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Oral history interview with Wolfgang Homburger

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1999.A.0122.768 | RG Number: RG-50.477.0768

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    Oral history interview with Wolfgang Homburger
    Transcript
    And I am April Lee [PERSONAL NAME]
    and assisting me here today is Charles Gardyn.
    So we will begin now, and let's ask Mr. Homburger to spell
    his name for the transcript.
    It's H-O-M-B-U-R-G-E-R.
    And your first name.
    Wolfgang, as in Mozart.
    As in Mozart, all right.
    Well, as we talked before, we're going
    to try and recapture in this interview
    your early experiences as a child in Germany,
    and your experiences when life began
    to change when the Nazis came in, your experiences
    during the war, and then after the war
    and how those experiences affected you in your life--
    your young life and your later life.
    So let's begin by going back in memory to what your childhood
    was like in Karlsruhe.
    Right.
    And tell us when you were born.
    I was born in December 1926, so I
    was only six years old when Hitler
    took over the chancellorship of Germany.
    And I really have very few memories of a pre-Nazi Germany.
    At about two weeks before Hitler came to power, my mother died.
    And I think that probably left more of an impression on me
    than Hitler coming to power.
    In terms of the atmosphere of the city
    and the general atmosphere of Germany,
    I think I was aware most of the time after--
    soon after 1933 of the enmity of much
    of the population of the uniforms of the SA
    and of anti-Semitism of some of the-- but not nearly all--
    some of the classmates I had in school.
    So because of the age group I'm in,
    this was something I almost grew up with, so to speak,
    as I became older--
    age 7 through 12.
    The SA part of the Hitler troopers kind of thing
    was particularly vivid, because we lived
    in a three-story duplex house.
    And the other half of the house was the home of a--
    I still remember the last name, Bader--
    Herr Bader-- who was some sort of an officer in the SA.
    And who had his particular platoon
    or whatever it was meet outside his house
    and do military drills right out there
    on the street outside his house, which was, of course, right
    next to our house.
    So this was probably by 1935 or so that he started this,
    and so we became very conscious of that.
    Also, up at the end of our street,
    was and still is a big barracks--
    army barracks.
    And that became also the center of a lot of political activity.
    And, in fact, once when--
    I believe it was Goring--
    came to Karlsruhe.
    He spoke from the front steps of that particular barracks
    that we could actually see from our house.
    And there was, of course, a huge crowd of people there,
    and lots of swastikas, and lots of cheering and Sieg
    Heils and so on.
    So without having to go very far from my house
    I was sort of steeped in this kind of thing already.
    As things progressed toward Kristallnacht,
    I think the tensions increased.
    I remember that on the commercial street that
    was about four blocks from where we lived,
    there was one of these big newspaper display cases that
    always displayed Der Stürmer, which
    was the very, very anti-Semitic newspaper put out
    by Julius Streicher.
    And since we as kids used to walk past there
    to and from the stores or the dentist or whatever,
    I used to sometimes see these displays.
    And I still remember actually reading them and looking
    at them, and getting this impression
    that what the caricatures of the Jew were like from this.
    I don't remember reading the text maybe,
    because the text was probably using
    very many long words in German.
    There's one language for kids and another language
    that you start picking up when you
    get to university perhaps that has the multi-syllable words.
    But I do remember looking at all of the illustrations
    and the cartoons and the headlines of that.
    So throughout this early part, Nazism and anti-Semitism
    was really almost a conscious part
    of what I was going through.
    So that you were so young, do you have--
    can you take back the memories of before that a little bit,
    like what kind of a household were you growing up in?
    What was the spirit of it like?
    What role did Judaism play in the household?
    Oh, I can talk about that to some extent,
    although again, my conscious memories really start
    when I was about four or five years old, which was almost
    when Hitler came.
    But no, I grew up in a family that was conservative Jewish.
    In fact, in Karlsruhe, I don't believe
    there was a reform movement.
    There was an Orthodox temple, and that was probably
    the minority of the Jews.
    And the majority of the Jews were conservative Jews.
    And the synagogue was on the other side of town.
    And we went there, not every week, but certainly
    for the high holidays and for some of the other sabbaths.
    It seems to my memory that traditionally,
    unlike in the United States now, the Saturday morning service
    was the key one, not the Friday evening service.
    And so I remember going during daylight essentially
    to most of these services.
    My father and all the other men were wearing
    these old fashioned opera hats.
    Yarmulkes would have been looked down upon.
    There was, in fact, a certain prejudice against the Orthodox
    Jews for doing such things as wearing yarmulkes
    and looking so obviously different
    from the German average people.
    The conservative movement, like so many--
    the vast majority of German Jews--
    was an assimilationist type of approach.
    So the opera hats were all right.
    That's how you kept your head covered in the synagogue,
    but not, say, a yarmulke.
    At home we really didn't do any observance at that time.
    Now, my mother, as I mentioned, died when I
    was age 6, in January of 1933.
    My father hired a housekeeper to replace my mother
    to some extent.
    And she was also a Jewish woman, but not
    a particularly observant one.
    And four years later, my father married again--
    my stepmother.
    Now, she came from a family where her father was Jewish
    and her mother was Christian.
    Her mother had died long before I ever knew her.
    Her father was still alive, and, in fact, got to New York
    in about 1940 via Holland, and died in New York in 1945.
    I did not know until I was reading one of the books
    that I brought with me about the history of the Jews
    of Karlsruhe that my mother actually formally converted
    back to Judaism from Christianity in 1934.
    This is very remarkable.
    When other Jews would have probably tried the escape route
    in the opposite direction of getting baptized and denying
    their Jewishness, she, who had been brought up
    in a Christian atmosphere being half Christian,
    formally became a Jew.
    And this was before she met my father,
    so it wasn't that she was already thinking about marrying
    into a Jewish family.
    She was-- perhaps we can come back to her.
    I know we will.
    But she was a very remarkable woman from the start.
    You felt very close to her.
    I would have if we hadn't been separated for so many years.
    But unfortunately, that came then a big gap.
    She married my father in 1937.
    And to get back to the theme of what Judaism played in my life
    at that time, she decided--
    I guess it must have been in the spring of '38, it had to be
    that year--
    to have a Seder in our house, and to invite one of the rabbis
    to conduct the Seder, since my father didn't
    know how to do this.
    And I still remember how nervous she
    became about what was kosher and what wasn't kosher,
    and how to prepare the meal, and all the other details.
    This was probably the only formal Jewish ceremony
    we ever had in our house during the 12 years
    that I lived there, certainly during the six or seven years
    that I can remember.
    You did not go to Hebrew school.
    Not until-- well, not in the sense of what that term means
    here in the States to learn Hebrew--
    that I remember.
    I think there was probably a children's activity during part
    of the service--
    which I don't remember now--
    at the synagogue.
    Now, after Kristallnacht-- of course,
    Kristallnacht resulted in us being thrown out of the schools
    we were in at the time.
    And we were sent then to the only option open, which
    was a Jewish school that was organized for that purpose
    within a matter of hours, I guess, or days.
    And in which there I learned a little bit of Hebrew,
    but, of course, they were also trying
    to keep our regular education going.
    Could you tell me a little bit about your family life--
    about your brothers, and your father,
    and what you remember about your mother before she died?
    And what did she die of?
    That last question it's difficult to answer,
    because I'm not quite sure.
    I had always been told that she died
    of an infection of the inner ear that somehow had spread
    and that could have been cured if penicillin had
    been discovered by that time.
    Most recently, one of my brothers
    says no, it was breast cancer.
    And I really don't know.
    Would that have been something that they didn't talk about
    in those days?
    Well, certainly not to a six-year-old.
    Certainly not.
    I wouldn't have understood the terms anyway, I don't think.
    And I never felt comfortable asking my father
    later on in life about that, partly because I
    thought I knew the answer.
    Yes.
    Now I'm not so sure anymore.
    My mother was born in the Harz Mountains in Central Germany
    and married my father in 1922.
    My father and my family, going back to 1721,
    has lived in Karlsruhe.
    I don't want to spend much time on family history,
    because that's not the purpose of this project.
    But I could talk on that for hours.
    My older brother was born in January of '24,
    so he's almost three years older than I am.
    And my younger brother is only 18 months younger than I am.
    So in the family atmosphere, I was somewhat closer
    to my younger brother because of the smaller age difference
    than to my older brother.
    After Kristallnacht, my older brother
    was actually sent to a Jewish school in Frankfurt
    and boarded there with a family for about a six-month period,
    whereas my younger brother and I went to the school in Karlsruhe
    I don't for sure why that was decided.
    Further about family, my uncle--
    my father's brother-- lived around the corner from us
    with his wife, who died in about 1937.
    And they had two cousins somewhat older than we were,
    born in 1914 and '18, respectively--
    I think both men who immigrated to the United States
    in the mid '30s and became very important to the story in that
    they eventually were the ones who
    got the visas for my father, my stepmother, and my uncle, which
    allowed them to escape from the camp in Gurs.
    My father also had a sister who lived in Berlin,
    whose husband had died.
    And she had a daughter and a son.
    And I want to come back to-- the daughter was one of my cousins
    obviously later--
    because she was a fugitive during much of the war hidden
    in Vichy, France.
    So that sort of sketches the key family members.
    On my mother's side, there was an uncle in the Harz Mountain
    village where my mother had also grown up.
    He and his wife, they were childless.
    But they were both interned in Bergen-Belsen.
    He somehow survived.
    She did not.
    And he was liberated at the end of the war.
    And since Bergen-Belsen was somewhere near Hanover,
    he settled in Hanover.
    He never was interested in emigrating after the war.
    He is a-- there is a type of German Jews,
    in which he belongs, that could never quite grasp the fact
    that they had become victims.
    He had got an Iron Cross in the First World War,
    having served the fatherland very faithfully and done
    brave things or whatever.
    And he could not believe that they would ever
    do anything negative to him because of that.
    And even after he came out, he said, where else should I go?
    This is my only country.
    So he settled in Hanover after the war,
    married again a Protestant woman.
    They had a daughter, so I have a very young first cousin.
    She's about 40 years old now.
    And he lived until age 96, which was just--
    a year and a half ago he died.
    His second wife died within a few months, a few months
    before he did.
    If you wish, I can come back to him later on, too.
    So that sort of sketches all of the family members I think.
    How about family friends?
    Did your family or you have any Gentile friends,
    say before Kristallnacht?
    I did.
    I think the one worth mentioning most--
    I mentioned that my step-grandfather was a widower.
    And he had a Christian housekeeper
    who had a son about the age of my older brother, maybe
    a year or two older.
    So he would have been four to five years older than I.
    And after my mother came into my father's life,
    he became friendly with us, although, of course,
    a 17-year-old or 12-year-old don't have
    sort of an equal friendship.
    It was more like an older brother kind of thing.
    And he used to take us on outings and things
    like that, even during the time when
    this became sort of looked down upon by the Nazis
    and many others.
    And he remained a very faithful friend until we emigrated.
    He died just a year ago in Germany.
    We had kept in sporadic touch with him.
    And then one day my younger brother
    reported that a letter was returned as undeliverable.
    And so we wrote a letter to the mayor
    of the town he was living in, asking
    is there any information, and got the information back
    that he had died.
    And that reading between the lines,
    he may have committed suicide, but that's
    sort of a tangential issue.
    But that was certainly the prime example
    of a friendship with a non-Jewish person we had.
    How about schoolmates before you were
    segregated off to this Jewish school?
    I had a few friends.
    I don't remember them very well.
    But I had a few friends that were not Jewish,
    as well as one teacher that I remember going to the morning
    after Kristallnacht or the afternoon after Kristallnacht.
    Because I was so utterly confused
    and didn't know what was going on and why
    I wasn't going to be allowed to go back to that school.
    And I went to his apartment, and he was very kind.
    Of course, he couldn't do anything about it.
    And I still remember going to ask what's going on
    and why is this happening.
    And he tried to comfort me as best he could.
    But he was also a very kind person.
    So did your family try to help interpret
    what this meant, what being a Jew in Nazi Germany
    was all about?
    You were pretty young.
    I don't think they really did a terribly good job at that.
    My father was in another group.
    He wasn't as blind as my uncle in northern Germany,
    but he also kept hoping this would eventually end.
    He wanted to ride it out, unlike, for instance,
    my two cousins who left in the mid '30s--
    unlike many other Jews who left in the early and mid '30s.
    It was my stepmother who finally decided
    something had to happen, but by that time
    it was getting very late.
    It was she who saw to it that that my two brothers and I
    would be taken on this Kindertransport program
    to England.
    And, by the way, she also had a brother--
    my step uncle in other words--
    who had also come to New York by then.
    And he plus my two cousins, or three of them,
    were responsible for getting everybody out.
    And I think it was much more her motivation that saved both us
    and eventually my father and herself.
    I think if it had been left to my father,
    I'm afraid that history would have been much sadder.
    Tell us your father's name.
    Victor-- his name was Victor.
    My stepmother's name was Marianna.
    And your mother?
    Lotte.
    Now, could you tell us about the events
    that led to your being part of the Kindertransport?
    Well--
    You said your stepmother--
    If I could say it strictly for my own memories,
    all I can say is that one day we were
    told that we would be leaving for England in a few days'
    time, and what did we want to pack and so forth.
    We meaning you and your brothers?
    My brothers and I. Well, my older brother
    was still in Frankfurt, but I presume
    he learned about it at the same time.
    I remember a day or two before leaving going around
    on my bicycle with a little box camera on the handlebar
    taking pictures of the town.
    And I still have them somewhere.
    But that's the part I remember.
    But from talking with my mother later and so on,
    I find that we had a very distant relative who
    is an Englishman.
    Well, two of them-- two brothers.
    They were related through--
    our whole family tree is really a bramble bush.
    Everybody intermarried everybody else.
    And anyway, he was on that bramble bush somewhere,
    and the two of them were.
    The one that took care of us was a bachelor,
    who I think among other things that
    yearned for having a family, but loved a married woman who
    couldn't or wouldn't get a divorce from her then husband.
    And after the war when her husband was dead, my uncle,
    as I called him-- he was really a distant cousin--
    eventually did marry her.
    But in the meanwhile, it was very appealing to him
    to become responsible for the three of us.
    Also, he was very well-to-do, and so there
    was no financial problem.
    So he became our guarantor in England.
    And my mother--
    I guess both my parents had made this contact with him.
    He had actually-- no, the other brother
    I believe had actually spent a year in Karlsruhe
    in the '20s as an apprentice in the family bank.
    My father and my uncle I mentioned between them
    owned a bank that had been founded
    by my great-grandfather.
    So the contact had been made in the '20s,
    it was renewed in '38 or early '39.
    This one uncle-- his name was Paul [? Dreifuss-- ?]
    guaranteed for us.
    And so on the 2nd of May, which is just four months before war
    broke out, we left Karlsruhe for Frankfurt.
    And then-- or maybe it was the 1st of May I guess.
    And then on the following morning--
    1939?
    Right.
    And on the following day, we were put on a train with lots
    of other children and went to Holland, where some group--
    it may have been part of HIAS, which is a Jewish welfare
    organization--
    H-I-A-S. But it may not have.
    I remember they fed us a dinner in a huge, big sort
    of gymnasium-like place.
    And then we were put on the ferry at Hoek van Holland
    go over to England.
    One interesting little sidelight is
    that there was an exhibition here at one of the museums--
    I'm not sure which--
    of the Jewish Community of Danzig.
    And one of the exhibits there was some reproductions
    of a local community newspaper they put out.
    And the issue of mid-May 1939 had an article
    that started on the page that was
    visible in the display about how their children left for Hoek
    van Holland on the very same day,
    so they must have been on the same boat.
    I wrote to the Jewish Museum in New York.
    I asked could they possibly Xerox the back side of that.
    And then I never had an answer.
    But there must have been, in other words,
    hundreds of children on that one particular ship.
    And I don't know how many other days there
    were in which Kindertransport was being handled.
    Do you have a memory of what it was like to leave your family
    and your community?
    Well, I was scared.
    You were scared.
    I think I was also relieved, because I
    knew we were escaping from something that was very bad.
    But something hadn't affected you in a painful way as yet.
    Well yes, I mean, at one point--
    It had.
    At several points, the anti-Semitism
    had become physical.
    Some kids of my age or older would beat me up
    on the way to school or from school.
    Or they'd at least yell nasty words at other times and so on.
    So it was very painful the last year especially before we left.
    And you were surrounded by these street corner meetings
    all around you, too.
    Yes, these kind of things going on as well.
    And, of course, on the radio you could hear these big rallies
    from all over the country with the Sieg Heils
    and Hitler's voice screaming away.
    I never could understand what he was
    saying because the words he used were always
    such political long words and so on.
    You can remember the sound of his voice?
    Well, and I've also, of course, heard it
    on the recordings since then.
    But I remember a sense of relief when
    we crossed the-- where the train crossed
    the boundary into Holland.
    On the other hand, arriving in England, meeting somebody
    I'd never met before was going to be our guardian,
    and everything else that followed was very lonesome--
    relieved a little bit by the fact
    that my two brothers were with me, otherwise
    I think it would have felt even more dreadful.
    What was happening to your father and stepmother
    while you were going to England?
    Were they--
    Well they-- yes.
    First of all, my family bank was confiscated.
    I don't know the exact date.
    In that year or somewhat earlier?
    I think it was later.
    I'm asking a really--
    I think it was after.
    Let's just go back to that moment.
    Your father and uncle owned this bank.
    You're reasonably comfortable financially.
    And when that began to be taken away,
    did you feel any economic deprivations?
    No, because I think--
    first of all, I think the bank wasn't taken away
    until after we left.
    Secondly, I suspect that my father had enough savings
    and so on that he could have kept up things a little bit.
    I should add, of course, that at some date like 1937 or early
    '38, there was a decree that non-Jews could not live
    in the homes of Jews anymore.
    And we had had a cook and a maid that lived in.
    And they sort of disappeared at that point.
    So there was a change in that aspect of lifestyle, which also
    reduced costs in a way, because my mother stopped
    doing the cooking and so on.
    So being rather spoiled by what I experienced before,
    I suppose I must have felt a little deprivation of that,
    although I hadn't really thought about that particular point
    anymore.
    Now, as I say, I guess I could look it up
    in one of these books just when the confiscation went on.
    I think it may have been soon after Kristallnacht.
    Maybe I should come back to Kristallnacht
    before we move on to England.
    Yes, why don't you tell us what Kristallnacht was like for you.
    First of all, I remember not everything about it,
    but a fair amount.
    I remember seeing our synagogue in ruins,
    seeing Jewish stores with broken windows and graffiti scrawled
    all over them and so on.
    My father disappeared-- it turned out to Dachau.
    What I didn't know, which I only learned when I on the 50th--
    perhaps for the purpose of the total history,
    I should add on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht,
    the city of Karlsruhe published two books
    dealing with all the expenses of Jews in Karlsruhe.
    And the second of those, which deals with the Nazi period,
    is one in which I read that when these Jewish men were rounded
    up on the morning after Kristallnacht,
    they were taken by taxi to the main square of Karlsruhe,
    were forced to pay for the taxi by the way,
    just as an added insult, and then were beaten up
    in the town square.
    My father never told me this.
    I never knew this until I read in the book.
    My uncle was in this group.
    One of my older cousin, I guess, was still in Germany.
    My younger one had left.
    My older must have left soon afterwards.
    He had been a TB--
    he had had tuberculosis, so they did not actually
    move him to Dachau.
    And I think he got out of Germany very quickly
    after that.
    My uncle and my father were in Dachau for about six weeks,
    as I recall.
    I still remember my father coming back
    and my being very startled by the fact that they
    had made him shave off his mustache,
    and they had given him a very sort of army-style crew cut.
    And so that he looked in that sense very obviously different.
    He also was a very shaken person after that.
    I think this was--
    as for many other people who went through this,
    the final information that they'd better get out
    of Germany if they possibly can--
    that there was no way of riding this out in Germany.
    Did he tell you anything about his experiences then
    or at a later time?
    No.
    Never.
    You can infer from what you read what might have happened.
    Yes.
    I think I have learned a lot both about that
    and about their later experience in Gurs.
    I've learned more from reading about it
    than from talking to them.
    Both my father and my stepmother were rather reticent,
    and I was rather reticent to bring up the subject.
    So after Kristallnacht, after being shaken and observing
    all these terrible things, and your father being away,
    and you're not understanding what
    was happening to him, what happened then
    to you and to the family?
    And how did you carry on?
    Well, I think we carried on as best we could--
    I think is the answer.
    At that point, of course, nobody was taking our--
    it wasn't even our house.
    We had rented or least it for years and years.
    But there was no dispossession of that.
    We went to this new school-- a Jewish school, which was,
    of course, quite different.
    We were much more careful about going out
    and where we would go, which neighborhoods
    we would go in and so on than we had ever been before.
    We were looking over our shoulders
    all the time to make sure nobody was going to jump us--
    things like that.
    So that about six-month period from Kristallnacht
    until we left Germany was very much this kind of atmosphere.
    It seemed quite restricted.
    Did you ever tried to go against the restrictions?
    They weren't really--
    Or what was it caution instead of restrictions?
    It was caution.
    I mean, I was making my own restrictions to some extent.
    I was learning how to be cautious,
    how to get through the situation without provoking
    physical attack or anything like that, if I possibly could.
    So this went on for about six months.
    And your stepmother was making moves
    toward helping you get out.
    Right, yes.
    Is there anything else you'd like to tell us
    about that early period?
    Well, maybe I should follow it up
    with what happened to my parents after we left.
    OK.
    They were in Germany for about another year.
    I know from my mother's little diary,
    which I found after she died in her effects,
    that just after war broke out, in fact,
    they did go back up to the town where my uncle from my father's
    first marriage lived, and visited there one more time,
    and saw him one more time.
    In October-- late October of 1940--
    all the Jews of the entire state of Baden
    and of the adjacent state of the Pfalz were interned.
    This was a more or less unilateral decision
    by the Gauleiter, although presumably he
    had been encouraged by Berlin to do it.
    They were put on about a dozen trains made up mostly
    of freight cars, and were sent to Lyon,
    which was in the then brand new Vichy, France.
    If the reading I've done about it is correct,
    the Vichy French did not even know these trains were coming.
    So something of the order of 11,000 Jews from Baden and I
    forget how many thousands-- a smaller number
    from the Pfalz arrived in these trains.
    The Vichy French were told put them in camps.
    The French had built some camps near the Spanish border
    in the foothills of the Pyrenees to house refugees
    from the Spanish Civil War.
    By 1939, those camps were 80% empty.
    Some of them were completely empty.
    So they just open them up and put these people in there.
    Of course, since they had no notice, there was no food.
    There was no bedding.
    The buildings were in partial disrepair,
    and it was, in fact, a very miserable situation.
    And, of course, winter was just coming.
    My parents, my uncle, some other relatives,
    and a group of six of them, I believe,
    were in a large group that wound up in this camp, Gurs--
    G-U-R-S-- which is not far from the city of Pau--
    P-A-U.
    Not near Lyon, then.
    No, no, no.
    That was just a way stop.
    Then it was up to the French to decide what to do,
    and they took them.
    Others went to other camps, all not far
    from the Spanish border.
    I believe there was a series of four of these camps
    if I'm correct.
    I've read quite a bit.
    There have been several books published
    by people who were in Gurs.
    I've seen some drawings that have been made by artists
    who were incarcerated there.
    In fact, three of them I happened to see in Yad Vashem.
    And one, in fact-- another relative of mine was an artist,
    and one of her pictures wound up in a book that I've seen.
    A work camp, then?
    No.
    In fact, it might have been healthy
    if they'd had something to do.
    They were essentially idle.
    The men were separated from the women, which, of course, was
    painful in its own way.
    Eventually they organized themselves.
    The camp commandants originally--
    they were French people--
    were reasonably humanitarian, but couldn't do all that much.
    They didn't have the resources to really
    get them much food and so on.
    It was not a prison in the sense that if somebody had an excuse
    to go somewhere, if they promised
    to come back that would be allowed to do that.
    Things got much worse later on.
    Of the approximately 11,000 people that wound up in Gurs--
    and a few of them, by the way, were French Jews.
    They were not all from this group.
    1,000 were in the category of my parents,
    that they eventually got visas and were
    allowed to come to whatever country gave them the visa.
    Another 1,000 died that first winter and spring
    and are buried there.
    And I've seen the cemetery, which
    includes one distant relative of mine
    and three people with the last name of Homburger,
    so were probably also relatives, but very distant if they are.
    And the last 9,000 were eventually shipped to Poland,
    and that was the last that was ever heard of them.
    I would imagine the proportions were
    the same in the other camps.
    My parents were released in early March of 1941
    on the basis that my cousins and my uncle
    had got visas for them, as well as
    for these other couple of relatives I was referring to.
    The same cousins and uncle, who probably had bribed even
    the good old US Department of Immigration,
    because that sort of thing was going on to get visas,
    were also bribing shipping companies
    to get tickets for them on anything that
    would sail across the Atlantic.
    And it turned out that the tickets they could get
    were on a ship that was to leave from Lisbon, which
    meant traveling through Spain and Portugal
    to get to the ship.
    So then the next challenge was to get transit visas
    across those two countries.
    And my parents spent a great deal of time
    in Marseilles, during which time my mother maintained
    this little diary, which is where
    I have some of the information I'm telling you.
    One of their group spoke fairly good French,
    which was extremely helpful, because the French were,
    and I would add perhaps from my tourism experience
    still to this day are, very hostile to people
    who don't speak any French at all.
    But they soften up when you try a little French.
    Anyway, they did finally succeed in getting
    all of these papers--
    transit visas and so on.
    They caught the ship all right, and they arrived in New York
    in late June of 1941.
    So they came through Ellis Island.
    They came through Ellis Island.
    And meanwhile, you were in England.
    Did you know anything of what was happening?
    Very little.
    When we arrived in England, this bachelor relative of ours,
    the guardian Paul [? Dreifuss ?] did what upper-class Englishmen
    do anyway--
    sent us to a boarding school.
    And because of our ages, my older brother
    went to a different school--
    what's called a public school in England.
    And we went to a prep school.
    War broke out four months later.
    Until then, we had corresponded normally with my parents.
    After that, of course, there was no direct Postal Service
    between Germany and England, and we
    had to correspond through the Red Cross, which
    involved using a special form in which you were allowed to--
    not sure if you had to count the words or not,
    but something like 100 words per individual letter you were
    writing, or maybe 200 words.
    And I think there was a maximum of one
    a month or something like that.
    And we were able to do that until they were interned.
    I don't remember now whether we ever were--
    I don't believe we ever knew where they were from October
    '40 until June of '41.
    There may have been a letter from them at some point,
    but I knew we couldn't write to them, because they could never
    give us an address where we could communicate with them.
    So was the next thing you heard from them
    when they arrived in New York?
    Probably.
    I'm trying to remember.
    I don't know whether we got a letter from Marseilles or not.
    This I don't remember now.
    So who was closer to you as a parent
    while you were in England?
    Was it this uncle or your older brother?
    No.
    Who was your guide in life then?
    Well, my uncle was very kind and wanted to be our parent,
    but when war broke out, he disappeared into the army.
    He had been a major in the First World War,
    and he immediately volunteered and disappeared.
    And I use that phrase, because he was an intelligence officer.
    So we couldn't really know much about where he was.
    Every now and again, he'd suddenly
    show up and call us up and take us out to lunch or dinner
    and ask how we were doing and so on.
    So he was school [BOTH TALKING]
    Yeah.
    He made arrangements for other people.
    But his own brother, who was married and had two sons--
    Albert [? Dreifuss-- ?] was taking
    care of some of the main responsibilities,
    like making sure the bills to the schools were paid
    and all this, but was not really very interested in us
    in a sort of a personal way.
    I remember we used to stay at his apartment in London
    once in a while.
    I remember being incessantly beaten at chess by his son,
    until I took a great dislike to chess.
    And I don't know that I've played it since.
    But then there were also arrangements made for us
    to spend our vacation time with a family in Devonshire
    whose sister was the housekeeper of this woman
    that my uncle loved and couldn't marry until after the war--
    one of these sort of involuted kinds of things.
    And certainly for my younger brother,
    they very much became parent figures.
    For me, I guess I didn't really have any one.
    I mean, there were a number of teachers
    that I found I could occasionally confide in,
    but in general, I think I was almost an orphan for most
    of my English experience.
    My older brother was interned by the British
    in 1940, as were all Germans who were 16 years old or older
    at the time of Dunkirk--
    June 1940.
    Essentially, the British said internment first,
    check them out later.
    And the fact that some of them were Jewish refugees
    meant nothing.
    They didn't want to take risks or waste time.
    My older brother was sent to the Isle of Man.
    And after, I don't know, maybe two or three months there,
    he was shipped off to Canada and spent another year
    in a camp in Canada as an internee.
    As an enemy alien?
    As an enemy alien internee.
    And eventually at the end of that period,
    was released and given the option of staying in Canada
    or going back to England.
    And since by that time he had developed a healthy hatred
    of the British for very obvious reasons, he stayed in Canada
    and lives there to this day.
    He's the one in Ontario.
    He's the one in Toronto.
    Toronto.
    Now, that also means that he couldn't
    act as any sort of advisor or helper to me.
    How about you and your younger brother?
    Did you have a close relationship with him?
    Yeah, with a good element of sibling rivalry in there,
    of course.
    He wouldn't take orders from me, and I
    wanted to give him orders-- this kind of thing
    that goes on with brothers.
    But I think we had a reasonably good relationship.
    We also, of course, made friends with-- in a prep school
    where you're spending 24 hours with the other students,
    you fairly quickly make friendships
    with other students.
    Tell us your brothers' names.
    Well, the older brother in Toronto is Walter,
    and the younger brother is Peter.
    Now, you were in-- this was an all-Jewish school,
    the boarding school?
    No, no, just the opposite.
    Just the opposite.
    It was a standard--
    --a few Jews.
    Yeah, in fact, I probably was the only Jew
    in the prep school.
    The only Jew in the entire--
    Except for my brother.
    These schools were, and still are,
    very much Church of England oriented.
    This prep school had a little chapel.
    The public school, to which I eventually moved
    on, had a big chapel--
    a beautiful one.
    I've visited it several times since then.
    And there were daily short prayers in this chapel,
    and weekly, or Sunday, more formal services.
    My Uncle Paul [? Dreifuss ?] essentially said, look.
    When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
    Just go along with it.
    Which we did.
    I always like to tell the story that one of the first--
    oh, I should mention that in this Jewish school
    in Karlsruhe, we had started learning English fast.
    It was obvious we all might were going to need it.
    But I still arrived in England with not very much English.
    And so one of my first tasks at this school
    was to learn English.
    And the reason, by the way, why my uncle had
    picked that particular school--
    he had no other reason to choose either the town of the school--
    was that there was a teacher in the school who
    was a German Swiss who was actually hired by the school
    to teach French.
    But, of course, he spoke fluent German,
    and he would be able to teach us English.
    And I like to tell the story that one
    of the first English words I learned at that school
    was "whichart".
    And people say, what's "whichart?"
    Our Father, whichart in heaven.
    Because that's the way they always pronounced it.
    But this also shows that I was exposed to this.
    I became very, very fond of the music there.
    I eventually became part of the chapel choir
    and have since remained-- well, not now, but for many years
    afterwards was in choruses in this country and so on.
    But I never took to the religion,
    and I've never shown much interest
    in any religion since that time.
    My younger brother, for whatever reasons--
    and they may include the age at which he
    was, both when my mother died, which I think hit him
    more than me in a way, but also the age at which all of this
    was happening.
    And his need to have to identify with the family
    that we were staying within Devon, he became a Christian--
    not Church of England, as it turned out, but congregational.
    So different reactions for different people
    for different reasons.
    Did being a Jew hold any importance for you
    at that time, and also in terms of [INAUDIBLE],, what
    understanding did you have what was happening in Germany
    and Hitler and the Nazis?
    No, we heard very little.
    And I think-- well, as you know, most other countries denied,
    as much as they could, what was happening to the Jews
    in Germany, partly because they were feeling guilty about not
    letting more of them come into their respective countries.
    I think that was probably the case in this country as well.
    Certainly in England-- well, everything the Germans did,
    of course, was evil, because we were fighting them.
    So it was not--
    but I don't know that they really
    knew much about what happened after the war started.
    If they did, it didn't trickle down to us.
    Now, as far as we were concerned,
    I remember being more worried about being
    German than being Jewish.
    Which I wasn't worried about anti-Semitism in England.
    I was worried about anti-Germanism,
    where people say, oh, you're just another Kraut.
    But it didn't really happen.
    You did not experience that kind.
    No.
    You were in a sheltered boarding school.
    Later on in the public school, there was one anti-Semitic boy.
    I remember quite vividly.
    That would be around what year?
    I was aged 14 by then, so this puts it into 1941, '42--
    somewhere in there.
    And he used to hurl insults at me.
    But he was an isolated case.
    As a Jew or a German?
    As a Jew.
    It was strictly anti-Semitic, not so much as a German.
    In that school, there were one or two other Jewish boys
    in a group of like 300 or 400, so it was still almost zero--
    very few.
    I should also say, in relation to perhaps other people you've
    interviewed that were involved in the Kindertransport,
    that other than the actual trip to England,
    we really weren't involved.
    We never afterwards had contact with any
    of the other Kindertransport people.
    And when they last year had a 50th anniversary reunion,
    and somehow--
    I forget how I heard about it and got some material
    about it--
    I discovered that I was an outsider
    of that particular group of people
    that we're putting on the reunion.
    That what they were talking about in the material
    and so forth was all strange to me,
    because I had become very English in a way.
    But because I was sent to these English boarding schools,
    I was living in an English village
    during the vacation times, and I never spoke German
    until I got to New York.
    So I also remember that when I was coming to this country,
    on the ship there were some other people
    of about my age who may have been
    Kindertransport people, who had maintained
    very strong German accents--
    much more strongly than I. And it
    turned out the reason, in part, was
    that they had stayed in communities where
    German kept on being spoken.
    I had somehow been pushed into a completely different kind
    of situation.
    So yours was a more unique experience, or a different one
    than many of the others who chose
    to be a part of the reunion and still felt [BOTH TALKING]
    Yeah.
    Nobody chose.
    It's where you happened to land.
    I meant chose to be part of the reunion.
    Oh, chose to be part of the reunion.
    Well yes, I suppose.
    Yeah.
    Some of them may have landed in clusters and made group ties.
    Right.
    Whereas you were away from all of that with your brothers.
    Yes.
    And so why don't we start.
    Let me see if Charles has any questions thus far.
    If you don't, you can hold it for later on.
    I'll wait.
    All right, fine.
    OK.
    So then you went to the public school
    after the boarding school, right?
    Yeah, two years in this-- oh, the school
    was evacuated after Dunkirk, because the place we were at
    is Eastbourne, which is on the South Coast of England, right
    opposite France.
    And so after Dunkirk, that was pretty dangerous.
    And the whole school just packed up and moved to a country house
    in Somerset, where, by the way, there was no chapel.
    And I suppose we must have had some prayer services,
    but I think that was then de-emphasized.
    And after another year there, I then
    reached the age where I would go to the public school, which
    was outside Oxford.
    Which was also an Eastbourne school, because my uncle had
    decided, for obvious reasons that my older brother ought
    to at least be in the same town we
    were in when we first arrived.
    That school was evacuated, too, near Oxford.
    And so I caught up with him there.
    And I was there for 3 and 1/2 years, and graduated-- well,
    took the higher certificate is the correct phase--
    higher school certificate in 1944.
    And you were a good student, weren't you?
    Yeah, I think so.
    How do you feel about your brother
    being detained [INAUDIBLE]?
    Well, I'm somewhat at a loss, of course.
    I think I felt more sensitive about being German
    then than at any other time while I was in England,
    although I realized at that time that it wouldn't affect me.
    Later on, by the way, when I reached 16,
    they weren't doing that anymore.
    But they did restrict me from going to some--
    from going to Devonshire, in fact.
    Anything near the South Coast was out of bounds for me
    after that.
    So I faced some of these bureaucratic restrictions
    when I reached the age of 16.
    But yeah, I was upset.
    I'm trying to remember now how much contact we had with him.
    There wasn't very much.
    But I think that we did exchange a few letters, maybe one
    every other month or so.
    And I did keep sort of track of where he was at any time.
    Then, of course, after my parents were in New York,
    they established contact with him in Canada.
    And after that, we started knowing again
    exactly who was where and how they were doing.
    And then you-- [INAUDIBLE].
    Did your uncle explain?
    Did your uncle-- how did he feel?
    He was gone.
    He was already [INAUDIBLE].
    Yeah, he was I believe in North Africa
    or someplace doing his intelligence work.
    So again, we were a little bit at sea about what was going on.
    We knew he was going, because perhaps he had time to tell us,
    or if not, one of the teachers from the public school
    came over to explain it to us.
    How would you sum up your British experience?
    What effect did it have?
    Well, in general, I felt very positive,
    partly because I got a very good education.
    I got a lot of kindness from people that was valuable--
    the people that we stayed with in the summers, for example--
    some of the teachers, my uncle when
    he was there, even the other--
    I shouldn't really call him uncle, but for simplicity--
    his brother to some extent, not as much.
    And I made a lot of friends.
    Now, the last 18 months or so after I finished schooling,
    I took a job as a teacher in a prep school.
    So I stayed in the same atmosphere somewhat longer.
    This was a different prep school.
    I got it through the fact that this woman,
    my uncle's girlfriend-- a woman friend--
    knew the headmaster of this school.
    And he was desperate in those days for teachers,
    because there was a labor shortage where they
    were already away at the war.
    And so I taught at this other boarding school for about 18
    more months afterwards.
    And again, I made a lot of friends,
    and I felt very good about that experience.
    I enjoyed the teaching.
    I didn't really know--
    I kept three pages ahead of the students part of the time,
    but I got some good feedback, to use a modern term,
    from the experience.
    And I, in fact, had a lot of regrets
    about leaving England to come to the States--
    my younger brother even more so.
    As I say, he integrated much more
    into the Christian part of England as well.
    And he really didn't want to come to the States.
    But again, with the kind of visas we had in England--
    did not allow us to just become British citizens.
    And so we had really no choice anyway.
    [BOTH TALKING]
    I wasn't quite as--
    I was not reluctant to go as much as regretful.
    So what were the series of events that led to your then
    coming to the States?
    Well, that the war was over, that my education
    through the equivalent of high school
    was over, which my uncle would have said,
    look, let's not interrupt it.
    But that was over, so that wasn't a factor anymore.
    And, most important, there was finally
    shipping space available.
    Because the war in Europe and in May of '45 in Japan in August
    of '45, and it wasn't until March of '46
    that suddenly some shipping space became available.
    Which was, by the way, on a lend-lease ship being returned
    by the British Navy to the US Navy,
    where the fare was $0.40 a day--
    2 shillings a day.
    And the longer it took, the more expensive the trip became.
    And since it took 17 days since the ship broke down halfway
    across the Atlantic and sat there for several days,
    it was 17 days at $0.40--
    was my total fare.
    That was you or your younger brother?
    No, no.
    That was just me.
    My younger brother was still in school,
    and my uncle did say he should stay until he finishes school.
    And he came about a year later.
    He came on the Queen Elizabeth.
    Because what year was it that you came?
    I came in-- well, left in England in late March
    and arrived in mid-April of '46.
    Which, in fact, it was the day of the first anniversary
    of FDR's death.
    I remember FDR's death while I was in England,
    and this was really a major mourning event.
    I mean, I think the British--
    and we all over there took it as emotionally
    as you people must have done in this country.
    So he was a link for you to America in a way.
    In a way, yes.
    Of course, my parents--
    Had written [INAUDIBLE].
    Of course they were the main link.
    I mean an additional link.
    Yes.
    Yeah, right.
    Tell us something about the ship experience
    and then what it was like-- the reunion with your parents.
    Well, the ship experience wasn't particularly interesting.
    There were 40 of us who--
    it was one of these things where the Navy suddenly said, hey,
    we're going to have a ship leave like day after tomorrow.
    Who's got their bags packed?
    And so 40 people came in a ship that could have handled 400.
    And we arrived in Norfolk, Virginia,
    which is the naval base to which they were returning the ship,
    not in Ellis Island.
    I don't really remember terribly much processing of papers
    and so on.
    We seemed to sort of sail through fairly quickly there.
    I do remember one of my very first impressions--
    I should add that in England, of course, we met some GIs.
    And some of them we got to know a little bit when we were--
    when I was teaching in the school during the summer,
    it had been a hotel before the war.
    And if some GIs would come by, we
    would give them room and breakfast
    probably for free, as I recall.
    And so we got to know some of these GIs,
    and they were always making fun of the British and their class
    system.
    They said, oh, in America everybody is the same.
    We don't have lords and all this sort of thing.
    But one of my first impressions in Norfolk, Virginia
    was waiting for the ferry to leave the coast to Cape
    Charles, and seeing water fountains,
    whites, water fountains, Negroes--
    bathrooms for whites, bathrooms for Negroes,
    and getting my first sort of shock treatment of
    is this really what those GIs were telling us about?
    My parents-- I need to fill in here--
    got to New York, as I say, in the summer of '41.
    My mother was very artistic.
    She'd gone to the Bauhaus.
    I don't know whether you know what--
    Yes.
    OK, then I don't need to--
    I think architecture?
    Right.
    She was a student there.
    And among the skills she had learned was weaving.
    So in New York, she became a weaver right away
    and started making money at it, enough to help support them.
    My father started out by selling items door to door--
    kitchen items and things like that.
    After a while, a good friend of his from Karlsruhe
    had become the director of self help, which
    was then called Self Help for Emigres from Central Europe.
    It's now changed its name somewhat.
    But a Paul Tillich was, in fact, president of the board.
    You may have heard of Self Help, too.
    And Fred Weisman was the director,
    and he finally got my father a job as their accountant.
    So by the time I got there, my father had a good job--
    didn't pay very much, but very good.
    My mother was weaving, and they lived in a small apartment
    on the east side of Manhattan--
    too small to accommodate me.
    So also, I guess their finances were such
    that they couldn't really support me.
    I was more or less told--
    I was 19 by then, of course--
    that it was up to me to find a job, by the way,
    and start earning some money, and then worry about schooling.
    Was this lower Manhattan or upper?
    They were on West 49th.
    That's Midtown Manhattan, near where the United
    Nations was later built.
    So I was to find someplace to live.
    And since this cousin of mine, who'd had tuberculosis,
    was living in a rooming house on the west side of Manhattan
    on 91st Street--
    and across the street in an apartment building
    were some other people from Karlsruhe
    I remember from before the war.
    I wound up taking the room in the same rooming house.
    And this was quite a culture shock--
    a big culture shock for me.
    I'd lived in this rather isolated public school,
    boarding school kind of atmosphere,
    even when I took that job later on.
    And all of a sudden, I was in what
    was a pretty crummy room with a toilet
    down the hall and virtually no money and so on.
    Then I got a job as an office boy in a firm
    that actually was sending food packages to Europe--
    relief food packages.
    And this was all in April, May.
    And by September, I had enrolled in night school for engineering
    and maintained that job for another year,
    until I was able to switch.
    And also, my father by that time was able to start saying I
    can pay you--
    I think it was $100 a month, which in those days
    was a lot of money.
    That's a lot of money.
    In '47-- then I switched to going to college
    during the day, and I had a part-time night job.
    This is when you went to Cooper Union?
    Cooper Union, right.
    Yeah.
    So you went to college and became an engineer then.
    Right.
    And what happened then?
    Well, in the summer of '49, my mother
    had had it with New York summers.
    She just hated them, as I guess everybody does.
    And decided-- I should say that I
    had mentioned before there were some other people
    in her group at Gurs.
    And of those, one woman, actually,
    whose husband died in Gurs, and her then teenage daughter
    came also on the same ship to New York,
    but came here to California where
    her older children had already settled and lived in Berkeley.
    So my mother shipped one room by truck
    across the country in the spring of '49.
    And when she got a note from this woman that it had arrived,
    she caught the next train out here
    and spent the summer here weaving.
    And, in fact, I have it here if you want to see it
    after this is all over.
    She sold some of her stuff to Gump's and to the little store
    that was in the Frank Lloyd Wright
    building on Maiden Lane--
    Morris it was called--
    very successful in that respect.
    When she got back to New York, she said, Wolf,
    when you graduate you ought to go to Berkeley
    for graduate school.
    I happened to, at a meeting of engineering students later on,
    meet a student from Berkeley, who told me
    about the emerging transportation
    program at the University of California.
    So I came out in the summer of 1950 as a graduate student.
    And I think my mother has kicked herself ever afterwards,
    because I didn't come back to New York after.
    She was sorry she told you about this Garden of Eden there.
    She was very regretful of it.
    So you stayed on and got a graduate degree.
    I got a master's degree, and then I worked for the army
    for two years.
    Because I still wasn't a citizen, and, of course,
    the Korean War had started.
    And I--
    So we're around 1954 now then.
    Well, I got my master's degree in '51.
    The Korean War started in June of '50.
    I was getting to the end of the war instead of the beginning.
    Sorry.
    Yes.
    And I got my master's in June of '51.
    And I was within a few months of becoming a citizen.
    And I didn't really want to be drafted as a non-citizen.
    I wasn't quite sure what my status would be
    and what they would do with me.
    And I was scared anyway.
    Who wants to be drafted when a war is going on?
    So I took a job with the army, which
    exempted me from the draft.
    And I was an engineer for the Corps of Engineers
    here in Northern California.
    And then this draft status still hung over me,
    and I decided I could get a direct commission
    with a master's degree.
    And I got it.
    In fact, I got the commission.
    I was in the reserves, then I decided to have it activated.
    And I actually went on active duty
    two weeks before the armistice in the Korean War, which
    technically makes me a Korean War veteran,
    although I never got further than Missouri
    before the war ended.
    So I did spend 21 months out of the 24 months
    I was supposed to spend in the army.
    But then Eisenhower cut the budget,
    and we all got three months' early release.
    I was in Korea briefly and in Japan
    for about nine months of that.
    So I look at my army career as having
    been a rather useful two years.
    I not only learned a lot about myself and about discipline
    and about how I interact with other people,
    but I also got a pretty nice view of Japan
    before it got ruined by its industrial explosion.
    So then after the war, was that when you started
    teaching at [INAUDIBLE]?
    Well, yes.
    I was released in '55.
    And then you were a citizen.
    Oh, I became a citizen in late '51
    while I was working for the Army as a civilian.
    You became a citizen.
    Yes, right on schedule.
    5 and 1/4 or 5 and 1/2 years after my arrival in the States,
    I got my citizenship.
    So that was all taken care of before I went on active duty.
    And that was pretty important to you, wasn't it?
    Oh, yes.
    Yeah, especially since technically,
    at least in the US' eyes, I definitely was still stateless.
    I didn't have any kind of a status at all,
    and everybody wants to have some sort of a status.
    A sense of security.
    Yes.
    So then what happened in your career?
    Did you get married?
    Well career-- I came back to where I got my master's degree
    and talked to a couple of the professors
    about where should I go job hunting.
    And the one said, well, if you can't find anything right away,
    we'll put you on for six months.
    We've got some research work going on here,
    and that'll give you a chance to find a real job.
    And I did go back east, of course,
    to see my parents in New York.
    And I did some job interviews back then.
    And I took up this offer of six months.
    At the end of the six months, this particular professor
    had left, and there was nobody to remember
    that I was supposedly there for six months.
    And so I stayed for 35 years.
    In terms of getting married, I got married in '58
    to a Jewish woman born in Seattle, grew up
    in Southern California, who was a graduate student at Berkeley.
    And what was she studying?
    She got her master's degree in social work.
    What is her name?
    Her name is Arlene.
    And her maiden name?
    Levinson.
    We adopted two children--
    Paul, who is now 29, and Joanna who is 26.
    Did your wife-- what kind of Jewish background
    did your wife bring into the family?
    It wasn't all that much different from mine.
    Of her four grandparents, three were from Poland, Lithuania,
    Russia, and the Baltic countries was changing that part.
    The fourth one was from Germany.
    Her grandparents on her mother's side
    were quite Orthodox, in fact to the extent
    that the father never worked, because he was always
    studying Torah and preparing boys for bar mitzvah.
    And the mother had to do all the work.
    And one way of earning money was she ran a boarding house
    for university students in Seattle,
    which is how Arlene's mother met Arlene's father.
    He came from a family--
    he was actually born in a small town in Texas
    and grew up in New York.
    And it was on his side that there's one German grandparent.
    They were not-- well, based on what
    I remember by both her father and the two uncles,
    they were not particularly observant.
    Arlene's parents moved somewhat away from this.
    It's kind of interesting, if this
    plays a role in what you're doing,
    about who stays at least married to Jewish people
    and who starts marrying partners from other mostly
    Christian religions.
    In her family, several of her cousins
    have married Christians.
    Arlene and her sister are almost unique,
    I think, at that generation of having married Jews.
    And I think it was in part a reaction of some
    of the people against this strange setup, where
    the poor overworked grandmother was really suffering, partly
    because of this Orthodox Judaism that was going on.
    My wife, as I say, grew up in LA.
    She went to Sunday school at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple--
    the famous Rabbi Magnin--
    which was more of a social experience,
    she says, now than a religious experience.
    About five years ago, she went for two years
    and took a graduate program at the Graduate Theological Union
    here in religious studies, primarily
    because she was very interested in it
    from a personal point of view.
    And I think she could talk at length now about the lousy kind
    of Judaism she was exposed to in the Wilshire Boulevard Temple
    kind of situation.
    So partly, it was more ethnic than religious.
    You had to have your latkes and play
    with the dreidels at the right moment,
    but the religious significance was sort of downplayed,
    partly sort of a knee jerk reaction, like if he's Jewish,
    vote for him-- this kind of thing.
    I have never resumed any Jewish observance in an active way.
    I will accompany Arlene once in a while
    if she feels like going to a service,
    but I don't feel part of this kind of thing anymore.
    I have long since lost a lot of that.
    In New York-- I should backtrack.
    The people from Karlsruhe who lived across the street from me
    had joined a offshoot of the Unitarian church,
    called the Community Church of New York, which was then
    headed by a famous preacher called John Haynes Holmes
    and by Donald Harrington, one of whose claims
    to fame around here is that he is the father of Loni
    Hancock, mayor of Berkeley.
    I knew Loni when she was a little girl.
    Anyway, I became active there, but in a social way.
    But, of course, again I was singing in choir,
    and I was somewhat exposed to some
    of the religious ideas, which was very, very liberal,
    very multicentered--
    readings from Hindu scriptures and you name it
    from all over the place.
    And I think that that's kind of where
    I have left my religious education
    and my religious orientation.
    How did you raise your children, though?
    What degree were they exposed to any religious education?
    Well, one can have a lot of regrets about that, I suppose.
    We did join the Unitarian Church of Berkeley, primarily because
    of the children.
    Which is, of course, what a lot of adults sometimes do.
    They feel guilty about their children.
    They feel gee, we ought to send them to a religious school,
    but what sort of an example would
    be set if we don't participate ourselves?
    So we joined the Unitarian Church of Berkeley.
    We were, by the way, married in the study
    of the Unitarian minister of Berkeley--
    Raymond Cope at the time--
    much to the nervousness of all others concerned,
    both her parents and my parents.
    But they found out that it wasn't a pagan ritual.
    It was all right.
    It turned out to be a disaster, because the religious education
    program of children was just too unstructured for anything.
    It was in the era of the mid '60s, when
    essentially discipline was a word you never used
    in liberal educational circles.
    They learned very little.
    They started resenting it, and after about three years
    we just gave up on the whole thing.
    And that was about the end of it.
    Neither of our children are particularly
    religiously active.
    How did you share your experiences
    from back in Germany with your children?
    Have you talked with them about it?
    Have they shown any curiosity about it?
    To some extent.
    The major occasion was a family reunion
    we had two years ago in Colorado,
    at which about 35 people were present.
    And in our generation-- my generation--
    there were both my brothers and all three of their wives.
    Because my brother has an ex-wife and a current wife--
    both of my cousins and their wives.
    So of us Germans, there were five of us.
    And then all the children of these--
    well, my two-- yeah, all the children involved--
    my older cousin had one child, my other cousin had two,
    that's three--
    my two, my older brother's two, my younger brother's
    four-- all of the children were there.
    Those that were already married-- it was two of them
    at the time-- their wives were, et cetera.
    And after one of the lunches with the video camera going,
    we went through a lot of this.
    In fact, I learned something about my cousins
    and my one cousin's wife, who survived somehow
    in Berlin for years during the war and a number of things
    like that.
    It was facilitated by my older brother's wife, who,
    even though this is not in her particular background
    and her training, turned out to be
    able to start the conversation going
    and keep it flowing in a very good way.
    And we have a copy of the tape.
    In fact, this is something that at some point
    your project might want to make a copy of.
    I hadn't thought of bringing it over here.
    That's a good idea.
    It gets off into tangents quite a bit.
    But my older cousin, who's since died unfortunately,
    was a great student of philosophy on the side
    and had a lot of insight into a number of things that
    are very valuable on the tape.
    Toward the end, the children were encouraged
    to ask a few questions.
    But they were mostly listeners.
    I mean, they could have interrupted at any point,
    but they chose not to.
    So certainly my two got a great deal out
    of that particular experience of listening,
    not just to me, but to everybody else that was there.
    And for you, was that a good experience?
    Oh yes.
    As I say, I learned quite a bit about what
    was going on with some of the other people involved that I
    hadn't known about before.
    As you look back on your own experiences,
    do you feel it left any physical or mental sequelae
    or consequences for you?
    No physical ones, I don't think.
    Psychological in any way?
    Oh, I'm sure.
    In what way?
    I'm sure there are quite a few, and I'm not
    sure I can catalog them very easily.
    I know last year Arlene and I went back to Karlsruhe
    as part of a trip to other parts of Europe.
    My first mother's grave is there,
    and this is one of several reasons
    why I wanted to go there.
    And Arlene told me after about 48 hours after we crossed
    into Germany, she said, you know Wolf, are you aware of how much
    tenser you've become in the last two days?
    And I hadn't really been aware of it.
    But I was evidently seizing up.
    Now, that's obviously a psychological reaction.
    And it was only in my hometown, it turned out.
    Once we moved on to other parts of Germany,
    I seemed to relax again.
    So it obviously has to do with the associations
    of the anti-Semitism I experienced there.
    When we went to other parts of Germany,
    I was just a tourist again.
    Although, I think I was still sort of studying the people
    and seeing if they were old enough.
    What were you doing back in the '30s and the '40s--
    to myself.
    There was on this particular trip one strange experience.
    We had gone off into the Black Forest
    on a sort of a streetcar line, and we're coming back.
    And a woman got on at a stop and sat across from us.
    And the train left this particular station,
    she suddenly became chatty.
    She pointed out something and said,
    that's where she used to live years ago and so on.
    So I made a bit of conversation with her.
    And so then she said something to my wife, and I said,
    well, my wife doesn't speak German.
    We're from America, and that's why and so on.
    And at some point she said, why did you leave Germany?
    I said, well, it turns out to save my life.
    You know, I'm Jewish and all that.
    And she said, oh, those were awful times.
    Of course, we didn't know what was going on.
    What was your reaction?
    And I just snapped back and said, in German,
    I cannot believe that.
    And I wouldn't talk to her anymore after that.
    And I can't believe it, based on this book
    here, which describes how the entire population watched
    this Kristallnacht business or took part in it--
    how it was, of course, magnified in the press and so on.
    There couldn't have been a single German who
    was an adult by then, or a teenager or something, who
    would not have known what was going on.
    But there are still a lot of people who deny it.
    This woman was probably 10 years older than I,
    so she would have been 20-something by Kristallnacht.
    She must have known.
    Did you go by your home?
    Oh, yes.
    Now, this was not the first time back in Karlsruhe.
    We had gone there with my children.
    We were living in England for eight months in 1971
    when our children were 10 and 7.
    And we went actually twice.
    The first time it turned out that we
    caught some sort of a virus, and we just went right through
    and headed for the nearest doctor in another town
    or something.
    But that was the first time we were there.
    We were back with the children seven years later.
    The second time, I took them both to the cemetery
    to see my mother's grave.
    Each time we stopped, we didn't go into the house,
    but at the house where I lived and showed them the school
    I went to and a few things like that.
    So they all have-- they both--
    and my wife has seen all of this.
    Did you speak to the people [INAUDIBLE]??
    Not in the house where I lived.
    It turned out that on the first trip when our son was 10,
    he developed a rash.
    It turned out later that it was a reaction
    to a particular suntan lotion he shouldn't have put on
    or something.
    But we didn't know.
    And in the next street over we saw one of these glass plates
    that said this was a Kinderarztin--
    a pediatrician, which was wonderful.
    So I went in, and I asked--
    also has the hours, whether there was time to see them.
    Oh yes, and the woman turned out to have
    been a friend of this other family
    I mentioned that was in Gurs with my family.
    And so the moment she heard the name Homburger,
    she immediately said, oh, which branch?
    Of course, she was about my age, so she didn't really
    remember me.
    But she remembered this other family very well and so on,
    and became extremely friendly.
    And Christian, but obviously had remained
    friends with this other family throughout the Nazi period.
    And then had seen them, in fact, after the war.
    So I did talk--
    that's the only people in Karlsruhe I talked to.
    Except in '56 when I was still a bachelor,
    I went back the first time after the war.
    And then I really was tense.
    I remember that, too.
    I had nightmares.
    You asked about psychology.
    I remember still that I had a recurring nightmare in England
    and probably in the early parts of the US
    of being finding myself back in Karlsruhe
    and giving myself away by something like not speaking
    good German, and therefore being identified
    as some sort of an enemy and getting
    into a great deal of trouble.
    And when I went back, I said to myself,
    will I pass for German or not?
    Can I pass?
    How good is my German?
    Will I speak it?
    Why I worried so much about it and didn't
    pretend to be an American tourist, I don't know.
    But at that time, I visited some other people--
    Christian friends of this other family
    who were still alive then.
    They were in the older generation.
    But those, plus this pediatrician,
    are the only people that I've actually
    talked to, other than people in restaurants and hotels
    and so on.
    Did you have any fears of a resurgence
    of anti-Semitism in Karlsruhe that first time we
    went back in '56?
    I guess I probably was subconsciously worried
    about it.
    Yes, sort of looking over my shoulder all the time,
    and sort of sizing people up, and sort
    of wondering just a little bit what's going on in their mind.
    Like wondering what they did during the war and how
    they're reacting to you.
    Yes.
    Could you live in Germany again?
    I don't want to.
    I might mention, two years ago Karlsruhe invited all survivors
    of the Kristallnacht to come back, all expenses paid,
    to a commemoration of this.
    In fact, because they expected a lot of them,
    they had two groups, one in October
    and one actually on the Kristallnacht week.
    I immediately said, I'm not going.
    I thought it through some more, and I still said,
    I'm not going.
    I felt that this was their way of washing their hands
    and saying, OK, we'll do this, and then we're clean again.
    That it might be propaganda, because there
    were going to be addresses.
    And there were, in fact, addresses
    by the lord mayor and the chief this and the chief
    that and so on.
    And they said, this is all going to be published
    in the German newspapers to show how magnanimous we've
    become now and how all is forgiven and all that.
    And I didn't want to be part of that.
    After other people came back and told me what went on,
    I kind of regretted it.
    I think perhaps I should have gone.
    Because a few other things went on.
    This all did go on, but, for example, they encouraged people
    to sign up for going to some of the schools
    and talking to some of the classes
    about their experiences.
    They got good feedback from these classes.
    There are a number of these kinds of additional things
    that went on that, had I known, I might have said, well,
    they're really trying.
    I should have given them more credit.
    But I missed out on it.
    I heard about it later from some of the others that did go.
    So that was a way of transmitting information
    to the younger generation.
    Over there, yes.
    A little footnote to that--
    as I mentioned, my father owned a bank.
    And the building was taken over by some other bank
    after it was confiscated.
    And it's still a bank today, but it's
    a completely different bank.
    Back in 1971 I was there.
    I wanted to change some travelers checks,
    and I said for sentimental reasons I'll do it in the bank.
    That was that.
    I went back last year and did the same thing.
    This time, when this young lady looked at the travelers check
    and saw my name, she reacted.
    Homburger, she said.
    Are you related to the Homburgers
    that owned this bank?
    Now, the only reason she might have possibly known
    was that event the year before--
    that that event, in fact, made everybody so conscious
    of what had gone on.
    There was a big exhibition in the museum, by the way,
    of the Jewish community in Karlsruhe.
    These two books were published for that occasion.
    And this young woman happened to be
    among those that wanted to learn,
    and did learn, and discovered that the building she was now
    working in had once been the Homburger Bank.
    That wouldn't have happened before 1988.
    So I really think that was probably
    a very worthwhile event, and I regret having missed it.
    But you asked about psychological leftovers.
    And my reaction to the initial invitation
    was one of those leftovers.
    There's still pain there.
    Oh, yes.
    Do you know what happened to your neighbor,
    the one that they say [INAUDIBLE]??
    No, not the slightest idea nor the slightest interest.
    Is there a Jewish community in Karlsruhe?
    A very small one.
    When we were there this last year,
    we went to the Jewish cemetery.
    And my mother, since she died rather unexpectedly,
    was buried in the same grave as my grandparents.
    And so her stone is a flat stone as
    compared to the beautiful stone of my grandparents.
    And over the years, it had become very, very eroded
    by the weather.
    And so we arranged with a stone cutter--
    there's always a stonemason across the street
    from a cemetery--
    to have it completely re-polished
    and so on and so forth.
    And then it dawned on me that the people who run the cemetery
    ought to know about it.
    And there was a little office there where it was locked,
    and it said Jewish Community, and it gave another address.
    But I wrote them an explanatory note
    and just slipped it under the door with a 10 mark note,
    and asked them to please let me know
    when it's finished to confirm that the work was
    done properly.
    The letter, by the way, I got turned out
    not to be from the Jewish Community
    but from the City Office of Cemeteries--
    a very official letter with a very official looking stamp.
    But there is a Jewish community.
    I'm guessing it's maybe 15 or 20 families,
    compared to the over 3,000 total Jews that
    lived there in the 1930s.
    So there may be 300, or probably less than that.
    Looking at the present now, how do you feel politically about
    reunification?
    And what feelings or ideas do you
    have about the fate of the Jews, whether there
    could be another Holocaust?
    Are you optimistic, pessimistic?
    Well, let me say in my lifetime, which
    isn't all that many decades more,
    I don't expect there'll be another one.
    But anything is possible in the long run,
    because people do forget.
    Anti-Semitism is such an ingrained emotion
    in certain other ethnic groups.
    It seems to be ineradicable.
    I am not optimistic, if I'm looking
    at it in terms of centuries.
    I think I am optimistic if I look at it in terms
    of the next few decades.
    What we see all the time now, including
    the events of this very week--
    the reaction to the assassination of Meir Kahane
    just is stirring up a lot of these emotions.
    Now, this happens to be more anti-Arab,
    but then there will be another reaction that will
    become anti-Semitic perhaps.
    So no, I'm not filled with optimism in the long run.
    I think we have to work very hard at it.
    In fact, one of the things I'm doing now--
    perhaps I guess we will be finishing pretty soon,
    but let me perhaps finish on a positive note.
    My wife Arlene and I are active in a support
    group for the village of Neve Shalom Wahat al Salam.
    I don't know whether you've heard of that.
    It is the only place in Israel where Jews and Arabs are
    living together, administering their village together, doing
    projects together.
    And the main project is a School for Peace,
    which is a conflict resolution school for focusing primarily
    on high school students and high school teachers,
    bringing together Arabs and Jews,
    forcing them together almost, having them talk out
    their prejudices, having them talk out their fears of each
    other, having them, by the end of a three-day session--
    and they usually go through a series of about three
    of those in a year's time--
    by the end of each session having them learn something
    about this enemy isn't a target in the rifle range,
    but a human being who has good reasons for fearing me,
    just like I have good reasons for fearing him or her.
    They don't necessarily all become friends,
    but they do at least start learning something
    about each other.
    And unfortunately, this village, of course,
    is despised by the Israeli government, who
    don't give them much support.
    And therefore they rely on support from many other places.
    The British and the French and some other countries
    have very large donors that keep them going.
    And the US somewhat less so, but still
    has a fairly active program.
    And Arlene and I have started a support group here
    in the Bay Area for that.
    Now, this to me is one way of responding to my fears
    that I just expressed a moment ago, that anti-Semitism
    is endemic, anti-Arabism is endemic among Jews.
    And that somehow, while this is an awful small start,
    somehow we have to nurture more of this kind of an attempt.
    I think that's wonderful.
    Well, I think Neve Shalom is wonderful, yes.
    So you've translated your experiences
    into something very useful and important.
    And your contribution to this interview
    here will be a help, too, in overcoming prejudice.
    Well--
    The understanding, and the understanding
    it gives people who listen to it.
    John, you may have some questions.
    And Charles, you have other questions.
    I don't.
    Charles, how about yourself?
    No, no.
    We thank you very much for this.
    And if, when you get home-- if you think of anything else you
    wanted to talk about or didn't get to--
    The one thing we didn't get to--
    Oh, right.
    There are photos, right?
    Well, with this one--
    my cousin in France.
    I was just briefly going to--
    [INAUDIBLE]
    Pardon?
    [INAUDIBLE]?
    Yes.
    Yeah.
    I mentioned I have a 40-year-old cousin.
    I also have an 80-year-old cousin.
    This was the daughter of my aunt, who
    as a young girl in about 1930--
    a rather rebellious late teenager
    or something like that--
    moved to France.
    And she married a French Jewish man.
    And at the beginning of the war, I
    don't fully understand exactly what happened.
    But he wound up in the free French forces in England,
    and she was stuck in Paris with a little baby.
    And after the Germans occupied Paris, of course
    this became rather perilous.
    And she was tipped off one day that the concierge
    in her apartment building was going to betray her--
    tell the Nazis there's a Jew living in this apartment.
    So the partisans, about whom she knew by then,
    arranged for her and the little baby
    to be spirited into Vichy, France.
    But they had to do it separately.
    They felt it was too dangerous to take them together.
    And so she didn't even know whether she'd ever
    see this baby again or not, and it turned out she did.
    They spent the next three years in hiding in a part of France,
    which was subject of a movie.
    I can't remember now-- beautiful French movie that
    was shown not commercially, but was
    shown on campus about three, four years ago
    about a part of France where they're mostly
    Huguenots Protestants who protected
    a great number of Jewish people from the Nazis.
    And she was in this situation.
    She survived this three or four years
    of being a fugitive there.
    Her daughter, unfortunately, suffered somewhat
    from, who knows, malnourishment or whatever.
    And to this day has a very severe case of diabetics
    and unable to really carry a full-time job.
    And so for her, the Holocaust, or that particular experience,
    is one that's left a very major mark.
    Yes.
    My cousin herself came out of it as a hard bitten person,
    that she probably was going in.
    From what I can tell, she must have been that way before.
    Her brother, by the way, was a communist.
    And when I was in the army, I remembered not to remember him.
    And he was in East Germany after the war.
    He was a big official in the East German government,
    until one day he was found out for whatever reason.
    And he became very disillusioned in the last few years
    of his life before he died.
    But she was, to my mind of my immediate family--
    my parents, of course, my uncle in Gurs, and she for four years
    underground in Vichy, France-- those
    were the Holocaust survivors.
    Your father was released at 6 weeks?
    The first time, in Dachau-- yes.
    I think they all were.
    This was sort of a--
    I don't really know exactly what the Nazis were doing.
    First of all, they wanted to make a big point.
    All conventional behavior is forgotten.
    They'd been using this incident in Paris as the excuse,
    but all the literature says that any match could have struck
    this particular explosion.
    They arrested as many male Jews as they
    could lay their hands on, and then they said to themselves,
    why did we do this?
    What are we going to do now?
    And I think after about six weeks,
    they started releasing most of them again.
    Some of them, of course, were never released
    or were transferred to regular jails or something like that.
    One of the Xeroxes that I have left with you happens to be--
    it was published in one of these books, the postcard
    that my uncle sent from Dachau to his wife.
    The only thing he could do on there was show his address.
    Everything else was printed by the authorities,
    including a sentence which says, any attempt
    to request the release of this particular person
    will be useless.
    So that was a separate kind of an episode.
    I might add I've been to Gurs.
    I've been to Bergen-Belsen, but I have not yet
    had the opportunity.
    And I think it's really more that that and anything else
    to get to Dachau.
    One of these trips I will finally do that.
    Rediscovering and understanding the past.
    Yes.
    Well, thank you so much for your contribution.
    You're very welcome.
    It was very helpful.
    I'm glad I could do it.
    Are there any last things you want to add?
    I really think that there are many more things I could add.
    You'd have to load another cartridge into the camera.
    But I think we've covered the important things.
    OK.
    Well, after the interview, let's talk about that and maybe
    the possibility of your returning
    to do a continuation at some point
    if you feel there's a lot of material
    that you still haven't covered yet.
    I'm not sure whether there's another two hours' worth.
    You have some photographs?
    I have-- yes.
    The Xeroxes that you have there may not
    be good enough to photograph, and you
    may want to go to the actual book
    and take them right out of there.
    If you just tell us what we're looking at.
    OK.
    These are photographs of the Camp de Gurs in the Pyrenees
    of Southern France.
    This here is a memorial that's been placed
    in the middle of the cemetery.
    These are pictures of graves in the cemetery,
    and this is a picture of the entrance to the cemetery area.
    The rest of the camp has been completely obliterated
    and has gone back to being just farmland.
    It was a very, very large camp with something
    like 200 barracks in it originally.
    But all that's left now is a cemetery.
    It's maintained by the French government with payments
    from German government.
    And there's a caretaker that lives in the house near there.
    And you took these photographs yourself?
    I did.
    I took these photographs about five years ago
    when we had a lot of trouble finding the place.
    It took a fair amount of research
    in the map room of the University of California
    library to even locate where the little village of Gurs is.
    But we eventually found it.
    What was-- there we go.
    This is the wedding picture of my parents in 1922--
    my father Viktor and my mother Lotte.
    And where was that taken-- that photo?
    That was-- they were married in Karlsruhe.
    OK.
    Anything else on that page we should--
    is that you in the bathing beauty contest?
    Yeah, I am in this bathing beauty
    contest with my two brothers.
    OK.
    I would be the one on this side.
    Here on the left.
    And Peter is in the middle, and Walter is on the right.
    OK.
    And down below, if this is not too small--
    this lower picture here shows my maternal uncle and his first
    wife, who did get killed and died in Bergen-Belsen--
    this woman there with, I believe, my younger brother
    Peter between.
    What was her name?
    Her name was Hedda.
    My uncle's name was Hans, and she was Hedda.
    And her last name?
    Fruhberg.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Wolfgang Homburger discusses his childhood in Karlsruhe, Germany; the death of his mother in 1932 and his father's remarriage in 1937; antisemitism under the Nazi regime; his memories of the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938; his father's decision to send him and his two brothers to England; his experiences in boarding school; the lack of antisemitism in England; his concerns about being identified as an enemy alien; his father's arrest, internment in and release from Dachau concentration camp; his father's immigration with his stepmother to the United States; his post-war experiences; leaving England for the United States to join his parents; his education in engineering; his military service; and his career as a teacher.
    Interviewee
    Wolfgang Homburger
    Date
    interview:  1990 November 07
    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
    Homburger, Wolfgang.

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project conducted the interview with Wolfgang Homburger on November 7, 1990. The interview was received by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Branch in June 2004.
    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 08:46:46
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn515712

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    Oral history interview with Bernard Offen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Pels

    Oral history interview with William Pels

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Plainfield

    Oral history interview with Ruth Plainfield

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Schneider

    Oral history interview with Thomas Schneider

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Shlyapochnik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gisela Spigel

    Oral history interview with Gisela Spigel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Erika Weingarten

    Oral history interview with Erika Weingarten

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Weingarten

    Oral history interview with Max Weingarten

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herman D. Wiener

    Oral history interview with Herman D. Wiener

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Liza Avrutin

    Oral history interview with Liza Avrutin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Aleksandr Belfor

    Oral history interview with Aleksandr Belfor

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshteyn

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshteyn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lev Dumer

    Oral history interview with Lev Dumer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anisim Dworkin

    Oral history interview with Anisim Dworkin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest Feld

    Oral history interview with Ernest Feld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mae Lopatin Herman

    Oral history interview with Mae Lopatin Herman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Inna Kagan

    Oral history interview with Inna Kagan

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with J. Daniel Khazzoom

    Oral history interview with J. Daniel Khazzoom

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Vilem Kriz

    Oral history interview with Vilem Kriz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Lapan

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Lapan

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sofiya Manoylo

    Oral history interview with Sofiya Manoylo

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Shaya Neys

    Oral history interview with Shaya Neys

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rahilia Sirota

    Oral history interview with Rahilia Sirota

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tom Szelenyi

    Oral history interview with Tom Szelenyi

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irving Zale

    Oral history interview with Irving Zale

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tamara Albukh

    Oral history interview with Tamara Albukh

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bernard Broclawski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Audrey Doughty

    Oral history interview with Audrey Doughty

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sofia Ginzbursky

    Oral history interview with Sofia Ginzbursky

    Oral History

    Sofia Ginzbursky (born on December 27, 1915 in Asipavichy, Belarus) describes her mother, who died at the age of 27, soon after she gave birth; going with her siblings to live with their grandfather, who observed Jewish traditions; studying at a technical school in Gomel (Homel), Belarus; living in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), working as a nanny and secretary; getting married and moving to Gomel; moving later to Belostock (Białystok), Poland; being left alone with their two children when her husband was called up for military duty at the beginning of WWII; evacuating from Belostock by train to Zlobin (ZHlobin, Belarus) and then to Baranovichi, Ukraine; destroying all her documents to hide her Jewish identity; witnessing the persecution of Jews in Ukraine when locals helped the Nazis find Jews; how speaking German helped her find a job at a food exchange center where she received food to feed her children; obtaining false papers with a new last name that showed she was Russian and not Jewish; returning to Gomel to look for remaining family members and being captured by the Nazis and was humiliated by Politsai for several days; being released and living with a woman named Nadia Lisitskaya; passing as a gentile refugee from Poland; washing clothes for the German army in exchange for soap and kerosene; seeing the deportation of hundreds of Jews from the Gomel ghetto; traveling with her friend, Sonia, as well as all their children to Oryol (Orel), Russia; finding a new place of stay every night so no one would suspect them of being Jewish; living with Sonia and the children at the house of a Latvian lady for two years; choosing to not wear the Star of David as was requried for the Jews by the Nazis; passing as Russian Orthodox; having a Russian lady teach her son how to pray to an icon when bombings occured; working small jobs while in Oryol; being liberated and moving to Leningrad; getting a new passport and stating her nationality as “Jewish” again; reuniting with her husband in Chkalov (possibly Orenburg, Russia) with the help of her sister; experiencing even more antisemitism after the war; and becoming more observant after the war.

    Oral history interview with Genia Likwornik

    Oral history interview with Genia Likwornik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mark Malamud

    Oral history interview with Mark Malamud

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Annemarie Roeper

    Oral history interview with Annemarie Roeper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irina Rozhanskaya

    Oral history interview with Irina Rozhanskaya

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Clara Tsukerman

    Oral history interview with Clara Tsukerman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sam Weiss

    Oral history interview with Sam Weiss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edith Wertheimer

    Oral history interview with Edith Wertheimer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Laszlo Vass

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jakob Atlas

    Oral history interview with Jakob Atlas

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Isaac Silber

    Oral history interview with Isaac Silber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Grunwald

    Oral history interview with Lotte Grunwald

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Roeper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Janina Swift

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Polya Liza Pekker

    Oral history interview with Polya Liza Pekker

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Meier Lichtenstein

    Oral history interview with Meier Lichtenstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Janice Auerbach

    Oral history interview with Janice Auerbach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helmut Kobler

    Oral history interview with Helmut Kobler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ellen Leeser

    Oral history interview with Ellen Leeser

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Yellin

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Yellin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Adele Silber

    Oral history interview with Adele Silber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sylvie Marshall

    Oral history interview with Sylvie Marshall

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elena H. Javor

    Oral history interview with Elena H. Javor

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Joseph Welgreen

    Oral history interview with Joseph Welgreen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosnow

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosnow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gary Schoofs

    Oral history interview with Gary Schoofs

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ilse Eden

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva K. Breyer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kurt Levi

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Olga Nepomyashy

    Oral history interview with Olga Nepomyashy

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Floyd Dade

    Oral history interview with Floyd Dade

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Peter Oppenheim

    Oral history interview with Peter Oppenheim

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ellen Van Creveld

    Oral history interview with Ellen Van Creveld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lola Welgreen

    Oral history interview with Lola Welgreen

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshtein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jenny Friedlander

    Oral history interview with Jenny Friedlander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leonid Bobrovsky

    Oral history interview with Leonid Bobrovsky

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagi-Talavera

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Edith Eva Eger

    Oral history interview with Edith Eva Eger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Otto Springer

    Oral history interview with Otto Springer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Greta Stuehler

    Oral history interview with Greta Stuehler

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Magda Silberman

    Oral history interview with Magda Silberman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eric Willgott

    Oral history interview with Eric Willgott

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cecilia Kornbluth

    Oral history interview with Cecilia Kornbluth

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Steiner

    Oral history interview with Ruth Steiner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Trudy Lyons

    Oral history interview with Trudy Lyons

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margrit Schurman

    Oral history interview with Margrit Schurman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edith Deutsch

    Oral history interview with Edith Deutsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Francis E. Cappel

    Oral history interview with Francis E. Cappel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Wittenstein

    Oral history interview with George Wittenstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Thomas Trier

    Oral history interview with Thomas Trier

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rita Grunbaum

    Oral history interview with Rita Grunbaum

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lily Robinson

    Oral history interview with Lily Robinson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herman Apteker

    Oral history interview with Herman Apteker

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagy-Talavera

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagy-Talavera

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Semyon Veyber

    Oral history interview with Semyon Veyber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chaya Fuhrman

    Oral history interview with Chaya Fuhrman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Mueller

    Oral history interview with Peter Mueller

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Cohn

    Oral history interview with Eva Cohn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Cantor Hans Cohn

    Oral history interview with Cantor Hans Cohn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gilbert L. van Mourik

    Oral history interview with Gilbert L. van Mourik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bernard Broclawski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sam Zelver

    Oral history interview with Sam Zelver

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Asya Grunkina

    Oral history interview with Asya Grunkina

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kurt Mostny

    Oral history interview with Kurt Mostny

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Vera Korkus

    Oral history interview with Vera Korkus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Steffi Black

    Oral history interview with Steffi Black

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Parket

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Parket

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ann Burger

    Oral history interview with Ann Burger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Volf Gershaft

    Oral history interview with Volf Gershaft

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Klara Garmel

    Oral history interview with Klara Garmel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Polina Sorkin

    Oral history interview with Polina Sorkin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Blank

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Blank

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kurt Gronowski

    Oral history interview with Kurt Gronowski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rosa Wigmore

    Oral history interview with Rosa Wigmore

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Evelyn Lowen Apte

    Oral history interview with Evelyn Lowen Apte

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Annette Herskovits

    Oral history interview with Annette Herskovits

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Guta Zlotlow

    Oral history interview with Guta Zlotlow

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Alfred Cotton

    Oral history interview with Alfred Cotton

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marion Mostny

    Oral history interview with Marion Mostny

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Roy Calder

    Oral history interview with Roy Calder

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alfred Batzdorff

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Felberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sandor Hollander

    Oral history interview with Sandor Hollander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Abraham Jaeger

    Oral history interview with Abraham Jaeger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Judy Kirkham

    Oral history interview with Judy Kirkham

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rita Kuhn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Greta Reisman

    Oral history interview with Greta Reisman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dan Dougherty

    Oral history interview with Dan Dougherty

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Erlichman

    Oral history interview with Max Erlichman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marianne Gerhart

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rose Herskovic

    Oral history interview with Rose Herskovic

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eugene Katz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tillie Molho

    Oral history interview with Tillie Molho

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edith Newman

    Oral history interview with Edith Newman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Agnes Allison

    Oral history interview with Agnes Allison

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ann Gabor Arancio

    Oral history interview with Ann Gabor Arancio

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Valerie Balint

    Oral history interview with Valerie Balint

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ilse Lewy

    Oral history interview with Ilse Lewy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Esther Kemeny

    Oral history interview with Esther Kemeny

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ray Redel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Roma Barnes

    Oral history interview with Roma Barnes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margot Braun

    Oral history interview with Margot Braun

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ted Ellington

    Oral history interview with Ted Ellington

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anna Hollander

    Oral history interview with Anna Hollander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Theo Joseph

    Oral history interview with Theo Joseph

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Katz

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Katz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jim Sanders

    Oral history interview with Jim Sanders

    Oral History

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