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Oral history interview with Walter Frank

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1999.A.0122.816 | RG Number: RG-50.477.0816

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    Oral history interview with Walter Frank
    Transcript
    And then you can begin at your convenience.
    And where we are--
    And where we are.
    The Holocaust Project Center.
    Holocaust Center of Northern California.
    Holocaust Center of Northern California, OK.
    All right.
    Go ahead.
    Shall I begin?
    Yes, please.
    My name is Constance Bernstein.
    And I'm talking to Mr. Walter Frank--
    Right.
    --at the Holocaust Center of Northern California.
    The date is May 15.
    1990?
    1990.
    Thank you.
    OK.
    All right?
    Go ahead.
    All right, Mr. Frank, I'd like to begin by just asking you
    something about your background, your childhood, where you were
    born, and tell me about your parents and the rest
    of your brothers and sisters.
    All right.
    I was born in 1920--
    May 1920, as a matter of fact, just about 70 years ago,
    in Wiesbaden, which is now in West Germany.
    It's near Frankfurt.
    My father was a physician, what was then called a [GERMAN]..
    Today, it'd be an internist, a family physician.
    And two years after I was born--
    I was the firstborn--
    I had a little brother.
    That is how I was told, the stork bought me a brother.
    In those days, a stork brought children.
    And when I was told that, I asked my father what
    did the stork bring me?
    Always, always thinking of number one.
    Anyhow, I grew up in Wiesbaden.
    I went to school there, to a Volksschule,
    a preschool, grammar school, I'd say,
    and then to the gymnasium because I
    wanted to follow my father's footsteps
    and become a physician.
    I left the gymnasium after six years, and got a job,
    and also went to another type of school that trained you
    for trade and commerce, lectures in accounting, economics,
    sales, and so forth, sort of an equivalent to some
    of the business schools here.
    And I worked in a factory in Wiesbaden, a Jewish factory
    that made medical equipment.
    I did that until November the 10th,
    1938, when Kristallnacht occurred.
    And I, along with 30,000 other Jews,
    was arrested and sent to Buchenwald.
    OK.
    Let's stop there and go back.
    You've covered a lot of territory there.
    How old were you there, then, at that time?
    Well, that was 1938.
    And since I was born in 1920, it makes me--
    18 years.
    OK.
    --18 and 1/2 years old.
    So tell me something more about your childhood.
    Did you go to--
    and your family, and your friends, and your relatives--
    did you have your relatives there?
    Well, OK.
    Let's go to my relatives.
    I had, in Wiesbaden, my grandparents
    on my mother's side, that is, my mother's father and mother.
    And were they from Wiesbaden?
    No, they were from Mannheim.
    In fact, my mother is from Mannheim, was born there.
    My grandfather, her father, was a partner in a large department
    store in Mannheim, with branches in Mannheim, Ludwigshafen,
    Darmstadt, Michelstadt, and other cities
    in that neighborhood, called Rothschild--
    Rothschild.
    Department store?
    What's that?
    You said department store.
    A department store, right, very large department store.
    And he had retired.
    When I got to know him, he was already retired
    and living in Wiesbaden in retirement with his wife.
    And we visited there very often.
    And I had always a big thing to go visit Grandpa and Grandma.
    Did they have a big house?
    Were they wealthy?
    They had the upper flat of a three-story building,
    which is still there.
    I was in Wiesbaden just about a year ago.
    And I saw it.
    It's still there.
    And they lived there very comfortably.
    I couldn't tell you today how many bedrooms they had.
    But I know they had a beautiful living
    room, dining room, kitchen.
    Could have been one or two bedrooms.
    Then I had, in Wiesbaden, my mother's sister, who
    was married to a man who, together with someone else,
    owned a large--
    oh, what would you call it-- store
    selling perambulators, bedding, linens, that sort of thing.
    Firm was called Hamburger and Weil.
    This was Weil, Otto Weil.
    And they had a son, name of Max--
    Max Weil.
    Max now lives in Middletown, New York.
    Otto Weil died the day after he came home from Buchenwald,
    during Kristallnacht.
    He came home, was very sill--
    sick, very ill, went to the hospital,
    was taken care of by two German physicians,
    and died the next morning.
    My aunt was deported on May 23, 1942.
    I discovered that last year when I went to Wiesbaden
    and found the Gestapo lists.
    They had listed her as one of the deportees on that day.
    Those were the relatives in Wiesbaden that I recall.
    There were other relatives outside of Wiesbaden.
    There was my grandparents on my father's side
    who were living in Bebra.
    He was a native of Bebra, a small town in Central Germany.
    It was a very small town.
    I'd say it's a village, but it was called a town
    because it had a very large railroad station.
    Most trains going north-south or east-west in Germany
    had to go somewhere through Bebra, particularly
    freight trains.
    And so it was an important what they called [GERMAN]----
    important railway center.
    And that's where he was from.
    His parents were living there.
    They had a hotel, ran a hotel, Jewish hotel, strictly kosher.
    And we used to go there in the summer,
    stay there two weeks, three weeks--
    the kids, my brother and I.
    And my father's one sister lived in-- two sisters, matter
    of fact-- lived in Bebra.
    They had married there.
    Another sister lived in Eisenach.
    And they're all gone.
    They were killed during the Holocaust.
    We don't know exactly where--
    Auschwitz, probably.
    My grandparents died before things
    got bad, died before or shortly during the Hitler period.
    So your father's parents?
    And my father, mother, my brother, and I
    were able to get out of Germany after Kristallnacht
    and get to Shanghai.
    But that's a later story.
    We're not quite there yet.
    So you had grandparents in kind of the country, your father's
    parents.
    They were in sort of a--
    Small town.
    --country setting, I'd say, a small town in which everybody
    knew everybody else, and which--
    this not just the Jewish population,
    but Christian population too.
    My grandfather, Isidore, was very well-known in Bebra.
    For many years, he was a member of the city council.
    He was a sort of an unofficial conciliator and arbitrator
    for disputes that you wouldn't take before the courts,
    because the courts would take too long.
    The farmers, if they had a problem,
    they would go to Isidore.
    And he would fix it all up.
    Was this just for the Jews, though?
    Or was it--
    No, no.
    --for everyone?
    The Jews weren't farmers in those days.
    They were tradesmen.
    He would be the sort of arbitrator between one
    farmer and another--
    dispute about a piece of land, dispute about a cow,
    dispute about merchandise, whatever, you know.
    And he was well-known in that area for that sort of thing,
    and very well-respected, and good reputation.
    I had a cousin who was born there,
    Ilse, who died in Oakland a couple of years ago.
    And she wrote up a bit of a history of what
    she remembered from those days.
    I remember seeing her, of course, meeting her in Bebra,
    where she was living, until she got married and left
    for the United States sometime in the '30s-- '39,
    something like '40, maybe.
    I'm not quite sure.
    Anyhow, those were the family members.
    And then, of course, my father was
    well-known in the community-- not just Jewish community,
    but community at large.
    But he was very active in the Jewish community.
    I'm not sure whether he was on the board of the Judische
    Gemeinde in Wiesbaden.
    But he was very active.
    And he was always a man who got an Aliyah
    when he went to synagogue.
    And he had a good, let's say, social position as a physician,
    as one of the busier physicians in town.
    How did he get to medical school from--
    his father ran a hotel, was it?
    His father ran a hotel.
    And it's interesting that you ask that.
    I've just been reading a book called Burger Auf Widerruf,
    published by The Leo Baeck Institute, a collection
    of autobiographical material, diaries,
    et cetera of German Jews from 1780 to 1945.
    It's a collection coming out of a larger work,
    four-volume work, that deals with that.
    And they indicated there that the people
    in the 1700, 1800 area, late part of the 19th century,
    the Jews were business people.
    They might be farmers, but very usually not.
    And they would always try to get their children
    to go into the professions.
    And there was my father, going into professions.
    And he went to-- borrowed the money from his father.
    Went to Halle first.
    I think he studied in Berlin for a while, medical school,
    and went to Würzburg and graduated from the University
    of Würzburg with a degree as an MD.
    And he told me, I remember, that he paid every penny
    that he borrowed back to his father once he was in practice.
    He was in practice in Wiesbaden for a while.
    Then the war broke out.
    And he was taken into the German Army.
    He was an officer.
    Wound up as a captain.
    This is the First World War?
    First World War, regimental surgeon, [GERMAN],,
    staff officer.
    And he spent much of his time in France or in Russia.
    Those were the two fronts that he served at.
    A number of years ago, oh, this is probably
    25 years or more now, I happened to talk to a physician
    at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland who was a dermatologist.
    And I was seeing him for some minor skin problem I had.
    And I detected a German brogue when he was talking.
    And so I let on that I spoke German too
    and that my father-- and we talked German.
    And my father was a physician.
    Oh, what was his name?
    I said, Dr. Fackenheim, which was our German name.
    Frank is the Americanized version of it,
    because Fackenheim would be a little bit
    of a problem in this country.
    And he said, oh, I met your father.
    I said, what do you mean?
    He says, I heard, during the war, when
    I was on the Russian front, as a physician with one
    of the German regiments, I heard that there
    was a very well-respected and well-educated physician,
    Jewish physician, who always traveled with a library.
    And I wanted to meet him.
    And I made it my business to get a couple of days' pass.
    And I went over.
    And I saw him.
    That was your father.
    He said this?
    We spent two days together.
    And then I went back to my regiment.
    And I never saw him again.
    And so how old was this doctor?
    That physician must have been, at that time,
    in his early 60s--
    late 50s, early 60s, I'd say.
    He would have been old enough to have served in the German Army.
    And my father was born in 1882.
    He was probably in his 30s--
    32 when the war broke out.
    And this man must have been 30-32,
    in the same age, same age group.
    So they would get together.
    It was a small world--
    a lot of these small coincidences
    that I've run across, not just in that case,
    but in other situations too.
    So he was well-respected.
    He had a good practice.
    And we grew up in a medical atmosphere.
    My mother helped him in his practice to the extent
    that she took care of the bookkeeping.
    She would also took care of the chemistry.
    In those days, you didn't send out to the lab
    if you wanted to check somebody's urine.
    You did it right in the doctor's office.
    And she would do that.
    She would check it for albumin and check it for sugar.
    And sure, you did a lot of tests that you don't do anymore today
    in that particular form.
    But she would do all that work.
    She would assist him when there was a big problem,
    say, setting somebody's leg.
    She would assist him with the bandaging
    and the stuff that finally immobilized the break
    or fracture.
    And every now and then, I would help out, too,
    as I was getting older, some of the bookkeeping.
    My father was a very particular guy.
    In Germany, when you went on the bus, you got a ticket.
    It was punched.
    And that indicated the value of what you paid for it
    and so it was.
    He would collect those tickets whenever
    he went out visiting patients and didn't use his car.
    And many times, he didn't use his car.
    And he would collect those.
    And he would put them on a string
    so that he would have the records for his income tax.
    And whenever there was an--
    That is incredible.
    --examination of his tax return, he
    had everything documented, but everything.
    If it wasn't documented, he wouldn't take a deduction.
    And that's probably why I got my tax--
    my early tax training.
    Is that what you do today, string things?
    Well, I remember, when the income tax people came,
    the men from the Finanzamt--
    that's what it was called in Germany--
    he would haul out his strings with tickets on it.
    They'd take one look at it and say, that's OK.
    So he had no problem.
    He was a very, very, very careful guy.
    He was-- a little story that kind of illustrates it.
    In Germany, when you went to the railroad station,
    you only got as far as a barrier.
    If you wanted to go past the barrier,
    actually to the platform where the train arrived,
    you had to pay, I don't know, a nominal
    of some $0.05, or 10 pfennig, or something
    unless you were under five years old.
    Then it had no charge, you know.
    Well, my father--
    I was in Bebra doing something.
    My father was arriving by train for a visit or something.
    And my grandparents or uncles, whoever it was,
    took me to the railroad station to meet him.
    I was just past five years old.
    It was in June or July.
    I was born in May, five years and two months.
    And as they took me to the railroad station,
    they told the guy at the ticket office, oh, he's under five.
    Oh, OK, sure.
    No problem.
    So in the evening, they were sitting to dinner.
    And somebody said, oh, boy, we put something over the railroad
    today.
    We took Walter to the railroad station.
    We told him he's under five years old.
    My father got up from the table, walked to the railroad station
    just two blocks away, and apologized, and paid $0.05.
    Oh, my goodness.
    What a man.
    He wasn't about to do anything that was
    remotely bad against the law.
    What a role model for you.
    Oh, he was a role model, all right.
    Both my parents were role models--
    upright, upstanding, no fussing around.
    You do what's right.
    What about your mother then?
    How did she end up marrying your father?
    Well, her sister was already married out of Weil.
    There was the Weil family.
    Yes.
    Remember that.
    Right.
    That's the man who was a partner in the store, that Hamburger
    and Weil.
    And he's just died in Oakland, you said, the son.
    No, no.
    Hamburger and Weil, he--
    Otto Weil died after he came out of concentration.
    That's right, so the son.
    That's the other side of the family.
    Son lives in Middletown, New York.
    And so his sister was already married.
    And she was visiting in Wiesbaden
    or maybe living in Wiesbaden at the time.
    And there was some kind of a party.
    And she was introduced to this doctor Fackenheim.
    And he thought he was a great boy.
    This is the sister-- your mother's sister?
    No, no.
    That's my mother.
    Your mother?
    Oh.
    See, my mother's sister was married.
    And she introduced my future mother to my future father.
    And my mother saw there this guy that's something of a bore,
    you know, no big deal.
    He later showed her.
    But I think she changed her opinion, because sometime
    later, they were-- got engaged.
    And then in September 1919, they were married.
    And I still have their wedding pictures.
    They was married in Frankfurt in a huge wedding,
    a lot of people, and the usual photograph,
    with the happy couple in the middle, and the family,
    the mishpacha on the wife's side and mishpacha the husband's
    side.
    And the thing that puzzled me when
    I saw this picture for the first time and studied it-- puzzling
    me was where the heck was I?
    I mean, wasn't I at the wedding, the family event?
    And I figured it out.
    I figured it out.
    I doped it out myself.
    I was standing behind grandpa.
    Oh, so the photographer couldn't see you?
    Well, I mean I couldn't see.
    And my grandfather was a very tall man.
    And so I figured out, I must have been
    standing behind my grandpa.
    And that's why you can't see me on the picture.
    How old were you?
    Oh, I must have been six, seven years old, something like it,
    before the age where you know more about these things.
    And for a number of years, that was my firm belief.
    And I would tell everybody that.
    That's this picture hanging in our living room--
    no, that's the dining room.
    Say it, there, see, I'm behind Grandpa.
    So I found out that was different later on.
    But for a long time, that was my idea.
    Still have it.
    And because those pictures are great treasures,
    and it's one of the few things-- some of the few things
    that survived all the trips from Germany to Shanghai,
    and Shanghai to San Francisco.
    How did your mother get to Wiesbaden, though?
    I know that your--
    Well, I think her parents were already retired.
    And her sister was living in Wiesbaden,
    as I told you, because of her husband, Weil,
    had a store in Wiesbaden.
    And this is how she got to Wiesbaden.
    My mother, as a daughter of well-to-do Jewish business
    people, was sent to London for 11 months for finishing school.
    This was the big thing, the young Jewish ladies of means
    would be sent to Switzerland, or France, or England.
    How old?
    Oh, she must have been 16, 17, maybe, something like that.
    And this was a very strict sort of school for her,
    a sort of an institution out of school
    where they're taught how to behave like young ladies,
    you know.
    And they had these rules-- no candy in the rooms
    and that kind of stuff.
    Of course, they smuggled candy into the rooms.
    And my mother told me that one time there
    was a sudden inspection.
    And she had all this candy in her bed.
    And threw it under the bed, fast asleep, lying on the candy.
    It made a sort of a mess.
    But somehow, they survived that.
    These are the things that happened.
    I guess it happens today, too, in similar situations--
    maybe at Mills College and not London.
    Maybe.
    Had your mother planned to work at all.
    Or was it just not favored?
    No.
    I don't think so.
    She was never trained for work in the sense
    that she went to any kind of a school that prepared her
    for any specific career other than,
    as a career, the housewife.
    But she finished school?
    She finished school, right.
    She went to school in Mannheim.
    And after finishing school, I don't know how far she went
    and whether she went to a gymnasium
    or some kind of a high school.
    But she went to that finishing school in London for 11 months.
    I think she had to come back because war was threatening,
    as you know.
    And so she had to get back to Germany.
    She never did train for any kind of work.
    And I think the idea was that she would eventually
    marry somebody, professional man, and she did.
    And how old was when she got married?
    1919, she must have been 25--
    25.
    My father was 30s.
    Oh, that's late, you see.
    Wasn't that-- it was late?
    Yeah, yeah, my father was 37.
    Wow, that is very late.
    Yeah, they had another-- he was late.
    She was late.
    They were 12 years apart.
    He was 12 years ahead of her.
    And he was late because of his medical training.
    He was late because of the war, which
    cost him another four years--
    of course not just him, but all the other people--
    Sure, 1914.
    --in the war on both sides of the frontier,
    both sides of the [GERMAN].
    And so by the time he got back out and got settled back
    in Wiesbaden, it was 1919.
    He was 37 years old.
    There was a big wedding?
    Big wedding.
    And then they settled down in Wiesbaden, at Bernstrasse 7.
    The house, it was bombed during the war,
    doesn't exist anymore--
    up in the third floor.
    It's a huge flat, with two bedrooms, a dining room,
    living room, kitchen, and then the office part--
    office, a treatment room, a waiting room--
    a very, very large place.
    And that's where I was born and where,
    later, my brother was born.
    A year ago, I was in Wiesbaden with a group of old Wiesbaden
    residents who were invited back by the city--
    they've been having for a number of years.
    Invite us back at their expense, all expenses paid.
    Without?
    Well, I'd written to them before.
    I knew they were--
    [STATIC] to be honest--
    [AUDIO OUT] they paid everything--
    San Francisco Airport back to San Francisco Airport--
    hotel, outings, $500 cash walking around.
    I mean, so they really treated us very nicely.
    I have to stop for a minute.
    I'm having a little problem with the microphone here.
    And I need to take about--
    This one?
    --five minutes to--
    Go ahead.
    Whole business is to convert computer disks now,
    because there's so many people who have changed.
    Well, I know they convert computers.
    There's an outfit called Data Clone.
    And they won't do an Apple 3.
    They just don't have.
    Well, I know she has some Apple computers at her facility.
    OK.
    Excuse me.
    I think we're ready to go.
    OK.
    OK.
    Go on.
    We can start up any time.
    Thank you.
    Oh, I just want to ask you, at the end,
    can we go back and get all the names of the family,
    like, move on from the family stuff to the period?
    Yeah, but I just want to explore a little
    about the childhood more--
    OK.
    --growing up.
    OK.
    We were talking about?
    You were talking about last year when you went to Wiesbaden.
    Oh, yeah.
    I went to Wiesbaden.
    And I'm not going to tell you now the whole story about it.
    But there was one very old lady there
    among this group of about 28 Wiesbadeners
    who went back there.
    And when she heard my name, she says, I was in your house
    when you were born.
    I heard your mother scream.
    And I said, what were you doing there?
    She says, well, I was working in the store
    that was on the ground floor.
    They had on the first floor-- ground floor,
    first floor, second floor, that's
    the way they ran it in those days.
    And I was working there.
    I was an apprentice, or a salesgirl, or whatever it was.
    And I heard your mother.
    And then I heard that you were born.
    That was in May of 1920.
    And she was not Jewish.
    She later married a Jewish man in Wiesbaden in 1928,
    I believe.
    And they had a son.
    And she and her son were at this group in Wiesbaden last year.
    She and her son wound up in Theresienstadt
    late in 1945, early '45, and late-- the last day of the war,
    and managed to survive.
    And so they were there.
    And there was this woman who says she was there in the house
    when I was born.
    And it's, again, a small world again.
    Very.
    Fantastic.
    Well, all right, well, let's go back to after your parents were
    born--
    after your parents were married, and you were born,
    and your brother was born.
    He was two years younger than you.
    2 and 1/2 years--
    2 and 1/4, yeah.
    The social life at that time, was it
    mostly with other Jewish families, do you remember?
    It was mostly with other Jewish families, right.
    We had a housekeeper who was Catholic.
    So we celebrated the Catholic holidays along with her.
    We celebrated Christmas.
    We didn't have a Christmas tree or Hanukkah bush,
    as I would call it.
    But we had presents for her.
    And she had presents for us.
    And we had a special meal.
    But we also celebrated Hanukkah.
    Of course, she celebrated that us.
    And of course, as I grew up, I knew quite a bit
    about what she was supposed to do and doing.
    And so the first Friday in the month,
    I made quite sure that she fasted, because that was a Hard
    Jesus Friday or something.
    I made quite sure that she always
    read her Catholic newspaper--
    kind of a shomer.
    Not just Shabbos, but a shomer goyim.
    But the social life was pretty much
    with either the family or other Jewish families in town,
    the colleagues of my father's, or friends of his,
    or his lawyer, that sort of thing.
    But it was a very good family life.
    Of course, Friday nights were always special.
    That's when we had an evening meal, which was major.
    Usually during the week, we would have our major meal
    at lunchtime, which was a German custom, much more
    healthy than eating at night.
    And at night, you'd eat a sandwich
    and have a glass of milk, or a cup of tea, or a cup of coffee.
    But at lunch, you had everything from soup to nuts to dessert.
    But Friday nights, you had your main meal Friday nights.
    And you had it in the evening.
    And it was always something special.
    And I remember, many of these Friday nights--
    particularly one, when in the middle of the dinner,
    the doorbell rang.
    And my father answered.
    And there was a man who was bleeding profusely.
    And he was drunk.
    And so my father got him in into one of the rooms.
    And they put him down.
    And he said, now, relax, relax.
    And just rest a little bit.
    But this guy wouldn't rest.
    And he was rummaging around the whole house,
    shouting obscenities.
    He was drunk.
    So I was a little scared.
    My father finally took him into his room,
    and gave him a shot of some kind,
    and calmed him down, and then banished him up,
    and sent him on his way.
    And I was small enough to be very disturbed about that.
    And I still remember that.
    This is one of those traumatic things that you remember.
    Kids, yeah.
    Not disturbed about it anymore.
    But--
    At the time.
    --then this was a very, very scary thing,
    this guy hollering.
    Excuse me just a minute.
    Were you very religious?
    Did you go to the synagogue with your family?
    Yes.
    There were two major synagogues in Wiesbaden,
    two major communities, you might say.
    One was called a Liberal Conservative community,
    which was a large group.
    And then there was a smaller group, which was very Orthodox.
    And that group included, of course,
    a lot of the Jews who had come into Wiesbaden from Poland,
    the Polish Jews.
    And those were the two major synagogues.
    The Liberal synagogue was on the Michelsberg,
    very large edifice.
    The smaller one was the Orthodox shul on Friedrichstrasse.
    And the rabbi there was a Dr. Ansprache.
    Rabbis, of course, were PhDs in Germany.
    They went to school.
    They got their PhD.
    They became a rabbi.
    So rabbi was always Dr. Ansprache at the Conservative--
    at the Orthodox shul.
    Dr. Lazarus, whom I remember very well, because he was one
    under whom I was bar mitzvahed.
    Dr. Lazarus was the rabbi for the Liberal shul.
    Dr. Ansprache had a son name of Joseph,
    who emigrated to England--
    that's another interesting story--
    and then was deported from England to Australia,
    became a rabbi, became a rabbi and a Reform rabbi,
    and wound up his rabbinical days in San Francisco--
    Joe Asher, Temple Emanuel.
    He's now retired.
    In fact, he's now quite ill.
    My old school friend, we went to school together.
    It's Asher.
    He's in San Francisco.
    And his son is a rabbi and is I think
    the sixth or seventh generation rabbi,
    because it's a family of rabbis going back I
    don't know how many years.
    And we were members in the Liberal Conservative-- today,
    you'd call it Conservative.
    Not Reform?
    No, no, a lot of Hebrew in the prayer books-- some German,
    of course, but a lot of Hebrew.
    The Reform has, here in this country,
    mostly English, some Hebrew.
    There was a good dose of Hebrew, a good dose of Hebrew
    prayers used in the service.
    And we went there, of course, Friday night,
    Saturday mornings.
    I wouldn't say that we went every Friday or every Saturday,
    but very often, particularly did to the youth
    services, which Jugend Gottesdienst, which took
    place at least once a month.
    And we went to religious instruction, which of course,
    in Germany, you couldn't avoid, because that
    was part of your regular school curriculum.
    You went to a Jewish school?
    No.
    No, in Germany, in those days, and still
    today, there is no separation of church and state.
    Therefore, in a Jewish-- in a curriculum of any school,
    there is a section that's called religious training.
    If you're Catholic, you go to the Catholic section.
    If you're a Protestant--
    two major faiths in Germany-- you
    go to the Protestant section.
    And if you're Jewish, you go to the Jewish section.
    And the trouble was that with the few Jewish students
    in Wiesbaden-- there were maybe 3,000 Jews altogether
    in a population of then 160,000--
    all the Jewish kids were collected from all the schools.
    And they had their classes in the afternoon,
    which was something of a bother for us,
    because while the other kids played football,
    we went to study Hebrew.
    And it was terrible to study Hebrew.
    My god, what a language, the grammar alone.
    And Bible, and that was terribly boring to read
    the Bible, all this old stuff about people
    that we didn't really believe existed.
    And I changed my mind about it in the meantime.
    I'm very active right now in the Torah study group in Berkeley.
    But in those days, that was a bit of a problem
    to go to the school.
    But I went there.
    And I got my usual good grades, no problems.
    And I still remember some of the teachers--
    Dr. Lilienthal, and Dr. Kapell, and others, most of whom
    perished in the Holocaust.
    Dr. Lazarus, the rabbi, was able to take a disability
    retirement.
    He had diabetes, was a patient of my father--
    diabetes, was retired.
    And a rabbi, of course, was an employee of the state.
    And because he was retired on a disability,
    he was not arrested during Kristallnacht.
    You see?
    A state employee on retirement, you didn't arrest him.
    That he was Jewish was another matter.
    And he was able to go to Israel, then Palestine.
    And they lived there for many years.
    I think he lived to see the State of Israel established
    and died in '49 or '50.
    But he was a rabbi in 1934 when I was bar mitzvahed.
    Bar mitzvahed.
    And I was supposed to be bar mitzvahed in 1933, in June,
    shortly after you're 13.
    But that was right after the Machtergreifung, the seizure
    of power by the Nazis.
    And things were very unsettled.
    Everybody was nervous.
    What are we going to do?
    Are we going to bar mitzvah or not bar mitzvah?
    And a bar mitzvah, normally, it was a big affair.
    And normally, my bar mitzvah would
    have been an affair of 500 people, 1,000 people,
    I don't know what, family from all
    over, from Mannheim, from Darmstadt, from Bebra,
    from Kasseln, from Eisenach.
    And so what are you going to do?
    We're not going to have a big bar mitzvah.
    Maybe we're not going to bar mitzvah at all.
    Finally, they decided-- my parents
    decided to have a bar mitzvah in January 1934,
    which is about seven to eight months later.
    And that bar mitzvah was very small.
    There were maybe 30 people--
    29 Jews, one goy, one non-Jew.
    And that man was representing the Gestapo.
    He was in the temple.
    Well, they wanted to make sure that the rabbi didn't say
    anything that was offensive.
    Was he invited?
    Of course not.
    Well, the Gestapo was at almost every service.
    You went to service.
    And there was at least one Gestapo man
    in the audience to pay attention to what was being said.
    And by god, if you said the wrong thing, off you went--
    Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Dachau.
    Yes.
    Now, tell me about the thinking at that time.
    This is '33.
    And can you tell me a little about what your parents were
    talking about at that time, and what had happened specifically,
    and what their response to it was.
    Right.
    The general-- I can't say what my parents specifically
    said, because I was too young to worry about that.
    No, just the general feeling.
    And I was not included in these discussions.
    But the general idea of German Jews
    then was that well, after all, we've
    lived in this country for hundreds of years.
    My family was traced back by some cousins of ours
    to the 12th and 13th century, actually traced back paper
    by paper.
    This guy, Hitler, he's from Austria.
    He's not even a German.
    And nothing, I mean, he's talking
    a big-- he's got to do that.
    He's got to say all these things in order to attract attention.
    But he isn't going to do all the bad things
    that he's saying he's going to do,
    because he needs the foreign support.
    And then of course, the German proverb, soup
    is not even as hot as it cooked.
    And so nothing's going to happen.
    And the next election, we're going to vote him out
    of office again.
    And it's not going to be too bad.
    And don't worry about it.
    And who could imagine that in a country of Goethe,
    of Schiller, of Wagner, even--
    great musician, who knew he was an antisemite--
    of Brahms, that they would kill people by the numbers?
    Who would imagine that?
    I mean, incredible.
    And then gradually, things started happening.
    At one time, the members of the neighbor's lodge were arrested.
    All of them were kept in jail, in a police
    jail for half a day, or a day, a couple of days,
    and released again.
    And that kind of--
    When was that, do you remember?
    About '36, '37.
    And what was the reason they were arrested?
    Was there a reason?
    Because they were members of the B'nai B'rith Lodge.
    They were Jewish.
    You know, there's no reason.
    There's just no argument.
    You were Jewish.
    If you crossed against the light,
    you were arrested and wound up in a concentration camp.
    So back in '33, after--
    But it was all--
    let me just finish up, spin out that thought.
    Sure.
    It was all sort of haphazard.
    And it usually happened to somebody else.
    And when it happened, there was always the idea, well,
    maybe he really did commit a crime.
    Maybe he did commit a fraudulent bankruptcy.
    Maybe he shouldn't have gotten that German girl in trouble,
    a non-Jewish girl, you know.
    Maybe he really did sell merchandise
    that was not what was represented to be.
    Maybe he should be in jail.
    Maybe he deserved what was.
    Those were some of the things that people thought.
    And it really didn't hit home until November 1938.
    All of a sudden, the Holocaust started.
    This was the start of the Holocaust,
    when 30,000 Jews were arrested, when businesses were smashed,
    synagogues were burned.
    You can read about it.
    You've got all the books here.
    You know what happened.
    That's when people started making massive attempts
    to get out.
    We were registered for immigration, with the German--
    with the American consulate in Stuttgart,
    which was responsible for our part of Germany,
    in 1936 or '37.
    That's when my parents really made an attempt to get out,
    before Kristallnacht.
    I think some uncle of ours who was an American came to visit.
    And he, apparently, discussed it with my parents.
    And they decided, well, maybe we'd better get out of here.
    Well, the quota for German nationals, not the German Jews,
    but anybody born in Germany, the quota for people
    born in Germany to emigrate into the United States
    was something like 12,000 a year,
    maybe 13,000, something in that neighborhood.
    Our number, waiting number at the consulate in Stuttgart was
    37,000-something.
    It didn't take much of a mathematician to figure out
    how long we'd have to wait.
    We couldn't wait.
    So when Kristallnacht arrived, my father was arrested.
    I was arrested.
    He was in the concentration camp.
    I was in the camp.
    He was fortunate to be released after two weeks.
    But I was there for five months.
    They made an attempt to get out.
    And they picked the only place in the whole world
    where you could still go without having to ask for a visa--
    Shanghai.
    OK.
    I'll get to that.
    Want to get back.
    Yeah, I'm interested in--
    OK.
    --how it started, you see, because already in '33,
    your parents are saying, well, maybe you
    shouldn't have a bar mitzvah.
    And I'm wondering, what was their thinking at that time--
    not to show Jewishness or what?
    The thinking still was that well,
    maybe it's going to blow over.
    But still, they didn't want to have the bar mitzvah because it
    would be too obvious that they were Jewish
    or what was the feeling?
    It was very-- you see, the Nazis took power in Germany
    in January 33.
    And those first few months were very turbulent.
    There was the Reichstag's fire.
    There was the crackdown on the Communist Party.
    There was the crackdown on Social Democrats.
    There were some arrests of Jews who
    were targeted because of a journalist
    had written against Hitler.
    There were lawyers and had prosecuted Nazis, some kind.
    But these were all isolated things.
    But there was a lot of turbulence, and a lot of Nazis
    marching through the streets, Fackelzug.
    I don't know whether you know what a Fackelzug is,
    that's a torchlight parade.
    And that's pretty frightening, you know.
    And so they said, well, let's wait a little bit.
    Let's see.
    It'll simmer down.
    It'll settle down.
    It's not going to be that bad.
    Maybe as time goes on, things aren't-- the soup isn't going
    to be eaten as hot as it cooked, the old story, you know.
    We'll vote him out of office.
    We'll have another election.
    So you had a small bar mitzvah.
    And how else, during this time between '33 and '38,
    were you personally affected by what was going on?
    What was going on?
    Well, personally affected-- I don't recall the details
    anymore, but more and more, they cut down
    the extent to which my father could practice until he
    couldn't practice at all.
    How did they cut that down?
    Well, they had to pass laws, one law after another.
    I have at home a record that's brought back from--
    a written record-- that I brought back from Wiesbaden
    that lists all the laws and government regulations that
    were passed during that time that cut down the amount
    of activities that physicians, and lawyers, and engineers,
    and architects, but particularly physicians and lawyers could
    do--
    Jewish physicians?
    --Jewish physicians could do until they finally were told,
    you can't practice anymore at all.
    A Jewish physician couldn't treat a German patient,
    a non-Jewish patient.
    A Jewish patient could not be treated by a Jewish physician
    unless there was a great emergency
    and there was only one physician in town
    that was qualified to do that-- qualified by law, not qualified
    by training.
    And this was all gradual.
    This was just a little bit at a time.
    You see, if all this business of the Crystal Night event,
    if all that had happened in '33, the Jews
    would have been out of there, all of them.
    But it was sort of gradual.
    And you kind of get used to it.
    Well, all right, OK, we can live with that.
    All right, we can live with it.
    It's in a lot of ways was similar to what
    happened in a family generally.
    Someone gets sick, well, it's terrible,
    but we can live with that.
    Probably get better, you know.
    Well, it doesn't get better, well, you can live with it.
    It gets a little worse, well, you get used to it.
    It gets a little worse.
    The party that is sick becomes unable to walk, well,
    all right, then we put him in a wheelchair or something.
    But you live with it.
    You always adjust.
    You always adapt.
    But how could your father make a living after he wasn't able to?
    Well, he was making the living of sorts until living got
    smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller.
    And it wasn't until '36 to '37 that he finally
    decided, well, maybe he'd better get out of here.
    He had a chance to get out of Germany in 1923
    when he had an American patient who said to him,
    Doctor, Germany is bankrupt.
    It just lost the war.
    They've got all those reparations to pay.
    Germany's bankrupt.
    Get out of it.
    I'll fix you up.
    I'll pay for your trip to America.
    I'll set you up in business as a physician.
    I guarantee your income for a year,
    introduce you to all my friends.
    He says, after one year, you'll make so much money,
    you don't need me anymore.
    My father's thinking, why should I, a German, ex-German officer,
    member of a German family that happened to be Jewish,
    who'd been in Germany for years, with a new family, two kids,
    brand new kids-- one was two years old, one was brand new--
    just set up in this fairly--
    in a beautiful town--
    and Wiesbaden is a beautiful town-- gorgeous surroundings,
    gorgeous climate.
    Why should I leave, go to America?
    Who went to America in those days?
    Somebody in the family who committed fraudulent
    bankruptcy, who got a girl in trouble,
    who committed something, everybody chipped
    in, the [NON-ENGLISH],, the district attorney,
    they looked away, would get them out of the country.
    Don't worry about it.
    You know, they sent him to America.
    And those were the people, of course,
    later on that sent us the affidavits that supported us,
    you know.
    Now, well, I'm not saying that everybody
    who left Germany went to America it was that kind of,
    but that's what happened.
    America was a country where sure, it
    was you picked up gold in the street.
    But it was, essentially, a place where
    there were a lot of crimes--
    Uncivilized.
    --like gangsters, and it was sort of Wild West, California,
    my god, I mean, you have to wear guns all the time,
    you have to fight with Indians.
    This was the picture we had of the United States.
    Well, what about when you were in school?
    Perception, not reality.
    Of course.
    Not reality, perception.
    It's very understandable, very understandable.
    Yeah.
    But when you were in school during this time,
    you were in a public or a--
    I was in a grammar school first, in which
    there was no problem at all about being Jewish.
    This was from 1926 to '30.
    When I was six years old, I went to grammar school, first grade.
    And I was there for four grades.
    Then I had to pass a very stiff examination in order
    to qualify to go to the gymnasium.
    You didn't go to the gymnasium by the fact
    that you were alive or paid for it.
    You had to qualify to get in there.
    Here, it's different.
    You go to high school because you live and breathe.
    So I went to the gymnasium, which started at age 10
    and was an eight-year school.
    And there, I was from 1930 to '33.
    Of course, there are no problems,
    because that was before Hitler.
    Now, when Hitler started, things got a little sticky.
    In the morning, they started the school
    with the teacher coming in, everybody jumping up,
    Heil Hitler.
    And that's how you started the school day.
    And of course, you didn't want to be left out.
    So everybody raised his hand, including myself.
    And there were probably four kids,
    four Jewish children in that school, four Jewish students.
    There was Joe Asher, my friend, my brother,
    and one of my brother's friends, who
    now lives in Frankfurt, retired from some job over there.
    And we were the only Jewish kids in that school.
    And there were maybe 800 students in that school.
    Still exists.
    I was there last year, an honored guest this time.
    And so things got a little sticky.
    Then we had the son of what they call
    the Kreislieter, the district leader of the Nazi Party.
    He was sitting right next to me.
    And we were good friends, played football together,
    no problems at all.
    And then another time, a real big Nazi
    in this particular grade, a fellow
    named Meixner with an X--
    M-E-I-X-N-E-R-- I still remember that, sitting next to me.
    And we were doing a test, a math test.
    And he was pretty stupid guy.
    I mean, friendly, but stupid.
    And somewhere during the test, I was working away there.
    The teacher, Dr. Glichter, said Meixner,
    don't copy Jewish work, you know, something like that.
    So Meixner, of course, he doesn't look at my paper.
    He looked at his paper.
    After that was over, the teacher called me over,
    he said, you know, I didn't want to offend you.
    I wanted to show up this Nazi.
    Big deal, he's a big Nazi and he has to copy Jewish thinking,
    you know.
    I didn't want to offend you.
    He apologized to me.
    He was not a Jewish teacher.
    It was a German teacher.
    So I had relatively little problems in school.
    We had one teacher who was teaching biology, chemistry,
    and physics, I believe, Dr. Breuckner.
    He was an old Nazi.
    But that was, you understood, someone
    who had joined the Nazi Party back in the early '20s.
    And as a result, he wore not just a swastika,
    but a swastika in gold.
    It was a big deal for those guys.
    And he was a bit of a problem because he
    was teaching the Mendelian laws, and dominant recessive genes,
    and all that good stuff.
    And of course, he discussed the Jews,
    who all the recessive genes were in the Jews.
    And Jews were bad.
    And he demonstrated the biological facts.
    And then I was sitting in the first row,
    writing it all down in shorthand,
    which I had already studied.
    And he was very upset about that.
    But I am supposed to take notes, you know.
    But there I was, writing down all this stuff.
    And so he was always giving me a bad grade.
    That's the only time I ever got a 3 minus.
    If 1 was the very best, 5 was the worst grade,
    3 minus was pretty bad from my point of view.
    I was always at least a 2 plus type of student.
    But he was the only one I was really
    having, in a remote sort of way, troubles with.
    My fellow students, even the big Nazis, we were always friends.
    And what happened later on, I don't know.
    I don't even know what happened to those kids.
    But I don't remember any specific problems.
    And I left high school because either that or they
    would tell me to get out, because they were trying
    to get rid of Jewish students.
    So when did you leave?
    I was 16 when I left high school and went to--
    got a job as an apprentice, commercial apprentice,
    and then went to a commercial training
    school, which is sort of equivalent to one
    of our business schools here.
    So you were forced to leave school when you were 16?
    Let's put it this way, I left voluntarily.
    But if I hadn't left, I might have been forced a little later
    to get out.
    It was time to go.
    How did you feel about that?
    Didn't feel too good about it, but I didn't have a choice.
    And your parents, that was about the time
    when they started seriously thinking about leaving?
    That was the time they started thinking,
    maybe we're not going to be here too long.
    Maybe we better get out.
    Maybe we better switch.
    Maybe he's not going to become a physician, because we
    knew already then that I would not be able to go to college,
    to university, because I wouldn't be accepted.
    In Germany, then, they had something
    called numerus clausus.
    They did a lot of things in Latin,
    which was fine by me, because I was studying Latin and Greek.
    So numerus clausus means that they cut, it's a quota system.
    Here, we call it a quota system.
    And they would say, all right, the numbers
    are closed for Jews.
    So many Jews can go to college.
    And that number went-- was smaller and smaller
    as the years went by until no one got to college.
    And so I left that school.
    But I switched to another school,
    which was equally tough and equally hard,
    except in another direction.
    And they let you in.
    There was no quota there?
    No.
    They had to let me in, since I was a commercial apprentice.
    And in those days--
    and this may still be true today in Germany--
    if you were an apprentice, you were
    protected by the Chamber of Commerce,
    which was a state organization.
    And you had a contract which was co-signed by the Chamber
    of Commerce, which your employer could not break unless you
    committed a terrible crime--
    stealing money or some such thing, you know,
    or setting fire to the factory.
    And your employer had not just the job, but the duty,
    the obligation to train you.
    Corresponding, you got very little pay.
    I think you had 15 marks a month the first year,
    25 marks a month the second year,
    where a regular employee would get 75 to 100 marks at once.
    So you were in that program for two years?
    And I was in that training.
    I was in there for a three-year period.
    But before the three years was out,
    the Kristallnacht occurred.
    And that was the end of that.
    What about your younger brother?
    What happened to him?
    Younger brother went also to the same high school.
    This gymnasium.
    Went through the same thing, was two years behind.
    And he left school also and didn't do--
    he went along another year or so.
    But he left school also.
    And he didn't do anything until we emigrated.
    So tell me about that night now.
    How did that happen, Kristallnacht?
    Well, how it happened, of course,
    I can just repeat the story of Herschel Grynszpan.
    From your point of view.
    From my point of view?
    Yeah.
    Where were you that night?
    And what was your personal experience.
    Well, that night, I was in bed asleep.
    I was working in that factory.
    And I got up the next morning.
    And not knowing what was going on, I got dressed.
    I got up.
    I think I had a bicycle and bicycled out to the factory
    and met there in very old, at least to me, in those days,
    he seemed to be very old, Jewish fellow who worked
    in the factory, who said that the synagogues in Mainz--
    and in Wiesbaden, Mainz is just across the river--
    were burning.
    And there was a lot of riots.
    And some businesses were smashed and whatnot.
    And things were in bad shape.
    And I decided, well, I have a job to do here.
    I better finish it up in case something happens.
    And then I got a phone call from my mother, who
    said my father was arrested.
    And they asked about me and where I was.
    They had come to the house and taken your father away?
    They'd come to the house to arrest my father, Gestapo.
    So then I decided, well, to finish what I was doing.
    And I was getting some kind of a shipment ready.
    And I felt that I didn't like to leave things half done.
    I wanted to tie up loose ends, get all the documents ready.
    Not that it mattered.
    Kind of silly thinking back in it, but this is the way I--
    Of course, you had no idea.
    --still, to this day, I would do the same thing.
    I don't want to leave work behind that's undone.
    I want to do it done.
    So I did that.
    And I went home about, I guess, 1 o'clock then.
    Oh, another thing happened.
    I would usually go to a little restaurant in the neighborhood
    to have a lunch sandwich, a cup of coffee.
    They called me.
    They suggested I better not come that day.
    They knew I was Jewish.
    So how were you feeling about all this?
    Well, I was feeling a little bit apprehensive.
    And I went home.
    And I said, well, what went on?
    My mother said, well, they came.
    And they just said, the government orders,
    they arrested my father.
    About 2 o'clock, the doorbell rings.
    And there was a Gestapo.
    And they said, I was under arrest.
    And I said, well, why?
    What's going on?
    Well, government orders.
    I don't know anything about it.
    He says, I just have orders to arrest you.
    He says, you better pack a few things.
    You might be away for a day or two.
    So I packed a little suitcase, a little satchel
    with a few changes of underwear and a shirt.
    And I took my heavy winter coat along and followed this fellow.
    And we walked.
    I mean, I wasn't handcuffed, or beaten, or anything else.
    We just walked like two friends through the streets
    to the main police headquarters.
    And there, he took me upstairs-- first floor or second floor.
    I don't know where it was.
    Opens the door, and then gave me a shove.
    And I went through the door.
    And I was in a police jail.
    And I was turned over to the police officers.
    This was the general police.
    So one of those guys says, well, what's your name?
    I said, Fackenheim.
    Oh, he says, yeah, we got your father here.
    He's another patient of my father's.
    My father had a lot of police and firemen
    amongst his patients.
    And so he knew many of them.
    He says, he's in number 23.
    But it's well, we'll put you in with your father.
    So they took me down to a small cell.
    And there was my father.
    And put me in the same cell.
    It was very nice of those guys.
    So we were there overnight.
    This was on the 10th, I believe.
    On the 11th, in the morning, we were called out
    and we were questioned by Gestapo officer, who
    had a big list.
    And he asked me, are you healthy?
    I said yes.
    Are you really healthy?
    I said-- I didn't know if I say no.
    I got problem in the lungs and my feet.
    I said, yeah, I'm really.
    He shrugged his shoulders, put a check mark after my name.
    Maybe if I said, I'm not healthy,
    maybe he would have said OK.
    That afternoon, they took us, called all us out,
    put us aboard the buses.
    These are the buses that are normally
    used to take people around Wiesbaden
    to show them a good time.
    Put us on those buses an SS officer
    with a big gun in the front.
    And they drove us to Frankfurt, about an hour or so away.
    Today, it's 20 minutes for the Autobahn.
    And there, we arrived sometime in the late afternoon--
    this was in November, it was already getting dark--
    at the main railroad station.
    And there was a mob of thousands of people, who were screaming.
    They were, kill the Jews.
    And let's tear them apart.
    People in the streets were screaming that?
    On the street, yeah.
    And the SS made a path for us to get us
    into the railroad station.
    How many of you were there?
    Oh, the bus full of people may have been 30 or 40 people.
    But there were many buses.
    I don't know how many altogether.
    I don't remember that anymore.
    I just remember the one I was on.
    From Wiesbaden.
    From Wiesbaden.
    And their object, of course, was not to protect us from the mob.
    But they had orders to deliver us to the trains.
    And of course, they didn't want to lose anybody.
    And that's why they protected us.
    See, this is, again, the German mind at work.
    Order was signed.
    You see, they got 33 prisoners.
    And the 33 prisoners got to be delivered.
    If somebody gets killed, or beaten, or bloodied,
    or whatever it is, they can't deliver 30.
    So they had to make a way for us.
    But we had to pass through that yelling crowd.
    And it was pretty frightening.
    And we were taken out to a platform
    without paying the $0.05.
    And there, we were lined up.
    And there was a train waiting.
    And on the train, it said Weimar.
    And that's when we knew.
    Weimar was the city where Buchenwald was located.
    Weimar was the city of Goethe.
    Weimar's a nice city, a beautiful city
    in the center of Germany.
    But a little bit outside of Weimar,
    there is a forest called Buchenwald.
    And in that forest, they had built the concentration camp.
    So we knew that's where we were going.
    You knew about the concentration camp?
    Oh, yeah.
    Oh, yeah.
    Concentration camps were not a secret in Germany.
    In fact, I remember, in 1935 or '36, reading in the papers
    a story about that, in a German paper, mind you,
    that those are camps in which people are trained for work,
    and educated about the German government,
    and the aims of the National Socialist movement.
    And it made it nice, nice, nice, nice sort of thing.
    But we still knew what was going on
    because we had met some people who
    had been there and come back.
    Jews?
    Jews.
    So we were taken onto the train or put on board
    the train, regular passenger cars, third class passenger
    cars.
    Third class is hard seats.
    Second class is soft seats.
    Hard seats, which is what we traveled on usually anyway.
    I mean, this is of no particular hardship.
    And then we were told that anybody who
    opens a window will get shot.
    Anybody who sticks his head out the window, shot.
    Anybody tries to escape, shot.
    Every third word was shot.
    We were given the rules.
    And then the train started to move
    and arrived in Weimar a number of hours later.
    And we were told to get out of the car,
    schnell, schnell, schnell.
    And there was a gang of SS officers, SS men
    with steel rods and whips.
    And they yelled at us, schnell, schnell, schnell.
    Run here, run there against the wall.
    Don't move.
    Don't move.
    Don't move.
    Anybody who moved got beaten.
    And then we were put on trucks.
    And again, we were given the rules--
    anybody that's shot, shot.
    Anything that you do that violates rules, [GERMAN]..
    And in those trucks, they took us up to the camp,
    which is about 10-15 minutes outside of town,
    a little bit before the main gate,
    which has that famous inscription,
    Arbeit Macht Frei--
    work liberates.
    I think you have a photograph out there
    of one of the camps that has that gate.
    All the camps, all the concentration camps have that.
    Then in front of that camp, the truck stopped.
    We were told to get off the trucks
    and run, again, through a gang of SS, who were beating up
    on us, into the camp.
    And then we ran into a scene out of, I guess, Dante's Inferno.
    There were thousands of people milling around,
    being told to go here, to there, to lie down on the ground,
    to get up.
    Nobody knew what was going on.
    And you were registered.
    This was about 2:00 in the morning, middle of the night,
    searchlights all over the place, machine guns,
    machine guns, barbed wire.
    And there we were.
    And we probably spent--
    I spent the whole night there, being registered, being
    recorded, and recorded again, told to go here,
    told to go there-- not friendly-like,
    yelled at, screamed at.
    I was almost immediately separated from my father.
    Yes, I was wondering where, up to what point
    were you with your father.
    I was with my father up to that point.
    I lost him.
    I mean, there was--
    I found out later that in this camp,
    there were 10,000 non-Jews and 2,000 Jewish prisoners who had
    been there before this November 10 thing occurred,
    before Kristallnacht, who were there for reasons not connected
    with Kristallnacht--
    Germans who were communists, Germans who were--
    non-Jewish Germans-- Germans who had committed crimes
    of some kind, served their time in jail,
    and then were arrested by the Gestapo
    when they were released after serving
    their regular time, people who had refused to do public works.
    For example, an insurance agent who was
    called up by the Gestapo, by the National Socialist Workers'
    Party, to work on the Putsch project.
    And he would say, well, gee, I can't do that.
    I'm this insurance agent.
    They'd say, oh, is that right?
    And then go, there was in the concentration camp.
    Social Democrats, Catholics, some Gypsies, Jews
    who had committed political crimes, Jews who'd committed
    what was called Rasenschande--
    sexual intercourse with a non-Jewish woman--
    homosexuals-- it was against the law in Germany, still is.
    A homosexual was just arrested, period.
    That was it.
    Didn't need any political excuses.
    They were there.
    So were approximately 10,000 non-Jewish German prisoners
    and 2,000 Jews who had been there before Kristallnacht.
    And now, we were brought in.
    And within the first week or so, approximately 10,000,
    just under 10,000 Jews were brought
    into Buchenwald, imprisoned there, from, I'd say, ages 14
    to around 80.
    In Berlin, they picked up a whole school
    with all the students and everything,
    put them in the camps.
    And the confusion was indescribable.
    There was a regular camp with regular buildings,
    permanent buildings made out of wood.
    Some were made out of brick.
    And then they had separated a portion of the camps
    with barbed wire.
    And in that separate portion, they
    had put up five barracks, 1A through 5A.
    That was the numbers.
    And those are the barracks that we had to live in.
    And the barracks had shelves.
    And we were living on those shelves.
    And I can spend probably a couple of days telling you
    what went on in that camp, but it wasn't very pretty.
    But almost immediately after the people got in,
    they started releasing people.
    Who were the first to be released?
    People who had immigration papers and were ready to go.
    They had people who had the American visa
    and the American shipping tickets
    in their pockets who could go two days later,
    three days later.
    They were sent out.
    And some people were sent out--
    maybe, we're not sure yet, or released--
    because they were German officers or German soldiers
    during the First World War.
    That may have been the reason why my father was
    released after two weeks.
    And so these continued.
    My cousin was there.
    My uncle was there--
    Max Weil and Adolf Weil, my cousin Max.
    Adolf Weil was released in early December, was sick already,
    went home, died the next morning.
    Max Weil went home, was able to emigrate in January '39.
    I also met a cousin of my father's
    whom I'd never met before and never
    met again, Julius Fackenheim, who had a son, name of Emil.
    There's somebody you know, is Emil Fackenheim.
    Emil Fackenheim is one of the most famous rabbis and sages
    in Jewish religion, used to teach a Toronto rabbi.
    Now he's in University of Jerusalem, very famous,
    written book after book after book, a philosopher.
    Well, Julius Fackenheim is his father.
    He was a lawyer from Halle.
    And I met him in the camp very briefly, by chance.
    You meet people by chance, because there's
    no way to make an appointment.
    There's no way to say, we'll meet at 12 o'clock
    under the clock.
    There's no clock, first of all.
    There isn't, and you don't have a watch.
    You mill around you.
    Work up to here in mud.
    Sometimes, you get something to eat.
    Sometimes, you don't.
    Have a meal with this guy.
    He says, isn't your name, you know.
    Yeah.
    I'm Julius Fackenheim.
    OK.
    He was released sometime in the middle of December.
    About a week later, my name was called on the PA system,
    report to Department 1.
    And if you had an order to report to Department 1,
    that meant you go to the administrative section, which
    is OK.
    They ask you to report the Department 2, that was trouble.
    That was the Gestapo.
    It's almost like the military in all the world.
    S2, G2 is intelligence, S1 is administration,
    S3 is personnel, S4 is supply and service.
    Same way in the German Army and the German SS.
    This was Department 1.
    I reported to Department 1.
    An SS officer took me into a room, had me sit down on
    a chair, very comfortable.
    He says, do I know a Julius Fackenheim?
    I said, yeah.
    They said, do I know where he is?
    I said, well, he was here.
    But as I recall, he was released about a week ago.
    Oh, is that right?
    I said, where did he go?
    I said, well, I assume he went back to his hometown of Halle.
    I said, well, why?
    What do you want to know?
    He says, well, we found a savings account passbook
    that belongs to him.
    And we got to return it to him by registered mail.
    And we want to be sure it gets to him.
    Now, this is the same fellow who would have had no hesitation
    to beat Julius Fackenheim to death
    or to shoot him over something, for an infraction of the rules.
    But now, Fackenheim was out of the camp.
    He was back among the civilian population.
    And they found his property.
    And his property had to be returned to him in good order.
    Ordnung was signed.
    That's a German mind at work.
    Strange, very strange.
    It's crazy, you know.
    So he thanked me.
    And he told me to go back to the other camp.
    And I went back to the camp.
    That was it.
    That was December.
    Well, things went along.
    People were released.
    People were released.
    Finally, there were about, oh, I'd say 200 or so
    left out of the 10,000--
    200.
    And at that point, they decided to liquidate
    that separate camp.
    It was barracks 1A through 5A.
    I might say that up to then, I had lived in that suit
    that I'd wore when I was arrested.
    I had not once, not once taken that suit off me,
    or washed, or showered, not once.
    I was living in the underwear, in the shirt,
    in the suit that I wore when I was arrested for three months.
    So they moved us into the regular camp.
    For the first time, we were given showers.
    And those were real showers.
    This was not fake.
    And we were not concerned.
    We wouldn't have been concerned.
    Wouldn't have known anyway when they
    told us to go into a shower.
    They'd given us showers.
    And they cut off all our hair, all our body hair that we had.
    We had lice.
    It was miserable.
    And we were given uniforms, regular concentration camp
    uniforms-- stripes and the star, yellow and red,
    in our case, which meant Jewish political prisoner,
    and numbers.
    And for a while, we were left alone.
    When all the rest of the camp were assembled in the morning
    and then march out, outside the camp,
    and work there, at various jobs, we were left alone.
    We'd walk up and down, taking our time,
    tell stories, play games.
    I remember one time, an SS officer came down.
    He played with us.
    But then somebody had an idea of all those Jews,
    they should be doing some work.
    And so they started to take us out and put us to work.
    So you had not been working before, even when
    you were in the other barracks?
    No, no, never.
    Didn't work.
    So for three months, you hadn't been working?
    No.
    We would line up in the morning for roll call.
    We'd line up in the evening for roll call.
    We'd line up for other occasions.
    For example, one evening, we were just
    having our, quote, "dinner," unquote,
    which was a salt herring and a piece of bread,
    no tea, when we were told to line up for a roll call.
    And we lined up.
    And there was a big gallows in the middle
    of was the parade ground.
    And they hung a fellow in full view of everybody.
    He and another buddy of his had escaped the camp in July,
    I believe, that year.
    And his buddy was discovered after a big search
    about a day later and killed right then and there.
    And this fellow escaped to Czechoslovakia.
    And after the Anschluss in September '38,
    he was discovered in Czechoslovakia, brought back,
    was tried for murder, and he was hung in front of it.
    And we were standing there eating our bread.
    You get very cold.
    All you worry about is didn't happen to me.
    So we were working.
    We were working, digging stones out of the ground, digging
    with our bare hands, digging tree stumps out of the ground,
    sometimes with tools, sometimes without,
    carrying bricks from one place to another.
    They were building barracks there, military barracks.
    And we were kind of helping along
    with some of the raw material.
    So this is after they decided that they
    should put you to work?
    That's right.
    And then in late November--
    late February 1939, the camp was put in a quarantine.
    I found out later that two days before, the camp
    was put in a quarantine and was completely locked up.
    No one was allowed in or out of the camp--
    SS, police, nobody.
    The camp was sealed off.
    Two days before that, the Gestapo
    had sent a release order to the camp to get me out,
    because my parents were able to not just get a ticket
    to go to Shanghai, but for me, because the Gestapo wanted
    to see a visa-- they want to see a visa, again, the German mind,
    got to be a piece of paper.
    My parents got me a visa to go to England,
    went to the Gestapo of February the 13th or something
    like that, 1939.
    And the Gestapo said, oh, great.
    Your son will be released.
    That's my order.
    But a few days later--
    a few days earlier, the camp was put in a quarantine.
    And we were told that typhoid fever had broken out.
    And we were inoculated once a week for three weeks, shots,
    subcutaneously in the chest, and worked, and worked.
    And in April, April the 12th, 1939, the quarantine
    was lifted.
    And out of the last 212 November Jews--
    that's what we were called, the November Jews--
    I was among 144 to be released and sent home.
    As far as typhoid fever is concerned,
    it wasn't typhoid fever.
    In the '50s, and I read that in Time Magazine,
    documents were discovered.
    They were conducting germ warfare experiments
    on the prisoners.
    And one of the experiments had jumped the controls
    and was threatening to wipe out the camp.
    That's why the camp was put in the quarantine.
    We knew there were two blocks, two buildings in the camp,
    which were surrounded by barbed wire.
    And we knew that people would only be taken into that
    but not come out.
    Rumors were going around.
    But we didn't know what was going on.
    Later on, I found out, the middle '50s.
    They were conducting germ?
    Germ warfare experiments on prisoners.
    And so on April the 12th, I remember very well,
    when our block führer, an SS officer name of Martin Gerhard
    Sommer, made a speech.
    He says, now, you're going to go home.
    And you can remember, nothing happened here in the camp.
    You weren't injured.
    You weren't sick.
    And don't tell anybody about what you saw in the camp,
    or what happened in the camp, because if you do,
    no matter where in the world you are, we're going to get you.
    We're going to kill you.
    That was his farewell speech to us.
    Again, in 1957 or '58, and I have that at home,
    Time Magazine published a story under the heading
    of "The Monster," story of an SS officer in concentration camp.
    He was such a brutal guy, such a cruel guy
    that even his own colleagues couldn't stand it anymore.
    He would do things like taking the prisoner,
    rubbing his back raw with steel brushes,
    and then pouring acid over it, then
    put the body under his bed.
    That's the kind of guy he was.
    So he was finally sent to the Russian front,
    got injured there, became paraplegic,
    went underground, and then surfaced after the war
    to claim a pension and get married.
    He was arrested by the German police, was tried of--
    charged with 1,000 murders, was convicted of 38 murders,
    and was sent to life imprisonment--
    Gerhard Martin Sommer, that guy.
    And I heard last year from Buchenwald,
    which is now a museum, that he died about two years ago.
    But I know where he died, whether he died in prison
    or not.
    That was the guy I had-- there's still
    his picture in Time Magazine.
    He looked just as bad sitting in a wheelchair
    in civilian clothes as he looked in uniform, just a bad guy,
    pathological.
    Anyhow, I was released April the 12th, came home April the 13th.
    Took all day to process us and to get us on the trains.
    Tell you an interesting story there, something that, again,
    shows the difference between the bad Germans
    and the good Germans.
    We were taken from Buchenwald to Weimar railroad station
    on buses.
    We were taken through the rear entrance of the railroad
    station, because we looked disreputable.
    Our clothes had been deloused--
    not pressed, but deloused.
    We had our hair cut off.
    We looked terrible.
    Some of us were starved.
    Some of us were not, just looked bad.
    So they didn't want us to show this to the general public.
    And we had instructions.
    You do not use a D train, which in Germany is
    a very fancy sort of train, almost like an express train.
    You do not go into dining rooms.
    You do not go into dining cars.
    You only go to regular, what they call a Personzug, which is
    a third class type of a train.
    OK.
    And when you come home, you report to the Gestapo
    immediately before going home, before going to your house.
    You go to the Gestapo headquarters and report.
    OK, OK.
    So they dumped us in the back of the railroad station,
    in the back entrance.
    And we stood around there.
    And we didn't know what to do.
    And when a railroad police officer shows up, uniform,
    gun on the side, and immediately,
    in a Pavlovian reaction, we took our hats off
    and snapped to attention, because that's
    what we learned in the camp.
    When an SS officer comes, you take your hat off,
    stand at attention.
    Fellow took one look at us, he says, gentlemen, he says,
    you're not up there anymore.
    Relax.
    Put your hats on.
    He says, I've just called the Jewish community.
    They're going to be here in 15 minutes, half an hour,
    with coffee and cake.
    In the meantime, anything that we can do for you, just
    let me know.
    Says, also, he says, you were told that you could not
    use the express train, you could not do this,
    you couldn't do this.
    From now on, the railroad police is in full charge
    and has the responsibility of getting home.
    If I tell you you go on a D train
    or you're going to a dining room, that's where you go.
    And we thought the earth would open up and swallow the sky.
    It didn't.
    That was a decent chap.
    And sure enough, a few minutes later, the guys
    came in with rolling trains of coffee, and cake,
    and I don't know what to eat.
    And I went home in a D train.
    It was three of us in that compartment.
    And there were a bunch of soldiers, German soldiers,
    sitting in the same compartment.
    And they wanted to know where we were coming from,
    because we looked kind of-- you know,
    didn't look like a regular civilian.
    And we were kind of noncommittal about that because we
    didn't want to say we come from Buchenwald, you know.
    And he says, oh, you probably come from the--
    what do they call it--
    labor service.
    There was a sort of a National Socialist labor service type
    of thing, where German Jews, German youth--
    not Jews, but youth were sent out to do public works,
    get a little training, and go back to their families,
    you know.
    Oh, you're probably from the labor service.
    Yeah, yeah, yeah, labor service.
    And we arrived in Frankfurt.
    From Frankfurt, I changed trains, went to Wiesbaden.
    Got off the train in Wiesbaden and said to myself,
    well, I've got to report to the Gestapo first thing.
    But how do I do that?
    I mean, this is Wiesbaden.
    And Wiesbaden at about 11:00 at night,
    you roll up the sidewalks.
    Are they going to be there?
    Are they going to be awake?
    Let me ask a policeman.
    Next thing, I didn't know where to find a policeman.
    So I walked from the railroad station
    to the main police headquarters and rang the bell.
    Nobody answered the door.
    So I said, well, I'll go home and see what happens.
    I went home on foot, dragging my little suitcase.
    And my mother and my father were there.
    They already moved out of our apartment.
    They were ready to go, packed, everything ready to go.
    Was supposed to leave on the 18th.
    This was the 13th.
    My mother said, yes, the Gestapo had told us
    to report to them immediately.
    They're worried about you already, why, where did you go?
    Worried about you, mind you.
    So she threw a coat over her nightgown, and called a taxi,
    and she and I drove down to Paulinenstrasse,
    which is where the Gestapo was located then.
    And while she waited in the taxi, I went up to the door.
    And I rang the bell, and rang the bell, and I rang.
    And finally, a guy opens up.
    [MUMBLING] I said, well, I'm name so-and-so.
    And I'm supposed to report in.
    I've come back from Buchenwald.
    And I have orders to report to you immediately.
    And he said, I see that.
    I had my papers from Buchenwald.
    Oh, you're the guy we've been waiting for.
    I said, yes.
    He says, well, you could have waited till tomorrow morning.
    You're two months late anyway.
    I said, well, I had orders to report immediately.
    I didn't want any trouble.
    He says, well, yeah, I guess you're right.
    Come back tomorrow.
    He says, I'm tired.
    How do you explain this?
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    People are people.
    They're not machines.
    They're not always as bad or as good.
    But how do you explain this attitude,
    about the concern that you were two months late--
    I don't know, the guy was asleep.
    --that they keep you in a concentration
    camp for five months.
    I mean, this can drive you crazy.
    Kafka.
    Yes, it's Kafkan, yeah.
    Kafka, that's what it is.
    And the policemen at the railroad station.
    How do you explain him?
    He knows what's going on just up the road in the camp.
    Of course he does.
    And then he's so nice to you guys.
    I mean, how do you make sense of this?
    The more and more you get stories out of Germany, out
    of Austria, out of Poland of nice Germans, of nice Austrian,
    nice-- there were not many, but there were enough.
    There were enough.
    There were plenty of them.
    They just didn't speak up.
    But you call him nice, I mean.
    This guy was nice.
    As far as I'm concerned, there was a fellow
    who could have made our life miserable in the railroad
    station because he had the authority.
    He was a police officer.
    Somebody didn't take his hat off fast enough,
    he could have picked up the phone and had him rearrested.
    But he didn't say anything.
    And he called us gentlemen.
    But he tolerated what was going on right down the--
    Exactly.
    --the way.
    He was scared.
    And you still would call him nice.
    He was nice to you.
    What can I do?
    I don't know.
    The question is, there, how do you--
    It happens here too, you know.
    What?
    It happens here too.
    Yes.
    Except it's people that don't say anything
    if a Black is beaten up in Bensonhurst.
    People would say, well, it's Bensonhurst.
    It's not the west side of the park.
    It's Bensonhurst.
    What do you expect?
    It's Brooklyn, it's the Bronx.
    What do they expect?
    Me in Westchester County, why should I worry about it?
    Same thing, same attitude.
    I've gotten very philosophical about it.
    You've what?
    I've gotten very philosophical about that, you know.
    I'm interested in that process.
    You can get mad, but get mad--
    don't get mad, get even.
    That's probably the better attitude.
    Well, tell me about that, about how
    you developed that approach.
    Well, over the years, you know, I mean, I guess in those days--
    to give you an example, when the war was over,
    somebody asked me, do you want to go back to Germany?
    Would you ever consider going back to Germany?
    This was in 1945, '46, after I found out what went on.
    That's when we learned in Shanghai.
    We learned what was going on in Germany, the 6 million Jews
    killed, my relatives killed.
    I said, the only way I ever go back to Germany
    is with a machine gun.
    And I believed that.
    But I've gone back to Germany twice.
    Without it.
    Without a machine gun.
    And I met Germans who were very nice.
    And I met Germans who were maybe not so nice.
    We can take hours.
    I went to the opera last year because I had opera tickets--
    free, no charge.
    We saw the Bolshoi from Moscow, putting on Mussorgsky play,
    a Mussorgsky opera.
    Gorgeous.
    That was the only time I was uncomfortable in Germany.
    Why?
    All those German opera-goers our age and older in smoking
    jackets, and tuxedos, and whatnot--
    very formal, was that the guy who took my aunt
    to the railroad station?
    Was he one of the guys?
    Was he in the Gestapo?
    The people who are now 45-50 years old, what the heck?
    You could, you know.
    I was mothered, fathered while I was there by two
    Germans, two teachers.
    One teacher is in the gymnasium and teaches French--
    teaches Latin, and Greek, and ethics in the gymnasium where
    I used to be.
    The other one teaches French there, both of them Germans.
    She told me-- she's, my guess is, early 40s.
    He may be a little older.
    That time, they were living together.
    In the meantime, they got married.
    [GERMAN],, both of them, meaning PhD, higher-level teachers.
    She told me that she found out, to her horror,
    that her father was in the SS.
    And she is horrified by it.
    And she's absolutely devastated.
    She was born in Peru or Chile, I think.
    Her father was a German abroad, but he was in the SS
    where he was in that foreign country.
    So he was probably not physically involved
    in the killing of Jews because he was always
    out of the country.
    But he was in the SS.
    And the idea, it horrified her.
    This is the type of Germans you meet today.
    You meet others.
    You meet the people who are members of the party
    called the Republikaners, the Republicans, which
    in Germany is a right-wing, neo-Nazi group, antisemites.
    Of course, today, they don't play
    much in antisemitism today.
    They are anti-Turks, and anti-Arabs,
    and anti-foreign workers.
    They've always got to be anti-something,
    always got to look down upon somebody.
    It's always got to be a level, like in the concentration camp,
    there were levels, gradations, or classes.
    Lowest class, of course, was the Jew.
    But then there were the Gypsies.
    And then were the homosexuals.
    They were all different levels.
    And the highest level in the camp was the criminal,
    the guy had committed some crime--
    thief, murder, whatever it was-- and then was
    put in the concentration camp.
    They were the guys who were the trustees because they
    were considered to be, politically, at least, correct,
    if nothing else.
    And they were the kapos.
    They were the guys who were running the Jewish section
    until sometime in December 1938.
    One evening, the camp commandant made a speech over the PA
    system, said, they had discovered
    that a coffee and alcohol smuggling
    ring had been operating in the camp that smuggled coffee
    and alcohol into the camp.
    And those things were strictly prohibited.
    And it was SS men who were doing it.
    SS men were doing it.
    And he said, they had been arrested.
    And they were now prisoners in the camp.
    And they didn't live very long either.
    And as a result, he trusted the Jews more than the Germans.
    This was an SS officer.
    And from that point on, every Jewish block
    had its own Jewish supervisors instead of German supervisors,
    because they didn't trust the Germans anymore.
    Again, Kafka.
    You know?
    How do you understand, how do you explain it?
    You don't explain it.
    All you can do is report it.
    This is what happened.
    Let me ask you about what happened
    to you during that time.
    You left in November a young worker--
    not a worker per se, but a young man who was working.
    Right?
    Who's trying to make a career.
    That's right.
    Trying to develop a career.
    And five months later--
    you're just taken out of that world.
    And you're put into, transferred into a nightmare, world end.
    Right.
    And you come out of that five months later.
    What happened to you during that five months?
    Physically?
    Physically and psychologically.
    I don't know that much happened to me psychologically.
    When you're that young--
    I was 18, 18 and 1/2-- you're very resilient, usually.
    I'm not saying this as a generalization.
    I'm not saying everybody is resilient.
    Some people break down.
    I didn't.
    And I was glad to get out.
    I was happy to get out.
    Within days, I was on the high seas leaving Germany, going
    to China, to a new life, whatever that meant,
    hoping to get to Shanghai for just a few days
    so then I would go to America.
    It turned out to be eight years, not just a few days,
    but looking forward.
    And while I was scared at times while I was in the camp,
    I mean, this is the place where you never knew in the morning
    whether you'd see the evening sun go down.
    And you knew that.
    But you get even used to that.
    You lived with that.
    And it's never bothered me.
    I've never felt-- and so many people do--
    guilty that I survived and others didn't.
    I've never felt hesitant about talking about it.
    I've talked to the students at University California about it.
    I've done this sort of thing before, not
    in this formal setting, and not in a televised setting.
    But I've talked about it.
    And I've written about it.
    And I've never hesitated to tell people if they ask me.
    Well, other people kind of--
    they can't verbalize it.
    They can't bring it out.
    So it may be-- and I'm my own psychiatrist and probably have
    a fool for a client--
    it may be that I had built a capsule around me.
    And I'm not looking too deep into me.
    And that may be why I was able to survive,
    why I was able to make it, and to think about it,
    and not to shy away from the thought.
    Well, specifically why as a wife there
    was that I had a girlfriend.
    And she had gone to Argentina just a few days earlier.
    In fact, the day that she left-- she was Polish, Polish parents.
    The day that they left for France and then for the ship
    to Argentina, that day, the Gestapo
    came to arrest them and take him back to Poland.
    This was the attempt by the German government
    to arrest all the Polish Jews in Germany.
    They did.
    anybody who was Polish, and was shipped to the Polish frontier
    and pushed across the frontier.
    And a lot of these people didn't quite survive that,
    because it was bad weather.
    And the Poles wouldn't take them.
    The Germans wouldn't have them.
    They were sitting there in this no man's land.
    And we were very much in love.
    And we had-- you know, this was a--
    today, I don't know whether it would have lasted,
    but in those days, we were going to get married, that's it,
    and live forever, and happily, and all that, and grow old
    together.
    And I just had this one idea.
    I got to see that girl again.
    I've never seen her again.
    But then I'm in correspondence with her.
    She's married.
    She's a grandmother.
    I'm a grandfather.
    But you kept correspondence?
    Well, for a while, I wrote her, of course, love letters
    and all that.
    She wrote back.
    And then I got my Dear John letter in Shanghai.
    She'd met somebody else.
    And I suppose it was OK, a very nice chap from Berlin.
    And they got married.
    And then I stopped correspondence.
    Not much point there.
    And we had a brief exchange of letters after the war,
    when I was in the United States, through my cousin, Max,
    in Middletown, who was in touch with her.
    And that stopped.
    And then a couple of years ago, I
    had a call from a chap name of Newman in Reno,
    who-- a long distance call, who said
    that he had a letter from an old friend of his in Argentina.
    He used to live in Argentina for many years.
    And she wanted to take up some contacts with our friends
    and whatnot from Wiesbaden.
    And so he wanted to know, could he give her my address?
    I said, what's her name?
    He said, well, Esther Doris Goerdner Schneider.
    Do I know her?
    I said, yeah, I think I do.
    And I gave her my address.
    And we established our correspondence.
    And we've been in touch off and on ever since.
    But that's one of the things that kept me going,
    the idea I had to get out to see that girl again.
    Not that girl, but my girl.
    You see, and these things have to hook onto somebody
    that gives you hope, because if you give up hope
    in a situation like that, that's it.
    You might as well walk up to the electrified fence.
    You're probably not going to get there, because they shoot you
    before you hit it.
    But that's what a lot of people did.
    A lot of people committed suicide.
    By running for the fence?
    Well, all kinds of ways--
    cut your wrist, go to the fence, or try to go to the fence,
    and you go through the control zone,
    and the guys from up there yell at you, halt, pop, pop, pop,
    pop, pop, one more body.
    So quite a few people passed on that way.
    Now, where were we?
    Physically, how did you change?
    How were you-- what happened to you physically?
    I don't know that I changed physically.
    You must have lost weight.
    No, I was just going to come to that.
    I went into the camp and I weighed 118 pounds.
    This is German pounds.
    You add about 10%, that gives you the American weight.
    Because the German pound is 500 grams.
    And American pound is 453.
    So I went in the camp, weighed 118 pounds, came out,
    I weighed 130.
    Now, how do you explain that?
    Very simple.
    The food we got was mostly water.
    And I was just waterlogged.
    You know, it was mostly liquids, you
    know, soup, soup, soup, soup there, a huge pot of water.
    And they throw in some--
    whatever it is, pork, or meal meat,
    or some second or third-grade stuff
    that had been not passed by the health department.
    And they sent it to the camp.
    And they cook a meal out of it.
    And if you're hungry, you eat it.
    And so all that you had there was mostly liquid.
    And that builds up.
    So did you lose it right away?
    I lost it fairly quickly.
    That's one of the funny things, you know.
    I weighed more when I came out than when I went in, because
    in those days, while we were not well-fed,
    they did not really starve us, either.
    And we were not in starvation rations,
    as happened much later.
    We just didn't get either good food or plenty of it.
    But it was-- well, you could exist on it.
    And the chefs, if you call them that, in the camp,
    were ex-Viennese chefs from good restaurants.
    And they knew how to cook.
    About the only bad meal I remember
    was the first hot meal I got two days after I got to the camp,
    that all of us got.
    And it whale stew--
    whale stew, very fatty stuff.
    And we were starved.
    And we just scarfed it down.
    And I managed to get another helping.
    And they call it nachschlag, and another helping.
    Oh, was great, you know.
    Next day, the whole camp came down with diarrhea.
    The whole camp?
    The whole camp, all of us.
    And there were no latrines.
    And this is the clothes we lived in for three months.
    And very interesting, I got a book the other day,
    Bürger auf Widerruf, from Lübeck Institute.
    These are biographical, autobiographical stories,
    or stories told by children of people, Jews--
    German Jews from 1780 to 1945.
    There's one piece in it by a fellow
    named Hans Berger from Wiesbaden who was in Buchenwald.
    He describes his experiences in Buchenwald.
    Hans Berger, by the way, happened
    to be my boss at that factory where I worked.
    I knew him very well.
    He disappeared in France.
    He and his whole family disappeared in France
    after the war.
    He was in the camp for three months.
    And he reports this mass of people
    milling around and so forth.
    And he came across a man lying on the ground, semi-conscious,
    and six other Wiesbaden people standing around him.
    And that was Dr. Fackenheim.
    And it was my father.
    And I didn't know that story.
    And he had in his pocket, Berger had in his pocket
    a little bottle of mouthwash.
    And he was able to get my father lips wet
    and let them smell in the mint.
    And he got him revived.
    And they were able to get him up again.
    And they were holding up, because this
    was roll call time.
    They were standing there four hours.
    And all around him, people were collapsing, and yelling,
    doctor, doctor, doctor.
    And my father, as weak as he was,
    would go around, drag himself around with that bottle
    of mouthwash, which he got from Berger, to try to help people,
    until the SS came and told him to knock it off,
    or they would beat him up.
    But I didn't know this story, because I
    was separated from him.
    I just happened to get that thing.
    And how did I happen to get it?
    The historian at Buchenwald sent me the story.
    He typed it up.
    He copied it out of the book, gave me the name of the book,
    and I wrote to the Lübeck Institute.
    And for $20, whatever you say, sent me the book,
    which is published in Germany by the Lübeck Institute--
    small, small world how you find out these things.
    Berger went to Belgium and France later on,
    lived there during the war, and disappeared somewhere
    during the war, don't know where.
    His brother, Fritz, I saw 20-25 years ago down
    in Southern California.
    He ran a dog obedience training school.
    I don't know whether he's still alive.
    I just saw him once when I was down there
    on some professional activity.
    So somehow you went through this experience.
    I went through the experience.
    And I wouldn't say I wasn't touched by it.
    But I also picked up a philosophy
    so that you can't get too excited about anything,
    because I'm living on borrowed time.
    By rights, I should have died, cashed
    in my chips, whatever you want to call it,
    age 19 or 18 and 1/2.
    What's more, this was not the only time
    the Germans tried to kill me.
    We haven't started talking about Shanghai yet.
    Oh.
    I didn't realize that you were hunted in Shanghai.
    I wasn't hunted.
    Let me tell you the story.
    In the summer of 1942, at that time,
    Shanghai was already completely under Japanese control.
    Shanghai, up to the outbreak of the war in the Pacific,
    was a town in which a part was occupied
    by the Japanese naval landing party.
    Another part was the international settlement,
    which was run by the international consulates.
    One part was called the French concession, which
    was run by the government of France,
    was under French control.
    And about 18,000 to 20,000 Central European Jews
    had managed to get to Shanghai and were living there,
    were existing there.
    Not all of us were living, many of us
    were just existing hand-to-mouth, day by day.
    Some people had a business.
    Some people had nothing.
    We had newspapers.
    We had theater groups.
    We had synagogues, plenty of them.
    We had homes.
    We had hospitals.
    I was working in one of the committees that
    helped refugees get established to help them
    interface with authorities.
    We had loan funds, interest-free loan funds,
    similar to the Hebrew Free Loan Society here in San Francisco.
    They help people establish a business.
    War broke out, all of that collapsed.
    All of a sudden, the Japanese took over the whole town.
    Nothing much happened to the Jews for a while.
    And in the summer of '42, and we didn't know that
    until after the war, in the summer of '42,
    Otto Meisinger was sent from Tokyo to Shanghai.
    Otto Meisinger had the rank of colonel in the SS.
    Before he was assigned to the job of chief of police
    at the Tokyo German embassy, he was the Gestapo chief in Warsaw
    responsible for the deaths of about 100,000 Jews.
    And he had earned himself the nickname the Butcher of Warsaw.
    He was sent to Shanghai with a couple
    of people, one fellow, name of Neumann, and one fellow--
    I forget his name.
    But I'm sure you have a book in your library
    that has the story.
    And he was meeting with that section of the Japanese naval
    police or navy that was in charge of Jewish affairs,
    because there were about 26,000 Jews, 6,000 Russian Jews,
    18,000-20,000 European Jews, about 800 Iraqis.
    And there was a Jewish affairs section.
    And he met with this section.
    And he said, look, he says, those Jews,
    you can't trust them.
    They'll give you nothing but trouble.
    Look what happened to Germany.
    He said, I'll tell you what you do.
    Since you got a couple of ships in the harbor, why don't you,
    coming Rosh Hashanah in the fall,
    surround the synagogues, arrest them when they come out,
    take them to the ships, take away their clothes,
    tow the ships out to sea, cut the ruddy cables,
    and let them drift there.
    And a couple of weeks later, send out a gun boat or two
    and sink the whole mess--
    simple, clean, no worries.
    If you don't like that, take them up to the salt mines
    up the Yangtze River.
    Mr. Neumann from Bergen-Belsen can tell you
    how to feed them so that they're good for maybe two or three
    months of good, hard work for the Japanese Empire.
    And that'll take care of them, also, a natural way.
    If you don't like that idea, I got another one.
    We'll establish a concentration camp for you in a little island
    down the Huangpu River.
    And you take them over there.
    And you let them volunteer for medical experiment,
    like the nervous system resistance
    to pain, stuff like that.
    Mr. Neumann from Bergen-Belsen, he's an expert on that.
    He can tell you how to do these things.
    The meeting broke up without any decisions.
    And one of the men at the meeting
    was a Japanese vice consul, named Mitsugi Shibata.
    And he went to a little park that
    was nearby the meeting place.
    I'd been there many times.
    And he sat on a bench.
    And he said to himself, have we, the proud Japanese people,
    sunk this low to listen to this sort of stuff, let alone
    to entertain the idea?
    Is this what we're fighting the war for?
    We?
    Terrible.
    And then he sought out some Jewish friends that he had.
    This was Friday afternoon.
    And he said, look, we got to have a meeting right away.
    Something terrible is going to happen to you.
    We got to have a meeting.
    We got to discuss it.
    And the man he talked to said, well, that's all good and well,
    but it's Shabbos.
    And we can't have a meeting now.
    He says, but it terrible stuff.
    Says, I'm sorry, it's Shabbos.
    We got to wait.
    No, you can't wait.
    He said, I'm sorry.
    So he found another fellow who was not quite a shomer Shabbos.
    And they had a meeting.
    And he gave the word to the Jewish leadership
    in Shanghai, to some of them, anyway.
    And they got busy.
    It took six or eight weeks, at great danger
    to all the participants, till they finally
    got word of that plan to the foreign minister in Tokyo.
    I believe his name was Togo or Tojo.
    And that man sent a wire to Shanghai.
    He said, keep an eye on the Jews, keep them under control,
    but don't touch them.
    One Japanese vice consul saved the life of 26,000 people.
    If he hadn't been there, I wouldn't be here today.
    The story is told in two books.
    One is Japanese, Nazis, and Jews by Dr. David Kranzler.
    The other book's called The Fugu Plan by Rabbi Marvin Tokayer
    and a woman, name was Swartz--
    S-W-A-R-T-Z. She is apparently the journalist who helped him
    write it.
    Tokayer was a rabbi in Tokyo.
    And he reads, writes, speaks Japanese fluently.
    And he found those documents in the foreign ministry archives
    after the war.
    I know it took-- where Kranzler got his story.
    If you don't have those books, they should be in your library.
    I would imagine they are.
    The Kranzler book, I don't know whether it's still in print.
    Tokayer book was issued in second edition.
    He was in San Francisco two or three years ago,
    spoke at Temple Emanuel.
    I heard him there.
    And I talked to him.
    And I saw him again in New York at a meeting of Shanghai Jews.
    So you've read an awful lot about that time--
    Oh, yeah.
    --the Germans and the Japanese?
    That's right.
    See, one of the things that's been happening as the Holocaust
    period is recorded is very little has been written
    about the Shanghai experience.
    Yes, OK, well, tell me, after you got back from Buchenwald,
    your family left five days later, right,
    to go to Shanghai.
    Or it was you were leaving on the 18th or something.
    Yeah, that's right.
    That's right.
    And I mean, your mother must have been just in ex--
    Well, we were all uprooted, just like anybody else.
    But to see you all right, I mean, that's a humongous thing.
    Well, yeah, I mean, I remember ringing the doorbell.
    This was about 1:30, 2:00 in the morning
    after having been on a train all day, and all afternoon,
    all evening.
    Ring the doorbell.
    And my mother yelled, out Walter, is that you?
    And my father fell out of bed, you know, he got so excited.
    And then they came to the door.
    And of course, the usual reception.
    And my mother, I says-- the first thing I said is look,
    I have instructions to report to the Gestapo right away.
    This was, again, my nature of doing
    things, which I am told to do, and do
    right now, and not later.
    And she said, yes, that's right.
    They told us they were worried about you--
    her words.
    And they told us to get you over there right away.
    I'll call a taxi.
    And so we went over there, the story I told you.
    Yes.
    That's strange-- well, it's not strange, of course.
    Did you learn to be so obedient to authority in the camp too?
    Not so much being the authority as if I have a job to do,
    I'll do it.
    It's not a question of--
    it's more inner-directed.
    It's not because someone told me to,
    but I know this has to be done.
    I might as well get it done.
    What about in--
    And now, of course, in Germany, if you're told to do something,
    you better do it.
    This is even true today.
    I mean, even in a nice sort of way,
    when we were over there, my cousin
    and I were over there together in Wiesbaden last year.
    And he's a kind of-- he's a bachelor.
    He's never married.
    And he's always in correspondence with people.
    And so he's been in correspondence with the chief
    of the German, call it--
    it's [GERMAN].
    It's the German CIA, Bundeskriminalamt, which
    is headquartered in Wiesbaden.
    Sometime early in '89 or late in '88,
    a German police officer or two were
    killed when one of those radio bombs
    blew up, the kind of thing that was
    used to blow up that airline, the Pan American Airline.
    They found one of those radios.
    And somebody messed around with it.
    And police officers got killed.
    So my cousin wrote a letter of condolence
    to the head of the German CIA there.
    And so he was invited through that fellow.
    And he was in Wiesbaden.
    He had invitations to come visit him.
    And the guy received him and said, Mr. Weil,
    nice to see you.
    Let's take a look at your dossier, we know all about you,
    and pulled out his file.
    And he knew all about him.
    That's German police.
    They know all about him.
    They had him down in their little list, friendly,
    of course, and over in ha-ha-ha, but efficient.
    What happened to your brother during this time?
    Was he taken to the camp?
    No.
    No, my brother was 16 at the time.
    And he wasn't taken to the camp.
    This was all very individual.
    It varied from city to city what happened.
    In the city of Aachen, which is on the Rhine.
    It's north of Cologne, as I recall--
    not so good in geography anymore as I used to be.
    In the city of Aachen, every Jew there
    was arrested by the Gestapo was put
    through a rigorous physical examination by a physician.
    And one man was told that he had diabetes.
    And he said he didn't know about it.
    They says, oh, yes, we checked your urine.
    You have diabetes.
    Better go home and see a doctor about it
    and do something about it before they send people off
    to concentration camp.
    Of course, he wasn't sent off, because he was sick.
    It varied.
    In other cities, they would walk in with guns and shoot people.
    A little town further up on the Rhine,
    they walked in, a husband and wife in bed,
    and Gestapo came in, lined them up, and shot them.
    Didn't even arrest them, didn't say what they're doing,
    just shot him out of hand.
    It varied.
    So your brother was never in camp?
    Was not arrested, was not arrested.
    He was somewhat traumatized.
    He hid under the bed all day long until he finally
    relaxed a little bit.
    All day long when?
    When I was arrested.
    Oh, yeah.
    Yeah.
    And that's what I was told later on by my mother.
    And I wasn't there.
    And we all went to Shanghai together.
    Tell me about that trip.
    How long did it take to get to Shanghai?
    Trip took a month.
    We left Germany on the 18th of April, Bremerhaven,
    and arrived in Shanghai on the 19th of May.
    So it's a month and a day.
    We went from Bremerhaven to Rotterdam,
    where we got off the boat.
    We went to Birmingham, England--
    sorry, Southampton, England, where we were not
    allowed off the boat.
    British were worried.
    We went to Genoa, Italy, where we were allowed to walk around.
    Then we went to Port Said, through the Suez Canal,
    to Aden, to Bombay, Singapore, Manila.
    In Singapore, we were allowed off the boat.
    In the Philippines, we were allowed off.
    Hong Kong, we were allowed off.
    And Shanghai, we were kicked off.
    That's it.
    And there we were with $2.50 in our pockets.
    $2.50?
    10 marks, that's all we were allowed to take out.
    So what happened to you?
    The money that we had on board the ship, which we could spend
    on champagne, cigars, photo equipment,
    anything else was locked up on the ship, sent back to Germany.
    On board the ship, we were rich.
    Why would they allow you to take your money to China?
    Oh, the Germans, this--
    you we're not allowed to take out anything
    except 10 marks in cash.
    And if they felt like it, they would
    send whatever you had left after that to whatever
    your foreign address was.
    And so we were fortunate in getting some of our money
    out afterwards.
    It was about six, eight months later,
    we got a transmittal through one of the British banks
    of what was left of our very, very small fortune.
    We didn't have much of a fortune to begin with.
    But then there was a big fine was levied on all the German
    Jews because of the murder in Paris
    by Herschel Grynszpan, which caused the Kristallnacht
    events.
    And then whatever we took out of Germany in the way of clothes,
    we had to be 100% duty on that.
    And my father took out his equipment.
    And we had to pay 100% on that.
    And so your money shrank in a lot
    of what you might call, quote, "legal," unquote, ways.
    And then what was left, including the money that
    was sent back from the unused money spending money
    on board the ship was sent back into blocked accounts.
    And those blocked accounts were transferred to us, finally,
    at the rate of $0.06 to the dollar-- six
    pfennig to the mark.
    So my parents got, I don't know, 100 or 200 pounds,
    English pounds.
    And that was it.
    So what happened to you when you got off the boat in Shanghai
    with $2.50?
    Well, we got off the board.
    We were received.
    We were received by the committees
    that were established there.
    We were put on trucks, taken to camps, refugee camps,
    and boarded there overnight.
    And then immediately, my father got busy
    and found a room that he rented for my mother.
    He didn't want her to be in a camp, a camp-type atmosphere.
    This was not a concentration camp,
    but it was strictly a refugee camp, pretty bad.
    And so we put her into a room in the neighborhood of the camp.
    And then we were in that camp for a couple of weeks.
    And my father was able to rent an apartment
    in the same building that the camp was in,
    the Embankment Building at the Soochow Creek.
    Building's still there.
    I was there a few years ago.
    And got the apartment.
    And we were able to get some furniture out
    of Germany, also very fortunate, and set up housekeeping there.
    And he set up--
    Did that furniture come on the ship, you mean, with you?
    It came on a separate ship.
    And where did your father get the money
    to rent the apartment?
    I don't know.
    It didn't cost much.
    Was-- the whole project was owned
    by a Jew, British subject, a Baron, that Sir Victor Sassoon,
    who died in California many years later.
    Sir Sassoon, a very wealthy man, owned a lot
    of industry, owned breweries.
    He owned cotton company, on and on.
    Later on, I worked for him.
    And so we were able to get the apartment.
    And I don't know what the financial affairs were.
    And so he set up-- my father set up a small practice.
    See, all I had to do there is go to the city council,
    say I'm a physician, here are my qualifications from Germany,
    here's my MD certificate from Würzburg.
    And he said, OK, you're in business, no tests, no nothing.
    Doesn't mean that he was making a lot of money,
    because there was a lot of competition.
    And almost every other refugee from Germany
    was either a physician or a lawyer--
    maybe not quite so much, but this is what happened.
    And then I got a job in a laundry,
    which is where I started my accounting career,
    Chinese laundry.
    True.
    True.
    Cathay Laundry, I was accounts receivable clerk.
    Learned to run an adding machine, 10-key adding machine.
    Learned Chinese.
    Really?
    Oh, yeah.
    I had a deal with the truck drivers, the coolies,
    they called them, who delivered laundry and dry cleaning,
    and collected the money, or brought back the signed bills
    so that we would record them in accounts receivable.
    And I would check their money.
    And I'd count it, and make sure it tied up,
    and everything dovetailed.
    And if it didn't, I would have to discuss it with them
    in Chinese, of course, and use the proper adjectives
    and conversational gambits.
    For example, if the guy didn't bring back the right change,
    you would discuss with him the question whether his parents
    were ever married.
    It was a circumlocution for calling him a bad name,
    you know.
    And he would then call me something.
    And this was all in good fun.
    You know, but this is how I learned Chinese.
    So you didn't take lessons?
    You just--
    No, you learned it.
    And the other language that I didn't know,
    which I needed very badly there was English.
    I had learned French.
    I had learned Latin.
    I had learned Greek.
    And when my girlfriend was ready to go to Argentina,
    I learned Spanish with her.
    But English, I never learned.
    So I come to a country in which English is the main language
    outside of Chinese, of course, outside of French
    in the French concession of Shanghai.
    And so I had to learn English.
    How did you learn English?
    I borrowed detective stories.
    I listened to the radio and detective stories.
    Of course, you want to know how it came out,
    and you got to read.
    And that's how you learn it.
    And I happened to be fairly fast.
    Listened to the radio whenever I could.
    And I got the language in to speak it.
    And of course, at my job, I had to speak English.
    There was-- nobody understood German there.
    The people that I worked with were
    either Portuguese, or Russian, or English, or Chinese.
    So if I didn't speak any of those languages,
    just German wouldn't help me a great deal.
    So I learned some Russian.
    I learned some Portuguese.
    I learned some English.
    I learned some Chinese.
    And then I've learned a lot of English.
    And about six months after that job, I became very ill.
    I had amoebic dysentery, one of the problems
    that you pick up there.
    I was in the hospital for six weeks, lost my job.
    Went back to the fellow who had got
    me the job in the first place, a local business, name
    of Paul Komor, who ran the committee that
    helped people get settled.
    And he said, why don't you go to work for me?
    That's what I did.
    And I worked for him first as a sort of a gofer.
    And very quickly did somebody discover
    that I spoke better English than anybody else in the shop,
    because all the people working there
    way in from either Berlin, or Vienna, or Germany someplace,
    Austria.
    And so I was promoted upstairs to Komor's private offices
    as personal secretary--
    number two personal secretary.
    He had another personal secretary.
    And I was writing for the newspapers.
    And I was helping people go to the police
    and go to the consulate.
    I acted as interpreter.
    And I worked there as an accountant.
    We had a thrift shop helping refugees sell their goods
    for a reasonable price so they wouldn't be taken advantage of.
    And I was keeping the books for that.
    --Constance, so you can give her a date, location,
    and personnel.
    It's the 13th, isn't it, Jeff?
    14th.
    Oh, 14th.
    You're right.
    I was scheduled for the 13th.
    Oh, all right.
    The 14th.
    Wow.
    14th of June.
    What a mind.
    Any time.
    OK.
    My name is Constance Bernstein.
    I'm talking to Walter Frank.
    It is July 14, 1990.
    It's June 14.
    Sorry.
    It's June 14, 1990.
    You're ahead of yourself.
    And we are at the Holocaust Center in San Francisco.
    Right.
    OK?
    Yes.
    Well, now, Walter, the last time I saw you,
    we were just leaving Germany.
    I think you had just come back from the--
    you had been taken away.
    I was in a concentration camp.
    Right.
    And for how long?
    How many months?
    I was in the camp for five months.
    That's right.
    And you just come back.
    And your family was getting ready to--
    well, they went to China--
    Leave.
    --to get on the boat.
    So can you take us from there?
    I'll take it from there.
    And I just want to put in one correction of something
    I had said the last time.
    I mentioned the Bundeskriminalamt
    in Wiesbaden, the German police office, national police office.
    And I said, that's the equivalent of what we have
    in this country called the CIA.
    I got my letters mixed up.
    It's the equivalent of the FBI.
    It's a law enforcement agency that covers the entire Federal
    Republic of Germany.
    And I suppose today they cover both Germanys.
    But with that correction, let's go back to--
    this is April of 1939.
    Right.
    And I just want to--
    I remember very distinctly what you said about the policemen
    at the railroad platform--
    Oh, yes.
    --and how he treated you like a gentleman.
    I thought that was--
    well, to come out of the experience
    and to still be able to tell the good guys from the bad guys,
    or--
    Well, it was, in a way, a shock to come out of the very rigidly
    structured environment of Buchenwald--
    and rigidly structured is probably a euphemism for what
    goes on there--
    Right.
    --and to stand on the platform or one
    of the back rooms of the railway station in Weimar
    and find a man in uniform with a swastika
    on the uniform say, oh, don't worry about those guys.
    You do what we tell you.
    And we have made arrangements with the Jewish community
    to bring coffee and cakes for you.
    Right.
    And don't take your hats off every time I say something.
    And just relax.
    You're among friends.
    Among friends, he says.
    I don't know whether he used the word "friends,"
    but he just treated us as nice people, and was a nice person.
    Yeah.
    And we just weren't used to that sort of thing.
    Anyhow, we went home.
    I think I told you about that instant in the train
    where three or four of us, all looking like vagabonds
    in our clothing, unpressed clothing, and our hair
    shorn off, and we were accompanied--
    or not accompanied.
    We were in company of a bunch of German soldiers
    who were also traveling on the train.
    And they wanted to know where we were coming from.
    And we were a bit scared of--
    nervous, maybe, about telling them
    we were coming from a concentration camp.
    And so we said, well, it's some sort of labor detail.
    Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the voluntary labor service,
    the Freiwilliger Arbeitsdinst.
    They understood that.
    And that was fine.
    And then they didn't bother us anymore.
    And yeah, we went from Weimar straight through to Frankfurt,
    where most of us got off.
    All of us got off the train, even the ones
    that had to go on, because you had to change trains there.
    It was a major transfer station.
    Was this a whole big group of you from your hometown?
    The total-- no, from my hometown, I was the only one.
    I was the only one going to Wiesbaden.
    Oh, you mean after you came back from the camp?
    That's right.
    Oh, right.
    But I think we can jump to-- we had talked about your mother
    seeing you, and how--
    Right.
    --she reported to the police, and everything.
    So let's take the story up to where you and your family
    are leaving.
    How was the boat?
    OK.
    I'd come home on a Tuesday, I believe, or Wednesday--
    Wednesday.
    And first thing I had to do was buy
    a whole set of new clothing, because nothing fitted me.
    I put on weight, which was a bit unusual for a concentration
    camp.
    Later on, that didn't happen.
    It was mostly water, though, that I eventually
    lost from the constant soups they fed us.
    And we all were packed.
    And on the following Monday, we got on a train in Wiesbaden,
    went to Bremerhaven in Germany, northern Germany,
    and then boarded a ship on Tuesday the 18th
    of April, 1939--
    my father, my mother, my brother, and I.
    We did have one more passage, one more ticket
    for my mother's sister.
    But she insisted that she would want
    to go to the United States.
    Her husband had died--
    I told you that last time-- on the day
    after he came home from concentration camp.
    Her son had already gone to the United States,
    was already here.
    And she didn't want to go to Shanghai.
    She wanted to go to America.
    Trouble is, she never made it.
    She was deported on May 23, 1942.
    And we don't really know what happened to her.
    But there we were, the four of us.
    At the last minute, my father was pulled out of the line
    by the Gestapo and body searched for money
    that he might be wanting to smuggle.
    At the time, the law was that you could not take out more
    than 10 marks per person, which was the equivalent of about
    $2.50.
    But he had no money on his body.
    He wasn't the kind of guy who would
    do anything that would be a violation of law,
    even if it was an unjust law.
    He just wouldn't do that.
    And so he came back.
    And we boarded the ship.
    And the ship left Germany.
    It was a German boat, German crew, German captain,
    with one Gestapo on board.
    And there was a purser.
    And the boat left and went to Rotterdam as its first stop.
    Was there are a lot of Jews who were leaving on that ship?
    There were several hundred refugees on board the ship.
    There were other people--
    Germans, there were Swedes, Swiss, Americans, some British.
    It was a mixed crew.
    We were traveling first class.
    That was the only passage we were able to get.
    It's not that was our choice.
    We wouldn't have gone--
    we would have gone steerage too if that had been available.
    But the only thing that was available
    was first class passage.
    And we were living for the next four weeks
    like first class passengers.
    Oh, yes.
    We had a lot of money that could be spent on board the ship.
    But anything that wasn't spent at the end of the trip
    was sent back to blocked accounts in Germany.
    So we were living high on the hog--
    champagne and wine every day.
    My father smoked expensive cigarettes.
    I shot roll after roll of film.
    I had my camera with me.
    Whatever there was in the way of luxuries that you could buy,
    we did, because we had the money.
    And it wasn't-- it was worthless because it would be sent back
    to Germany.
    We couldn't use it in Shanghai anyway.
    And you couldn't smuggle it off?
    Oh, no, you couldn't.
    All you did was sign for things.
    And it was charged against that account.
    And whatever wasn't used up went back to Germany.
    Eventually, some of the money was transferred to Shanghai,
    but at the rate of about $0.06 on the dollar,
    which doesn't mean anything.
    So we went to Rotterdam.
    We were able to get off the boat, all of us refugees.
    We went to the Jewish organization in Holland.
    This was before the war.
    This was still an independent country.
    And we got a lot of advice, and a lot of handshakes,
    and good luck, fellows.
    And then we went back on board.
    We went to--
    I believe it's Southampton, England next stop.
    British wouldn't let us off the boat.
    They didn't trust that.
    They were afraid we might stay in England.
    Next stop, Genoa, down past the coast of Spain, Portugal,
    past Gibraltar, onto Genoa.
    Genoa, we were allowed off the boat.
    Interesting city, we walked around a little bit,
    went back in the boat.
    Next up was Port Said and the entrance to the Suez Canal.
    There, again, we were confined to the boat.
    And we went through the Suez Canal
    to Aden, again, confined to the boat,
    to Bombay, again, under British control.
    They wouldn't let us off the boat.
    And in Bombay, it was Singapore.
    Singapore was the first port we were allowed off.
    And from Singapore to Manila, again, we visited Manila,
    walked around there-- very hot, very sunny, very bright,
    our first real taste of the tropics--
    to Hong Kong, where they, again, permitted us to visit Hong Kong
    and travel around.
    And some of the organizations--
    Jewish organizations in Hong Kong took us under toe
    and showed us around.
    And we went up to Victoria Peak, which is a typical visitor's
    place to go.
    Any time you go to Hong Kong, you go up to Victoria Peak--
    and then to Shanghai.
    Now, on the boat, it was interesting.
    The captain was a very decent guy.
    And what he could do to make our life easier,
    to make this last fling, as it were, nice for us,
    he did, in a quiet sort of way.
    For example, the rule was that in a German movie house,
    the Jews had to sit separate from the Germans.
    Didn't say where, but they had to be separate.
    So what did he do?
    We had movies every other night in the main lounge.
    And so the Jews were sitting separately from the others,
    right in the center.
    And the Germans, who had to be separate from the--
    Aryans, they sat way over on the side, not so good seats,
    you know.
    You're better off sitting in the center.
    Swimming-- the Germans and the Jews were not
    allowed to swim together.
    So all right, Germans swim from 6:00 in the morning till 11:00.
    And the Jews swim from 11:00 to 4:00 when it's nice and warm.
    You're right.
    You know, and of course, who was there to protest?
    There was a certain amount of cabin-hopping going on,
    which I, at my tender age, didn't quite
    understand at the time.
    But I heard about it.
    And I know now more about it.
    And so the captain called one of the Jewish passengers
    and said, look, he says, if this has to come to my knowledge
    officially, I have to make an arrest
    and take the person back to Germany.
    And you know what that means.
    So you better tell him to cool it,
    you know, the purser Gestapo.
    And so everybody cooled it.
    It's the kind of guy he was.
    I heard much later, oh, I'd say nine or 10 years ago
    from somebody I met who was an editor of US News and World
    Report that he also knew the captain, that he also traveled
    on that boat, and in another--
    Time?
    --on another voyage, in another context.
    That was an American.
    And he heard that the boat was interned
    when the war broke out--
    not interned, but taken by the Japanese when the war broke out
    and then converted to a troop carrier,
    and then freight carrier, and that the boat
    was sunk by either American or British bombers.
    And the captain went down with the boat.
    And he also confirmed that he was a very nice, decent German,
    someone that Rabbi Schulweis would call a Righteous Gentile.
    And the entire crew acted that way.
    They were international people.
    Sure, they were Germans, but they
    were used to international business, international trade.
    And to them, this business of race,
    and Aryans, and iron didn't mean anything.
    Didn't mean anything.
    The only "bad," in quotation marks, guy on board
    was the purser.
    So we arrived in Shanghai on May the 19th, a nice trip, a month
    and a day.
    And having been first class passengers on board the ship,
    we got off the boat and were poor as church mice, all of us.
    You had $10 or something?
    10 marks, not dollars--
    10 marks.
    But each of you, the four of you, all together had 10 marks?
    Together, we had-- they had the equivalent of about $10.
    There were trucks waiting for us that
    were operated under the aegis of local committees, which
    we weren't familiar with.
    It was hot.
    It was muggy.
    We were loaded on the trucks.
    Our baggage was taken to a go-down.
    That's not an English word.
    It's an Indian word.
    And it means a warehouse.
    And we were taken to a refugee camp.
    We were taken to a camp in the Embankment Building, which
    was a large apartment house on Soochow Creek.
    And the camp itself was in the basement.
    And my father looked around and immediately made
    an effort to get my mother out of that rather
    miserable facility.
    And so he was able to rent a room for a few Chinese dollars.
    Didn't cost much, but that much money we had.
    And he put her into that room.
    So she at least was spared this business of living in the camp.
    And the three of us-- my brother, myself, my father--
    we lived in that camp for a little while.
    And then he--
    Was it full of other Jewish refugees?
    Yeah.
    It was a camp for Jewish refugees.
    What was happening was that every week, hundreds
    of refugees poured into Shanghai--
    altogether in a period of, I'd say, a year or so, maybe
    a little more, 18,000 refugees.
    And of course, they had to be housed someplace.
    And so the local people, local Jewish organizations,
    organized a number of refugee camps on Chaoufoong Road,
    on Ward Road, and the Embankment Building, on Alcock Road,
    all over Shanghai, particularly in the area called
    Hongkew, which was in the eastern part of Shanghai.
    And they had warehouses.
    They had factory buildings that were empty.
    And they just set up beds-- double-decker, triple-decker
    beds and very primitive.
    But it was a place to be, a place to be taken care of.
    And then they set up kitchens to pass out food
    so that people had something to eat.
    They established hospitals, first aid stations.
    A lot of the refugees that came in were physicians.
    My father was.
    And so they had more physicians than patients in some areas.
    Oh, really?
    Lots of physicians.
    They had more lawyers than courts too, lots of lawyers
    there.
    And so people first went into these camps.
    Some of them, like my parents, were
    able to get out using their initiative,
    using what little resources they had.
    My father was able to rent an apartment in the same building
    that the camp was in on the third floor, a--
    what would you say-- two-room apartment,
    a bedroom and a living room.
    The living room became his office.
    And there was a kitchen and a bathroom.
    And it was a nice balcony.
    It was a comfortable place.
    And fortunately for us and for him, our furniture arrived.
    The Gestapo permitted it to go out.
    And it came through.
    And with the exception of some medications
    and some medical equipment that the Gestapo, we assume,
    removed from the stuff, almost everything
    arrived that we had sent out.
    So we had beds.
    We had room.
    We had furniture.
    We had desks, and chairs, and whatnot.
    My father was able to set up an office.
    He had himself cards printed in English and Chinese.
    He had a very friendly Chinese gentleman translate his name
    from Dr. Willy Fackenheim to [? Fou ?] [? Verlain-- ?]
    [? Fou, ?] the last name, Verlain, Willy.
    And it meant something very nice in English.
    That was a very tricky thing too.
    A lot of people had their names translated into Chinese
    for business purposes.
    But if you didn't get the right translator,
    you came out with someone that didn't sound too nice.
    But here, it's gentle and charming
    or something, whatever it meant.
    And he set up shop.
    He went to the city council, the municipal council in Shanghai,
    which was in charge of the particular area
    we were living in.
    And they said, OK, you're a physician.
    Where did you graduate?
    And here are my documents--
    Würzburg, Berlin.
    OK, you're in business.
    Sign here.
    And that was it.
    There were no tests, no examinations, no fees, even.
    And so he was able to start a very small practice.
    It never amounted to much, but he made a few bucks.
    We registered with a committee, which
    was called the International Committee
    for the Organization of European Immigrants in China.
    Didn't use the word Jewish.
    European immigrants, because there
    were a number of people who weren't
    Jewish who were also coming out, who were half-Jewish.
    They were Protestants, or Catholics,
    or married to non-Jews.
    And so the committee avoided the term
    Jewish-- this particular committee.
    We registered with them.
    And I was introduced to the honorary secretary, a Mr. Paul
    Komor.
    Komor was a Hungarian who had lived in Shanghai practically
    all his life.
    There was some connection with us in the sense
    that his mother had died and was buried in Wiesbaden,
    where we were from.
    And so of course, that already made us a little closer.
    He had been deported from Shanghai
    after World War I as an enemy alien,
    because after World War I, Germans and Hungarians
    were on the same side.
    And the British had won the war.
    And so he was deported.
    But now, he was on the right side of the law.
    He was friendly with the British.
    And in fact, he was the Hungarian honorary consul
    for a while with import and export.
    And he decided to help immigrants at the time.
    And he'd set up this committee, which
    was financed by a British Jew named Sir Victor
    Sassoon, committee to help people to find jobs,
    to sell their belongings through a thrift shop,
    to contact, to interact between refugees and the city council,
    or the foreign consulates if they needed it, or the courts.
    He set up a conciliation board to mediate disputes rather
    than having them go to courts--
    Chinese courts-- have it mediated by European--
    German, Austrian lawyers.
    He set up a milk fund, and a coal fund, and a school fund
    to collect money for purchase milk, which
    was very expensive and rare in Shanghai, to purchase
    coal for the winter, to send kids to school.
    In fact, eventually, he organized a school,
    separate Jewish school.
    And so I went there.
    And he arranged for me to get my first job in a Chinese laundry.
    It was my beginning of my accounting career.
    I was an accounts receivable clerk.
    And I started to learn English.
    I learned Chinese.
    I learned a little Indian.
    I learned how to say good morning in Indian.
    That's the only thing I learned.
    I learned some Portuguese, some Spanish,
    and had a smattering of languages.
    You've got to understand that Shanghai
    was a rather polyglot place.
    I guess--
    International community.
    --it was an international community.
    It was a culture shock to get there, to be there,
    to arrive there, to go into a city in which the street
    signs were in English, and French, and in Chinese.
    In the French part of Shanghai-- they
    have what they call the French Concession--
    it was-- everything was French.
    The uniforms of the police were French.
    And in the international settlement, it was all English.
    And in parts of the international settlement,
    called Hongkew, which I mentioned earlier,
    that had been occupied by the Japanese
    since the Sino-Japanese war in 1937,
    and there, a lot of things were Japanese.
    The Chinese spoke 100 different dialects.
    And there were Indians, Hindus, and Sikhs
    who spoke their language, practiced their religions,
    and had their customs.
    Chinese had their customs.
    British-- there were maybe 1,500-2000 Germans in Shanghai,
    maybe 6,000-8,000 Russians, I don't know how many
    Portuguese-- large Portuguese community.
    It was completely different.
    This was something that we'd never even dreamt of, you know.
    You've got to remember that going
    to Shanghai for a German or a German Jew was like today--
    it was less--
    Immersed.
    --conceivable, then, for you to today think that maybe one day,
    I'll go to the moon, because we've been to the moon.
    Sure, Marco Polo went to China--
    meshuggeneh-- you know, crazy.
    Who goes to China?
    And there we were, in China.
    And so I got my job in the laundry and learned Chinese.
    I talked to the coolies every day, the truck drivers.
    Called them coolies-- that delivered laundry
    and dry cleaning, and collected the money for it,
    or brought back the signed receipts for people who paid
    on an account once a month.
    And I would check the money.
    And I would check the receipts.
    And god help this poor guy if that didn't match,
    if things didn't balance.
    I would start discussing with him his parentage--
    all in good fun, you know.
    I'd question whether his father and brother were ever married,
    for example.
    It was all in Chinese.
    Really?
    Is that the Chinese way?
    Oh, yeah.
    Oh, yeah.
    This is customary.
    This is what you do with it.
    I mean, you probably do it in English in a rough environment.
    And this was a rough environment.
    These were very rough and tough people.
    These were lower economic circles, workers.
    They work by the sweat of their brow.
    So this would be the worst thing you can say about him,
    that his parents weren't married?
    Of course.
    Of course.
    And then he would call me something bad, you know.
    And we'd laugh.
    And then OK, go away.
    See you tomorrow.
    And tomorrow, he brought the right sum of money.
    And I praised him.
    And this is how you learn Chinese.
    How old were you at the time?
    I was 19.
    That's a very sophisticated skill at 19.
    Well, yeah, it's something different, you know.
    This is not the kind of hoi polloi, high society
    type of environment.
    And we had a lot of fun there.
    And you learn things.
    You learn questions that you shouldn't ask.
    For example, you never asked, even in fun,
    a Chinese what he thought the weather was going to be like.
    Why?
    You never did.
    And there's a very good reason for it.
    And I saw it again confirmed the other day in--
    of all places, in a science fiction magazine,
    Isaac Asimov's science fiction magazine.
    Had the same story, which confirmed it.
    And what happens is that in Chinese mythology,
    the only one that knows what the weather's going to be like
    is a turtle.
    Right.
    And if you ask a Chinese, well, do
    you think it's going to rain tomorrow,
    you are suggesting he's a turtle.
    That's an insult. You don't call him a turtle.
    I mean, you don't go around calling people pigs
    in this country, you know.
    And there, to call him a turtle is an insult.
    And you didn't do that even in fun.
    I mean, I might question whether his parents were married--
    or his grandparents, for that matter.
    But you never ask him what the weather's like.
    One is fun.
    And one is joking around.
    One is kidding.
    One is pulling the leg.
    The other one is a slap in the face.
    And you learn it very quickly.
    I remember somebody who came back to this business of cards.
    His name was Picard.
    And he had his name translated to [? Pigou. ?]
    And that was a very dirty word in Chinese.
    And he didn't know that.
    [? Pigou. ?]
    [? Pigou. ?] I didn't know what it meant.
    I forgot it.
    But [? Pigou, ?] that's close to Picard.
    That is in an Austrian, I believe.
    Anyhow, I worked for the Chinese laundry for six months.
    And during that period, I picked up my first tropical disease.
    My father was working as a physician.
    My brother got a job with an import and exporter,
    a Russian gentleman in Frenchtown.
    And I picked up my first disease--
    maybe dysentery.
    And it was very hard to diagnose.
    The symptoms are very simple.
    You have diarrhea.
    And you have to take the specimen
    to the laboratory in a hurry, because the bacteria
    die very quickly, even when they cool off.
    And so by the time you get it to the laboratory, a lab,
    they didn't find anything.
    They finally diagnosed it in December of that year.
    And I was immediately taken to Shanghai General Hospital,
    where I spent the next four weeks.
    I mean, here, you get a couple of shots,
    maybe you spend three days in the hospital and four days
    at home, and you're fixed up.
    It's antibiotics.
    Those were before antibiotics.
    They had just their conventional medications, which were slow,
    and which were more palliative and symptomatic in nature,
    rather than actually treating the disease.
    And so I was in Shanghai General Hospital for four weeks.
    Got out, rested up at home another three weeks.
    And then I got a letter from a Cathay Laundry,
    my employer, saying, well, too bad,
    but we had to fill the job.
    And thanks, but no thanks.
    So I went back to Mr. Komor and said, what do we do now?
    And Komor said, well, let's see, you speak English pretty well.
    And can you write English?
    I said, oh, sure.
    He said, well, OK, why don't you work for me?
    And I got a job for him as a gofer for that committee.
    Now, you go here, you go there, you go for this,
    you go for that.
    Third day in, he sent for me.
    And he had a letter to the editor, which
    was one way to communicate with the public-- letters
    to the editor in the North China Day News.
    And he had drafted some.
    And he said, why don't you write it out all the way
    and see what it looks like?
    And the thing was an appeal for funds for the milk fund.
    Rather than calling in a journalist
    and have him write it up, you wrote it up yourself.
    You sent a letter to the editor.
    And the editor would pick it up.
    And sometimes, even writing in a trailer to go along with it.
    This was a small town sort of thing, you know.
    Sure, there were millions of people.
    But it was an enclave surrounded completely by China.
    And it was pretty much like a family.
    So I wrote that up.
    And I took it upstairs to him.
    And he looked at it.
    He says, well, why don't you go and work
    for me as my secretary?
    So I was quickly promoted to his second secretary.
    He had one secretary, a lady from Vienna,
    a [? Liese ?] Altura.
    And I became her assistant.
    So we were the secretaries working right in the anteroom
    to Mr. Komor's office.
    So I made a quick career there.
    And from then on, I wrote most of the stuff that
    went into the North China Daily News-- appeals
    for funds and this kind of thing.
    And also, on a more general nature,
    he would write a letter to the editor
    complaining about the symphony concert or whatever it was.
    And I would write an answer to that
    under another assumed name.
    I see.
    We'd kind of work together, you know.
    For example, he might complain about recorded symphony
    concerts, records, because it isn't like a live concert.
    And I would write back, saying, yeah,
    but in records, nobody coughs, and nobody rustles the papers,
    and so forth.
    So we had a good time doing this sort of thing.
    And along that way, I learned how to improve my writing.
    He would always critique it, and help me, and straighten out
    to be sort of an editor.
    And I learned a lot from him.
    We became very close friends.
    The friendship lasted until he died in Santa Cruz, California
    here.
    Oh, really?
    A short while after I came here to California,
    he left Shanghai with his wife.
    His two sons were already in the United States.
    And he retired in Santa Cruz.
    And my wife and I visited him many times.
    We came all there.
    And when she died, we stayed friends all the way through.
    He was a wonderful guy.
    The committee that I worked at had an interesting policy
    as far as salary is concerned.
    Everybody got the same pay, didn't matter what you did.
    The lawyer on the conciliation board,
    the gofer, the fellow who sorted the mail,
    there was only one difference--
    Mr. Komor.
    He got nothing.
    Oh, my goodness.
    No pay.
    He devoted practically his whole day to running that committee.
    He would run to his office in the morning for a few hours--
    this is his own office--
    to do some importing-exporting.
    He would be there in the afternoon for maybe half
    an hour.
    And he spent practically all his time, seven days a week,
    on that committee.
    And what were the thanks he got when
    the Japanese took over the city when the Pacific War broke out?
    He was arrested by the Japanese.
    And they claimed he was a spy, and he stole the money,
    and all kinds of stuff.
    And they finally couldn't prove anything so they let him go.
    But he was a--
    if there is such a thing in Judaism as a saint--
    That was him.
    --he was it.
    Yeah.
    He was really respected by all the people that worked for him.
    We had lawyers for the conciliation board.
    We had accountants.
    I became an accountant again.
    I was running the books for the thrift shop.
    There was a store we had rented on Nanking Road, where people
    would bring their merchandise they had,
    silver, and some of the things they
    were able to get out of Germany--
    maybe a camera, or maybe a set of books,
    chinaware, anything at all that had value.
    And rather than throwing it on the open market, where
    they might not get anything, bring it to the gift shop,
    either sell it outright, or put it in on consignment.
    And the gift shop would take, what is it,
    30-35% of the sales price, which was enough to pay for the rent,
    and for the staff, for advertising.
    And any money that was left over would go back
    to the committee for its operations for milk, coal,
    school, whatever it was.
    And so this is one way to help people get as much as possible
    out of their belongings when they were trying to sell it.
    So I worked for the committee for a number of years.
    I got to meet a lot of the other refugees who were registering
    at the committee.
    Practically everybody had to register at the committee.
    If you didn't register, you weren't in Shanghai.
    And so if you wanted to be in Shanghai--
    there were other committees operating there.
    There was one committee that dealt primarily
    with food and housing.
    And they were probably our largest sister organization.
    They dealt with the camps.
    They dealt with the kitchens.
    They dealt with hospitals for refugees.
    And our committee was more an administrative type thing--
    the courts, the consulates, the city council,
    and a few charitable type operations, like milk fund,
    coal fund, school fund.
    And then eventually, we built a school
    with the help of a man name of Kadoorie--
    Sir Horace Kadoorie.
    He financed a lot of that.
    And that school ran classes.
    I don't know now how high they went.
    But they started with the first grade.
    I think they went through sixth or eighth grade.
    I'm not sure.
    The committee also had-- my committee,
    the one I worked in, also built a creche and a kindergarten
    and operated that.
    What about your brother, and your father, and your mother?
    How were they surviving?
    Well, my father continued to work as a physician
    and make whatever little he made there.
    He built up a small practice from people
    in that apartment house.
    The apartment house had, I think,
    eight floors and something like 20 apartments on each floor.
    It was a fairly big operation.
    And we picked up friends there.
    And people would come in, mostly people
    in that immediate neighborhood, some refugees.
    He was not in the center.
    And the apartment was not in the center of where
    the refugees were living.
    It was at the edge of it, the edge of Hongkew.
    Most refugees, most of the 18,000 people, were in Hongkew.
    Some were in Frenchtown, some were
    in the international settlement.
    But the bulk of them were in Hongkew.
    And we were at the edge of that.
    And so they didn't come to us.
    And there were so many physicians.
    After all, the competition was very, very stiff.
    My mother kept house.
    She was a housewife.
    She was doing the cooking, and cleaning, and looking after us,
    and making sure we were in clean clothes, and so forth.
    She was doing the shopping.
    Give you an instant out of her life--
    she was shopping.
    And of course, when you did go shopping
    for food, or for anything, for that matter,
    you had to bargain.
    There were no fixed prices, you see.
    You ask, how much is this?
    X dollars.
    And you offered 1/4 of that.
    And then you after a while, you get the price.
    And so she went shopping one morning for food.
    This was in February.
    And she's arguing about the price of vegetables, or rice,
    or whatever it is-- $0.09 a pound.
    And she offered $0.05 a pound.
    And well, no, $0.09 a pound.
    And out of there, it started to snow in winter.
    And the man immediately dropped the price to $0.08 a pound
    without her asking for it, you know.
    She said, what's going on?
    He says, oh, fresh snow in new year--
    very good luck.
    Everything in the market went down about 10%.
    Everything, automatic, so the customers
    had to get used to that idea.
    I would buy, and I remember that very vividly--
    I went to buy a pair of shoes on Nanking Road,
    which the main business street.
    Still is today.
    It's sort of like the--
    I'm trying to think--
    Market Street of Shanghai.
    And you walk into a store there-- in those days,
    at least--
    show windows, there's no glass.
    You walk into the store.
    The stuff is all over the place.
    There's no salesman in the way.
    Can I help you, sir?
    You look around.
    You walk around.
    You pick this.
    You pick that.
    You look at it.
    It looks like my size.
    You try it on.
    And once you decide on what you want,
    then you go to somebody and buy it.
    And so I found a pair of shoes that I liked.
    And it fitted me.
    And they had a Chinese price tag hanging on it.
    And so I went to the nearest clerk, called him there.
    Maybe it was the owner.
    And I said, how much is this pair of shoe?
    I spoke pidgin English.
    How muchie this pair of shoe?
    This is not really good English, you know.
    You wouldn't ask that in San Francisco.
    But you ask them in English?
    You ask them in pidgin English.
    How muchie?
    Sort of Indian English, Chinese, combine.
    How much is this pair of shoe?
    Oh, this is very, very, very good
    shoe-- really, really good shoe.
    This pair of shoe is at $22--
    $22.
    I said, oh, that's too much.
    Too much, man.
    Turned around, and put them down, and walk away.
    Comes and says, oh, no, no, no, no, no.
    $21 and 1/2, $21 and 1/2.
    That's down $0.50.
    Well, I said, no, no, too much and walked out the store.
    He comes running after me, dragged me back in the store.
    And back and forth, back and forth.
    We get it down to $16.
    Then I pointed to the price tag, which I had read before.
    And I said [CHINESE].
    I spoke-- switched to Chinese.
    This says $11.
    [CHINESE]
    You know Chinese?
    Oh, sure, sure.
    I know Chinese.
    [CHINESE]-- $10.
    Paid $8 for these shoes.
    Now, if I had paid $22 for these shoes, he would have felt bad.
    He would have felt like stealing.
    I mean, he expected me not to pay $22, even if he asked.
    It's how you start.
    And the whole fun in this business is the back and forth.
    You know, I asked $22.
    And he offers $10.
    And I was thinking and so forth.
    And you meet somewhere in the middle.
    Well, why did you start off in pidgin English?
    Because I wanted to see what happened, you see.
    I didn't want to say, I'm going to pay you $11 or $10.
    I made like I was stupid.
    I'm foreigner, after all.
    What do I know from Chinese?
    I was wearing a European suit.
    Mind you, this was before I was able to buy a suit there--
    European cut.
    He could tell that I was not a local person.
    I would be stopped on the street by rickshaw coolies offering me
    a ride.
    What would they say?
    Want you go Berlin?
    Want you go Berlin?
    I mean, they knew also.
    I mean, they weren't dumb.
    They may be rickshaw coolies.
    But they knew that I had a European suit on.
    Want you go Berlin?
    Want you go Vienna?
    Vienna?
    Really, really cheap.
    You say, how much?
    $3, $3, you know.
    To Berlin?
    Well, I mean, probably, if he had
    known where it was, he would have charged more-- $5 maybe.
    And so this is what you did.
    You bargained for everything, except streetcars.
    That was fixed price, you know.
    Postage stamps, they was a fixed price.
    Drinks in the Hongkew--
    what is it-- Shanghai Club, I think it was called--
    Shanghai Club.
    And it was the largest bar in the world.
    That was the big boast of it.
    And I never was there.
    I never seen the place.
    I couldn't afford it.
    That was fixed.
    But everything else, you bargained for.
    So did you enjoy being in China?
    Yeah.
    You get into the emotional aspects of it,
    the first day I walked around Shanghai, I said to myself,
    I'm not going to stay here.
    This place is filthy.
    I mean, the streets were filthy.
    The air smelled bad.
    I don't want to go into a lot of detail
    of what the air smelled like.
    But it didn't smell good.
    I walked down the street-- this was the first or second day--
    and there's a police patrol coming up
    the street with their guns out, not just in their hands,
    but like so.
    Said, my god, what's going on?
    Is there a robbery?
    Is there a shooting?
    No, they were just walking like this
    because if somebody fired at them
    they didn't have time to draw their guns.
    That's the kind of city it was.
    Talking about the Wild West, this was the Wild Far East.
    And since we had not only paid for our tickets
    to Shanghai, but under the law in Germany,
    under the rules in Germany, we had to pay for our tickets
    back to Germany just in case we weren't
    accepted by the port of destination,
    which happens sometimes--
    you remember the St. Louis, the boat, left Germany
    and then no country wanted to accept it?
    They went to Cuba.
    Cuba didn't, said no.
    Went to the United States, well, they sent them back.
    So in case Shanghai wouldn't accept us
    for any reason at all, the Germans
    wanted to be sure that our passage back to Germany
    was paid for.
    Of course, once you go back to Germany,
    that's it, back to concentration camps.
    So we had money.
    And so I said to my parents, you know,
    I have this visa to go to England, which you don't have.
    And maybe I ought to go back to England.
    After all, we have our patch.
    We checked with the [INAUDIBLE],, which was a shipping
    company, a German company.
    And they said, no, you can't do that.
    You can't use that money to go to England,
    because then, what happens if they don't accept you
    in England?
    Then you've used up all your dough.
    So I never did leave Shanghai to go back to England.
    I stayed there till I finally left for the United States.
    But my first impression was this is no place--
    terrible.
    It was hot.
    It was muggy.
    You were constantly perspiring, particularly
    since we were wearing these heavy European suits.
    And the work I was doing, I didn't particularly
    care for that.
    This was not what I was--
    really what I had planned for my life.
    You had planned to go to the university and study?
    Become a physician.
    This was a culture shock, future shock,
    you might call it-- culture.
    And this was a culture shock that affected a lot of people.
    I got over it rather quickly.
    So did my brother.
    So did my family.
    But there were other people that came there
    that were a lot older than I was that
    had been very successful merchants or very
    successful business people in Europe and that came there.
    And they just couldn't pull themselves out of the blue funk
    that they were in.
    I remember, when I was working for the committee,
    for Komor, we would have one client,
    if you want to call it that.
    He was a man that had just never gotten out
    of the depression that hit him when he got to Shanghai.
    He was living in a camp, living in one
    of those double-decker beds.
    And that was where he lived.
    That was it.
    He never had the energy or the initiative
    to get up and go to get out of that place.
    And I would bring him once, twice, every so often,
    let's say, every three months, bring
    him some money so he could buy a toothbrush, or toothpaste,
    or maybe a package of cigarettes, or whatever,
    just a few extras, a few things that he could not afford.
    And he was just-- he was so demoralized.
    And he just couldn't get out of that.
    And there were a number of people like that.
    There were a number of suicides, people
    that just couldn't make it.
    On the other hand, there were people
    who made it, who set up a little business, a bakery.
    A lot of people learned in Germany how to make ties.
    For some reason, that was supposed
    to be the big deal, tie-making.
    Ties, you mean like what you wear?
    Ties, yeah, ties.
    And so they set up a shop to make ties.
    Other people made shirts, became tailors.
    One guy set up an operation to make soap.
    And he was very successful with it.
    Made a lot of soap, sold a lot of it, and make good money.
    Some people started-- one guy started a newspaper.
    People organized little theater groups.
    People organized cafes, restaurants, bars, nightclubs--
    not the kind of nightclubs you have here,
    but in a dim sort of way.
    But they, in some way, had the initiative
    to try to get into the commercial, industrial,
    economic life of the city.
    One guy became an embezzler--
    one way to make a living.
    Sure.
    And was caught, went to jail.
    But by and large, there were quite a few people
    that were able to make a living of sorts.
    Now, as people came into Shanghai--
    and this was all before the war broke out, the European war--
    people started leaving again.
    They were able to finalize their papers
    to go to either Australia, or to-- in some cases
    to Palestine, but many of them to the United States.
    And they left.
    There was a constant turnover.
    And then the war broke out in Europe,
    which did not stop the trips to Australia or the United States,
    particularly, or to Palestine, for that matter.
    And so that continued until the Pacific War started and froze
    everything in Shanghai, at which point,
    there were probably 17,000-18,000 people,
    European refugees in Shanghai from Austria, from Germany,
    a group from Poland.
    And you never-- your family never
    wanted to go on to United States or to anywhere?
    Oh, yes, of course.
    Of course.
    All of us were there only for a "few weeks," quote-unquote.
    And of course, we went to the American consulate
    immediately and brought them all our papers.
    And we wrote to our contacts in the United States,
    because our objective was to go to the United States.
    And Shanghai was only an intermediate point.
    We did not realize then that we'd
    be there eight years, my brother and I,
    or that my parents would die there.
    But if you know the future, then you can plan for it.
    But you don't know.
    If I knew what's going to happen tomorrow,
    I'd probably make a lot of money in the stock market.
    But I don't.
    And if I'd known that I was going to be the eight years,
    I would have studied Chinese in a much more formal way
    than I did.
    And I would have come here, eventually,
    after eight years with a very good knowledge of Chinese
    and Japanese.
    And I might have gone into the foreign office
    of some such work, or into export-import, and whatnot.
    And we never figured we'd stay there that long.
    But we made every effort to get out.
    But it was difficult. You see, we were still
    under the German quota, which was over-subscribed.
    Poles were on a Polish quota, which
    was just a little nothing.
    It didn't matter what nationality you were.
    The question was where were you born?
    And that determined the quota in those days
    under the immigration law in effect then.
    And so we, like everybody else, continued our efforts
    to leave Shanghai.
    And those people that were lucky enough to were successful--
    to be successful left.
    This was the turnover that I mentioned.
    Well, we weren't.
    Our quota number was too long.
    We were in Shanghai from 1939 till '41, the war broke out.
    We might have been able to get out in late '41 or early '42,
    but no more.
    So what happened when the war broke out?
    We knew that things were getting sticky.
    We were reading the same newspapers or the same stories
    in the papers that you were reading in the United States.
    And Paul Komor told me, you know,
    it doesn't look very good.
    But what were you--
    we were stuck there.
    December 7, 1941, which was December 8 here,
    during the night, this was from a Sunday
    to a Monday in Shanghai.
    And I remember, I was out that Sunday with a friend of mine
    who had taken me to some sort of a Jewish dance or whatever.
    And I was there.
    I didn't have a girlfriend.
    I was just there sitting around, listening to music.
    I came home about 11:00, 11:30.
    Went to bed.
    We were living in the Embankment Building,
    in that apartment where my father had his office.
    And I was awake at about 2:00 in the morning from gunfire--
    machine guns, cannons.
    And since I was, at that time, a member of the Shanghai
    Volunteer Corps, which is another story
    I haven't even gotten into, which
    was a sort of a paramilitary organization of Shanghai,
    as it was called out during times of civic disturbance,
    or prevent civic disturbance.
    We were in British and American uniforms,
    armed with rifles, revolvers, and whatnot.
    And I immediately called the Shanghai Volunteer Corps
    headquarters to see what's going on, whether there's a problem.
    Couldn't get an answer.
    And then I call called North China Daily
    News, which was the major newspaper in Shanghai--
    no answer.
    And I looked out the window.
    And I saw the flames, and fire, and smoke.
    But I couldn't make out what it was.
    Well, the thing died down again.
    And I figured, well, what the heck.
    Went back to bed.
    Next morning, get up.
    And I turned on the radio.
    The station I always listen to his XMHA, an American station,
    where Carrol D. Alcott was the broadcaster, sponsored
    by Maxwell House Coffee, "good to the last drop."
    And there was an announcer, not Carrol D. Alcott
    who had left Shanghai a couple of weeks
    earlier, because things were getting sticky.
    And the Japanese had a price on his head.
    He said-- and they read a proclamation
    by the Japanese commander, commanded a naval landing
    party.
    Whereas war has broken out between the United States
    and Japan, da, da, da, and so forth.
    So that's how we knew war was on.
    And I looked out the window.
    And all over the area, I saw barbed wire, and soldiers.
    What was that from?
    Japanese.
    The Japanese had invaded Shanghai that day?
    Well, the Japanese were already in Shanghai.
    They had, in 1937, taken over that part of Shanghai
    called Hongkew, during the Chinese-Japanese War.
    So they were already there.
    All they had to do was move forward, physically, just
    cross the bridges--
    move into the international settlement,
    move into the French concession.
    And they moved in with their troops?
    And they moved in.
    They moved in.
    So Shanghai was occupied--
    Shanghai was occupied.
    --when you woke up in the morning?
    Shanghai was occupied.
    We were under Japanese control.
    And they were friends of the Germans.
    And that means the Germans were in control also--
    at least we thought.
    We knew there was Gestapo in Shanghai,
    because there were some indications.
    There were some funny murders going on.
    Some people disappeared.
    These were not Jews, but Germans.
    And we all were a little bit nervous about that.
    Or maybe to say a little bit is a euphemism--
    Yeah, I see.
    --we were quite nervous.
    Anyway, I heard later on that on that day,
    the Germans decided that aha, we are now already in charge also.
    And they put out their flags.
    They put on their uniforms and the swastika
    and hit the streets.
    And the Japanese stopped them, and tore off the flags
    from their cars, and tore the armbands off their uniforms,
    and passed the word that the only flag in Shanghai
    is a Rising Sun.
    The only uniform in Shanghai is that of the Japanese Army
    and Navy.
    And you guys better get off the street.
    And that was the end of that for the German showing
    the flag was concerned.
    Apparently, there was some instance
    of Japanese desecrating German flags--
    and not by burning them, either.
    Those were stories that we heard.
    And as far as I know, they were true.
    I've heard from pretty reliable sources.
    Anyhow, I went to work, having to cross a bridge over
    to Soochow Creek.
    And there were Japanese sentries.
    But they didn't yet stop people.
    And we were all pretty shook up.
    We were in shock.
    We went to work.
    We were sitting around talking.
    There wasn't much going on.
    There wasn't much traffic.
    And after a few days, things kind of
    simmered down to a semi-normal routine.
    There was a movie that was popular here two or three
    years ago about that time.
    I forget what it was.
    It was based on a so-called autobiography of somebody who
    lived in Shanghai at the time.
    I forget the name of the movie.
    Not The Last Emperor?
    Hmm?
    The Last Emperor?
    No, it was not The Last Emperor.
    It was another-- at the same time The Last Emperor was
    showing, that was showing.
    I forget the name of it.
    But it showed Japanese troops storming the city
    and a lot of shooting going on.
    Oh, I remember that.
    You probably remember that.
    And the guy looks out of the--
    probably the Cathay Hotel.
    And he sees the streets, and the riots, and people being beaten,
    and all.
    While his house was occupied.
    Yeah, none of it happened-- none of that, none of that.
    It was very quiet.
    They just took over the city and clamped down.
    That's all.
    Everybody was still walking around.
    Every now and then, for the first few weeks,
    they would suddenly, when there was a might
    be called a political assassination, when
    some Chinese would walk by a Japanese sentry,
    and would suddenly pull out a gun, and fire at the sentry,
    and disappear, melt into the ground,
    they would lock up a part of the city to try to find the guy.
    But that was all that happened.
    Then they issued orders to the quote, "enemy aliens--"
    British, the Americans, anybody at war with Japan--
    to give up all their cameras, and their binoculars,
    and their radios, and that sort of thing.
    Then they issued a general order that nobody--
    Did you have to do that?
    I was not an enemy.
    I was not British.
    I wasn't American.
    I was "German," well, quote-unquote.
    Well, I wasn't even German anymore.
    The German government had, prior to that, sometime in 1940,
    I think, issued a decree, a law that said,
    any Jew who had left Germany was now stateless,
    lost his nationality.
    So technically, politically, we were stateless refugees,
    not German.
    But the Japanese figured we were Germans.
    That was how we were.
    We were.
    And they classified the British and Americans as enemy aliens.
    And they issued red armbands to them.
    They had to wear red armbands too.
    So on the street, you could see that this guy
    is a bad guy, enemy alien.
    But they had issued a general order
    that everybody had to give up his shortwave radio.
    Nobody was allowed listen to shortwave radio.
    And so we would listen to shortwave radio on the QT.
    We would know somebody who had a shortwave radio in a closet
    someplace.
    We'd listen to KGEI in San Francisco--
    William Winter broadcasting the news from San Francisco.
    And so we would learn very quickly
    how to interpret Japanese and American reports.
    The Japanese would report that they had sunk 20 American ships
    and shot down 40 American airplanes, you know.
    And then we would listen to the William Winter news,
    and it was exactly the opposite.
    So we didn't have to even listen to William Winter anymore.
    We simply took the Japanese news and transposed
    the nationalities.
    We knew what was going on.
    The news agency of the Japanese was Domei--
    D-O-M-E-I-- Domei News Agency.
    And they were the ones that issued all the news.
    The only other foreign news that we could listen to in Shanghai
    was the German newscasts, which were, of course,
    friendly to the Japanese, and the Russian newscasts,
    Soviet Russian newscasts--
    XRVN, the voice of the Soviet Union.
    All the stations in Shanghai had an X in front--
    XRVN, XCDN, which is a British station.
    But they broadcast in Russian, didn't they?
    No, the Russian station broadcast in Russian,
    in Chinese, in German, in all kinds
    of languages-- in English.
    And not German, in English.
    They wouldn't speak German, but in English.
    And of course, they were censored, I suppose,
    to some extent.
    But at least you could get a good, clear picture
    of what was going on in the Russian front,
    that is, how the Germans were moving forward,
    and then were being stopped, and were turned back.
    That was available from the Russian station.
    You know, so many memories flood in
    on you as you discuss all this, you know, and what to say first
    and what to report on first, because it all happened.
    And a lot of it happened simultaneously.
    And so the British, then, were interned.
    One day, they were told to show up
    at certain collection points.
    And they were sent into internment camps.
    And gradually, in 1942, they shipped them home.
    They exchanged them for Japanese interned in the United States.
    The Japanese classified all the foreigners in three categories.
    The enemies, that is, people at war,
    nationalities that were at war with Japan
    were enemy aliens, enemies.
    The people that were friendly to them--
    Italians, Germans-- they were friendly enemies.
    And the people that were neutral, like the Swiss,
    like the Spaniards, like the Portuguese,
    they were neutral enemies.
    But they were all enemies, you see.
    And so we were neutral enemies, I suppose.
    Something interesting happened.
    I mentioned earlier that I was a member of the Shanghai
    Volunteer Corps.
    And in January 1942, that is months or so after the war
    broke out, the Japanese ordered a census
    taken of everybody in Shanghai.
    They wanted to know who was there
    because they wanted to know how to organize food distribution
    and whatnot and for possible other reasons.
    And to do the census, they used the regular police.
    Now, regular police being off the street,
    they wanted somebody on the street
    besides their own troops, which were not that many,
    to keep law and order.
    So they called out the Shanghai Volunteer Corps.
    Here was a city occupied by the Japanese
    during the war, the Pacific War, where
    the street was patrolled by people
    in British and American uniforms.
    Again, it's something maybe out of a Kafka novel.
    I think I mentioned Kafka last time.
    Right.
    There we were, in British uniforms,
    in American uniforms--
    I was in a British uniform--
    with revolvers, with rifles, with bayonets
    patrolling the streets.
    Well, unfortunately, first or second day
    of this thing, which lasted about two weeks, one
    of the people in what I believe was a Jewish company,
    was a separate company in the Shanghai Volunteer Group, which
    consists only of Jews, a Jewish company-- there was also
    a Japanese company.
    There was a Chinese company.
    There was the American company.
    Signals company was the communications outfit
    that I was in.
    We ran telephone lines and whatnot, signals with lamps,
    with flags, and rig-rags, and whatnot.
    And somebody in the Jewish company dropped his rifle.
    Well, normally, that is no big deal.
    But that rifle went off.
    He dropped it.
    So the Japanese got nervous.
    And they said, OK, you have to turn in all your ammunition.
    So there we were, armed to the teeth, no ammunition.
    But we were patrolling the street.
    And this was very cold.
    This was during the winter.
    Every now and then, we did find someone that was suspicious.
    Like and one night, I found a parcel in one of the lanes
    off the street.
    And when you found a parcel, you always worried about a bomb
    being in it.
    So I called my sergeant.
    I was a lance corporal, a British Army
    type of a rank, low rank.
    Called my sergeant.
    And I said, here, let's take a look at that parcel.
    And I put a bayonet, and fixed the bayonet on my rifle,
    and slowly sawed open the strings around the parcel.
    And fortunately, it wasn't a bomb.
    It was just a dead baby--
    sort of a shocking thing if you will sit here in the United
    States and talk about it.
    But in those days, it was ho-hum.
    In a city in which every morning,
    they picked up 20, 30, 40 bodies of people
    who froze to death on the street,
    picking up another body wasn't a big deal.
    So we called the police station.
    They sent a truck out and picked it up.
    And during the night, of course, sometime around midnight,
    we would go up to the Japanese sentry huts.
    And there they were in the Japanese uniforms,
    and we in our British uniforms and American uniforms.
    And we'd flag down an itinerant noodle seller.
    They were walking through the streets with their bamboos,
    and their little stoves, and the noodle boiling,
    bubbling away there.
    And we'd buy a bunch of noodles.
    And we'd share it with the Japanese sentries.
    And to the extent that they spoke English, or Portuguese,
    or Russian--
    and some of them do, some of them did--
    we would chat with them.
    They'd show us pictures of their families.
    And this is my son.
    And this is my wife.
    And this is my parents.
    And we'd show whatever pictures we had.
    And then we'd shake hands.
    And we'd go back to our job.
    And they went back to their job.
    And again, in the middle of the war,
    there were the symbols, if you will,
    uniforms of enemy soldiers sitting down,
    very frankly-like.
    It shows how silly war is, isn't it?
    It's only when you get 100,000 people on both sides
    that you have a war.
    If you had two people or three people, it's no war.
    So that's one of the memories that comes back of those days.
    Well, that lasted a couple of weeks.
    And then they ordered us to turn in all our equipment, and all
    our guns, and our uniforms.
    And that's the last time I've ever worn a British Army
    uniform or walked around with a 45 on my side,
    and a 303 Lee-Enfield-- that was what we had in those days--
    on my back, and went back to the committee.
    The committee was allowed to work.
    Then the Japanese naval landing party
    came, Captain Inuzuka, who was in charge of Jewish affairs.
    He came in with four or six people, four or six soldiers
    one day, and arrested all of us.
    Mr. Komor was arrested and taken to the fourth or fifth floor
    of the building where they had a hotel.
    And he was put into a hotel room and kept there for, forget,
    four or six weeks.
    Sort of diplomatic arrest.
    They didn't even lock the door.
    They just told him, don't leave.
    And we were told, the staff was told to show up for work
    or we would be [CREAKS].
    And so we showed up for work.
    Why not?
    We were working anyway.
    And they put in a group of auditors to audit our books
    and to see that we had really stolen all this money that they
    claimed we had stolen.
    And of course, we hadn't stolen anything.
    They wasn't anything even to steal in the first place.
    There wasn't that much money there.
    And the audit committee reported back to whoever it was.
    And we kept working, but without Japanese supervision.
    And in the meantime, I was introduced
    to one of the Japanese officers, a Captain Inoue,
    I believe it was.
    Something like that.
    And he tried to recruit me to work
    for the Japanese naval secret police.
    I can help my fellow refugees if I work.
    I kind of made excuses, you know.
    I'm not very good at that sort of thing and so forth.
    So he finally said, OK.
    OK.
    He wasn't going to hire me.
    And you couldn't really turn him down flat,
    because he might have just taken you out and shot you.
    But he was nice enough to me.
    He was related, from what I heard later on,
    to the emperor himself and quite a wheel in the area.
    So I got out of that sticky wicket--
    Wow.
    --which was pretty nerve-wracking.
    And yeah, I continued working for the committee
    until finally, one day, I decided
    there wasn't anything more I could do.
    And I got a job with Mrs. Altura my first boss at the committee.
    You know, she was the secretary to Paul Komor.
    She was my boss in a way.
    And she had opened a little haberdashery
    in French concession.
    And I went out to start to work for her.
    She was a manager.
    I was the assistant manager--
    all chiefs, no Indians.
    The whole store was probably half the size of this room
    here.
    And we were selling shirts, either off the shelf
    or made to order, pants, handkerchiefs, ties, socks,
    whatever men needed in the way of clothing.
    And I worked for her for a while.
    And in the meantime, my father had become ill with a problem
    that nobody could really diagnose too well.
    He first had what seemed like a heat stroke.
    This was 1942 in the summer.
    He'd been out visiting a patient of his.
    And he'd come back.
    And he went to sleep.
    And kind of when he woke up, he wasn't responsive.
    He responded to a question five, 10,
    15 minutes later, kind of delayed reaction.
    And I called in one of his colleagues.
    And he said, oh, it was a heat stroke.
    He'll get over it.
    And he did get over it.
    But a few months later, he began having problems
    with his vision.
    It was like a curtain was being drawn over his eyes,
    every day a little more.
    And he called in a Chinese nerve specialist, a brain specialist.
    We called in a German Nazi, or Aryan, eye
    specialist, the big eye specialist in the Far East,
    who came over right away, and no questions asked,
    no fee, nothing, examined him, and prescribed something.
    But they couldn't figure it out.
    And gradually, that got worse.
    And he died seven months later.
    I found out a number of years ago by discussing it
    with a surgeon here that now, they know what happened.
    A blockage in the carotid artery,
    which stopped blood from going to the brain, part of it,
    and blocking nerves, which today could have been fixed in a very
    simple bit of surgery.
    In those days, they didn't know about these things.
    So that left my mother, and my brother,
    and I. In the meantime, in 1943--
    oh, in 1942, the German government
    sent Colonel Otto Meisinger to Shanghai.
    Colonel Meisinger was-- that was a Gestapo rank.
    He had been the Gestapo chief in Warsaw
    and earned himself the sobriquet of the Butcher of Warsaw.
    He killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in Warsaw.
    He was transferred to the German embassy in Tokyo
    as the internal police chief.
    And in the summer of '42, he and two other Germans,
    a fellow the name of von Puttkamer, and another chap,
    his name was Neumann--
    Neumann-- he was sent to Shanghai
    to discuss with the Japanese naval landing
    party, and particularly the section
    in charge of Jewish affairs, what to do about the Jews
    in Shanghai.
    And he suggested to the Japanese that don't trust those Jews.
    They're very dangerous people.
    And I'll tell you what you ought to do.
    He says, coming the High Holidays
    in another six to eight weeks, Rosh Hashanah,
    you surround the synagogues.
    And when they come out after services,
    you just pick them up, load them on a freighter
    that you have in the harbor, or two freighters,
    some old, rusty ships, take away their clothes,
    and tow this thing out to sea, and let
    them drift there for a while.
    And then go out and sink the whole mess,
    just torpedo the ships.
    And if you don't like that, take them up to the salt mines,
    up the Yangtze River, and we can tell you how much to feed them
    every day so they are good for two or three months' worth
    of good work for the Japanese government taking salt.
    And if you don't like that, we have another idea.
    We can establish a concentration camp in the little island
    down the Huangpu River.
    And what you do there is you put them all into the camp
    and let them volunteer there for medical experiments,
    like the human nervous systems resistance to pain.
    Well, and Mr. Neumann here is from Bergen-Belsen.
    He's a former commandant there.
    He can tell you how to do all that.
    He's an expert in that field.
    The meeting broke up without any decisions having been made.
    And one of the participants at the meeting, a gentleman
    name of [? Shigemitsu ?] Shibata,
    he was the Japanese vice consul.
    And I'd met him on a number of occasions.
    He went to a little park, and sat on a bench,
    and thought about the meeting.
    And he said to himself, have we proud Japanese
    sunk this low to listen to this stuff, to even consider it?
    I mean, this is what we are fighting the war for,
    to take civilians and treat them this way?
    He had a few Jewish friends.
    He met the first one--
    he went to see the first one of them.
    And he said, we got out of a meeting right away,
    something terrible is happening.
    I've got to tell you about it.
    You've got to do something about it.
    And the fellow said, I'm sorry.
    It's erev Shabbos.
    It's the evening of Shabbat.
    And we can't have a meeting now.
    We've got to wait till after Shabbat.
    Can't have meetings on Shabbat.
    He says, but it's terrible.
    Says, I'm sorry, I can't do it.
    So he went to another fellow who was not
    quite so shomer Shabbos, that's the expression,
    careful of Shabbat.
    And he called a meeting.
    And Mr. Shibata reported that whole plan
    to the Jewish leadership.
    And they got busy.
    And working for six to eight weeks under danger
    to their own lives, they were able to get
    that story to Tokyo, to the foreign minister, who
    turned around, sent a wire back to Shanghai, saying, keep
    an eye on the Jews, make sure they don't get into trouble.
    But don't touch them.
    Mr. Shibata saved our lives.
    He saved, conservatively, 26,000 lives that day.
    The story didn't come to light until in the middle '70s, when
    a rabbi named Marvin Tokayer was stationed in Tokyo,
    and spoke, and wrote, and read Japanese [INAUDIBLE]..
    And he found the story in Japanese archives.
    1976, I believe, the Jewish community
    in Tokyo honored Mr. Shibata for his actions at a Passover
    dinner.
    He died a year later.
    That's why I'm here.
    That's why I can tell you this story, because Mr. Shibata had
    a conscience.
    And I understand that the Germans
    sent such top commanders to Shanghai
    to deal with the Jewish problem.
    Was there-- I mean, this was a major concern?
    They were planning to wipe out all the Jews
    in the whole world, not just in Germany,
    but in the whole world.
    If they'd won the war, they would have done it.
    And so here was a group of Jews who
    were under Japanese, meaning German, control.
    Why not wipe them out too?
    You know, I mean, they were wiping out community
    after community in Europe.
    Here was another community they were able to attack.
    And Meisinger, who was hung after the war,
    wasn't doing much anyway in Tokyo.
    He was police chief at the embassy.
    And there wasn't that much to do.
    And so they sent him to Shanghai to try to do that.
    Nice people.
    And so what they did instead of the carrying out the plans that
    Meisinger has advocated, in February of 1943,
    [AUDIO STATIC] that all stateless refugees in Shanghai
    must move into what they call a designated area,
    which is English for ghetto, and cannot leave that area unless
    they have a pass.
    And as a designated area, they designated a 1520 block--
    I can't tell you the exact size--
    in Hongkew, where most of the Jews were living anyway.
    Now, that doesn't mean that all the other people living
    in that area had to get out--
    Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, whatever, Russians--
    it just said, you go and find yourself some place to live.
    And so they squeezed 18,000 Jews into Hongkew,
    in many cases, families of three, and four, and five,
    and six people living in one room, six to eight families
    in one building with maybe two bathrooms, this sort of thing.
    And our family was able to, fortunately,
    get an apartment ourselves.
    We were very lucky that way.
    We had a two, almost three-room apartment-- two bedrooms,
    one living room, kitchen, and a bathroom--
    in a lane which was primarily occupied by Japanese.
    There were two buildings.
    One was a four-unit flats to size, or apartments to size.
    One was a four-unit building that had Jewish refugees in it.
    And there was another one which was
    a two-story building with three units,
    I believe, with refugees in it.
    All the other people in that lane were Japanese.
    That's where we were able to move to.
    How were you able to get that?
    I still don't know how it worked.
    As far as I recall, there was a gentleman living,
    a family living in the same apartment house we were in,
    name of Frankel.
    And they were very friendly with my parents.
    My father was already dying and died in March of '43.
    And they were able to get an apartment for themselves
    and an apartment for us.
    And another family, name of Brown, that also,
    they were associated with Frankel business,
    so the three of us were able to get these apartments.
    The fourth family was a family name of [? Bescher, ?]
    who were Austrians.
    And the man, Mr. [? Bescher ?] was running a large paper
    factory in Shanghai.
    And his son went into the business.
    And he now lives in Australia.
    In fact, he was here last week, visiting.
    They come here once every year.
    And you see them?
    Oh, yeah.
    Oh, yeah.
    We're still friends.
    And so we were able to get into the district
    and have relatively comfortable living quarters.
    And compared to many of our friends
    who just lived in miserable conditions--
    I wouldn't say they were living in holes,
    but squeezed together, no privacy, that sort of thing,
    it really bad, and sanitary facilities.
    We had regular flush toilets.
    This was something that was unheard of in many parts
    of the city.
    Of course, you couldn't drink the water.
    Didn't matter.
    I told you that earlier.
    You couldn't drink the water in Shanghai
    unless you boiled it first.
    Drinking the water out of the tap
    was like committing suicide.
    And so we lived in that apartment.
    And I was able to get a pass to leave the designated area.
    They had set up checkpoints.
    And they checked you as you came in and out.
    They had Jewish sentries there, internal sort of police force.
    And I had my pass, always valid for three months,
    for the entire city.
    And I went to work because I was working
    in French concession, which was about eight, nine miles away.
    So every morning, I took my bicycle
    and hotfooted it out to my job.
    Came back every night.
    My brother got a job with the internal--
    call it camp police.
    These were the kind of an internal security
    force for the refugee camps.
    You had to have somebody to help people who collapsed,
    or to prevent fights, or to prevent theft.
    Unfortunately, some of those things
    happened, even within the Jewish refugee camps.
    And so he was a member of the camp police for a while.
    That was a job where you got very little pay
    and you got food.
    And that was primarily what he got.
    And so we, hand-to-mouth, kind of continue
    to exist in that environment.
    Lots of things happened during the war.
    The Japanese organized a civil defense force,
    civil air defense force, in which
    my brother and I were members.
    We had armbands.
    And since we were, quote, "officers," we
    had two red stripes on the armbands.
    Some people had one red stripe.
    Some people had no red stripes at all.
    There's always ranks.
    It was always Indians and chiefs.
    We were chiefs.
    And we had to all make sure that we had blackout preparations
    and that we had first-aid squads, and rescue squads,
    and firefighting squads.
    And the firefighting squads were equipped
    with the latest firefighting equipment, buckets.
    That's all we had, buckets--
    steel, you know, metal buckets.
    And it's-- you learned how to throw water in a fire.
    You have to learn how to use a bucket.
    You can't just pour it like this.
    You can't get that close to the fire.
    The theory was that you just threw
    the water as far as you can and the water goes out,
    fire goes out.
    At least five-minute training, yeah.
    And as time went on, the US Air Force
    would fly through the Shanghai defense area.
    And there'd be air raid warnings.
    And they'd be on their way to Kunming
    or to other cities that were occupied by the Japanese
    to bomb them.
    And we would be called out.
    Air sirens would howl.
    And we'd rush out in the street in our, quote,
    "uniforms," unquote, with our armbands, which
    was our uniform, and towel around the neck.
    In case of a smoke, you'd cover your face.
    And we had a big nightstick in case we had to break a window.
    And we had ropes in case we had a rope something.
    That was our equipment.
    And we'd been out there in the day and night
    and kind of do our job.
    This is in between our regular daytime jobs.
    And that went on for a number of years.
    Then once in a while, there'd be an airplane
    go by and drop a bomb outside of Shanghai.
    But the city itself, till July the 17th, 1945--
    we didn't know it then, but it was about a month
    before the war was over--
    when there was an air raid, I was working in my job
    at Frenchtown, at my haberdashery.
    We heard the sirens.
    Police station was next door to our store.
    And they had a siren on top, was a heck of a racket.
    And well, we did what we always did when there was an air raid
    warning.
    We had put the shutters, wooden shutters,
    in front of the store window.
    And we would haul out our lunch.
    It was quarter after 12:00 noon, and hauled out our lunch,
    and had lunch.
    Of course, nobody was in the street anyway.
    There wouldn't be any business.
    I just stuck my head out the door to see what's going on.
    And I saw planes going in and out of clouds.
    And I wondered whether I'd ever meet any of the guys that
    are flying those planes.
    And the chances, what was it, in those days, 180 million to one,
    190 million to one.
    And then we heard this rolling thunder, like vrr.
    And the phone rings.
    And my brother's on the phone.
    He says, boy, they clobbered the district.
    I said, anything happened to us?
    No, just a lamp came down in our house.
    But we have houses burning.
    We have a lot of people injured.
    We have a lot of casualties.
    You better get home and help out with trying to control things.
    So it was just bombed, Japanese bombs?
    Yeah, American bombs.
    These were American air raids.
    After all, they were the Chinese on the street who
    saw the planes too, and said, [CHINESE],,
    American airplanes, great, great, hurray.
    And then they got bombed?
    They got bombed, still a raid.
    After all, they went outside, you know.
    And the Chinese didn't like the Japanese either.
    So the Chinese were very happy about the American airplanes
    coming over and--
    And bombing?
    --and bombing the city, even so they lost people.
    And we were happy.
    After everything was done, after the dust had settled,
    and the fires were out, we had lost 31 people.
    Dr. [? Kardig, ?] the head of the Jewish community
    organization was dead.
    His assistant, 31 others, a lot of people injured, some of them
    very badly, a lot of homes gone, a lot of property destroyed.
    I took my bicycle.
    And I bicycled back to the district, to the ghetto.
    And then I got off the bicycle and carried it,
    because there was glass all over,
    furniture, houses burning, a hand, a head, just a mess.
    Only area that I ever been, the only area that I would
    want to be in.
    And we cleaned up.
    It took us two days, put out the fires,
    dig out people, bury people, kind of straighten out stuff.
    In the early '60s, I guess I was at a board meeting of the East
    Bay chapter of the California Society of CPAs
    I was a treasurer, secretary treasurer.
    And there was the vice president.
    And there was the president and a bunch of members
    of the board of directors.
    We were having a meeting.
    We were having breakfast at the time and kind of talking
    about all kinds of things.
    And I told them about my Shanghai story.
    And this one fellow, a vice president, good friend of mine,
    another CPA, he said, oh, I know Shanghai.
    I said, what are you talking about you know Shanghai?
    Were you there after the war?
    He says, no, I wasn't really there.
    He says, I flew over it.
    I bombed it.
    I said, was that on July the 17th,
    you bombed by radar because of the cloud cover,
    it was about noontime?
    He says yeah.
    I says, you bastard, damn near killed me.
    He was a lead pilot.
    And a few-- maybe a year later, so his firm merged with our.
    And he's been my partner and good friend ever since.
    Oh wow.
    And so you met one of those pilots.
    Then after he had--
    this is a small world department.
    After he had joined our firm, he looked at our client list
    to kind of acquaint himself with who
    were our people, pointed to a name on a list of tax clients,
    and he said, is this fellow my age?
    I said, yeah, he's a little older than you.
    Is he in finance?
    I said, yes, he works at Pacific National
    Bank in Montgomery Street.
    He said, uh-huh, navigator.
    Then a few months later, we went down
    to San Diego for an annual meeting of the California
    Society.
    By then he was the president, I was the vice president.
    And he took his wife along.
    My wife stayed home with the kids.
    And he said, you're going to have dinner tomorrow
    night with [? Tully ?] and me.
    And I said, OK, fine.
    And we drove outside of San Diego,
    up a mountain, stopped in front of a house.
    He rang the doorbell.
    A young man opened the door-- well, middle-aged.
    And Jack [? Drummond, ?] my pilot friend,
    said, David Cohen, meet Walter Frank.
    Walter Frank, meet David Cohen.
    You guys have something in common.
    Well, with David Cohen, no, maybe because
    we are both Jewish.
    Jack said, David is the bombardier,
    and Walter is a target.
    So I met the bombardier.
    Wow.
    And then about a year later, I met the armorer out
    of that flight.
    And there were 100 planes involved in that flight.
    They were coming out of Iwo Jima, a little island.
    Yeah.
    And they were on their way to bomb Japanese shipping
    in the Yellow Sea, which is a stretch of water between China
    and Japan.
    And on the way, or shortly after takeoff,
    they were notified that the ships had been
    sunk by American submarines.
    And they were told to attack Shanghai
    as the alternate target.
    So they went over Shanghai.
    They made out the city on radar, and try
    to find whatever was worthwhile bombing,
    and dropped their bombs, and went back to Iwo Jima.
    That's how that happened--
    small world.
    So did it help the people of Shanghai?
    Well, it helped their morale.
    It helped their morale.
    But the Japanese, they weren't bombed out or anything?
    No, I mean, they hit--
    the bombs hit a uniform factory.
    They hit a Japanese radio station.
    They hit some Japanese trucks.
    They may have hit some part of the airfield,
    but I don't for sure where that's really--
    that's become.
    And I went on the airfield a couple of months later.
    I didn't see any bomb damage.
    This was after the war when I started
    working at the airfield.
    And there wasn't any major damage.
    It wasn't a big thing.
    But it was much bigger for the Japanese
    in terms of their morale was another story.
    When the Allies invaded Italy, that was 1943 or '44,
    there was an Italian ship, the Conte Verde, the Green Count,
    tied up in Shanghai.
    It was in Shanghai when the war broke out.
    And of course, it couldn't leave anyway.
    So was tied up there.
    And when the Allies invaded Italy,
    and Italy became suddenly an enemy, or at least
    an unreliable ally of Japan, the Japanese
    wanted to take over the Conte Verde.
    But before they could do that, the crew on the Conte Verde,
    the Italians opened the sea cocks.
    The ship filled with water and sank.
    It just keeled over and lay there.
    Well, you can't go in and just say, well, let's write it up
    and take it out of the water.
    It's a big ship, very big ship, a passenger liner.
    So they found a Swedish engineer.
    The Japanese found a Swedish engineer who worked months,
    and months, and months with all kinds of systems, and cables,
    and whatnot, was able to right the ship, get the water out,
    plug the holes, and then tow it down the river,
    where they were going to clean it up,
    and install new machinery, or whatever,
    and make it seaworthy again.
    That night, one American bomber came over
    and dropped a bomb right in the middle of the ship.
    That's the end of that.
    Now, that was bad for their morale, you see.
    This air raid, it wasn't, I don't think,
    that bad because it didn't really do that much damage.
    But it was good for our morale.
    And so there we were.
    And shortly after that raid, I developed
    jaundice, which to this day prohibits me from-- prevents me
    from donating blood.
    It's a lifetime thing.
    I was sick for a week or two.
    And then one night in August 11, first, we
    got the news that America has dropped an atomic bomb
    on Hiroshima.
    And what's napalm?
    What's an atomic bomb?
    And so there were the people in our group
    who were the smart ones, of which I
    figured I was one of them.
    I said, that's very simple.
    The atomic bomb is so powerful that the blast
    breaks everything up not just in the little pieces,
    but in the atoms.
    That's an atomic bomb.
    That's not exactly a scientific explanation, but it made do.
    And ooh, we want to know.
    Listen to me.
    I'll tell you what's an atomic bomb.
    Everything breaks into little atoms.
    And that's the smallest-- we knew that the smallest
    unit in the physical universe.
    Or they did know.
    And then we heard that on the Russian radio station.
    The Russian radio station broadcast
    this combined announcement by Roosevelt, Churchill,
    and Stalin that they had dropped an atomic bomb.
    The next thing we know, an atomic bomb
    dropped on Nagasaki.
    And then this was all these hot, humid, summer nights.
    The windows are wide open.
    Everybody's out in the street or sitting on a stoop.
    And even if you're in the house, you perspire and you sweat.
    And I hear upstairs, Mr. Brown opened the window,
    stick his head out the window, and yelling, sholem, sholem.
    Peace.
    And everybody's out on the street.
    What's going on?
    He heard it from so-and-so, who heard it
    from so-and-so, who heard it reliably
    from the Swiss consulate.
    You know how these rumors go, that the peace negotiations
    are going on between Japan and the United States.
    The European war was already over.
    Germany had already collapsed in May.
    And there, sholem, sholem, and a great deal of excitement.
    And the Japanese chief of the people living in that lane
    came over to me, since I was his contact at the time.
    After all, I was wearing two red stripes.
    I was an officer.
    He was an officer.
    And he said to please make sure that people kind of keep it
    down and didn't want any trouble.
    And I said, sure, we don't want any trouble either.
    And day goes by, another day goes by.
    August the 15th, word comes through the community--
    this was in the morning--
    that the emperor is going to make an announcement at 12
    o'clock over the radio.
    And at 12 o'clock, you saw Japanese standing
    on the streets and in their homes
    at attention, listening to the radio.
    And we couldn't understand what was going on,
    high-pitched voice, Japanese speech.
    The emperor made a speech throwing in the towel.
    That was the end of the war.
    That was at 12 o'clock noon on the 15th of August,
    three hours that saved my life, because for 3 o'clock that day,
    the American Air Force had scheduled another air raid
    on Shanghai.
    And their target, then, was the Shanghai municipal jail,
    in which there were some prisoners,
    but the basement was full of ammunition.
    And I would have been stationed next door to the jail.
    You know, air raid warning, I go on duty.
    I would have been right across the street from the jail.
    And even if I had been home, we were only a block away
    from the jail.
    And if that air raid had come off
    and if that air raid had succeeded,
    that entire area would have gone up.
    That would have killed thousands of our people.
    But the raid was called off.
    That's it.
    And did you find out about the raid through your friends?
    When the war was over, shortly thereafter,
    the Air Force came in, and the American Navy came in,
    and US Air Force came in, and set up shop there.
    And they hired local talent.
    And I was hired.
    My brother was hired.
    So I was working for the Air Force.
    And that's how I found out.
    They just declassified those orders
    from secret to confidential or from confidential
    to restricted.
    And so we were able to see these things--
    not officially, but unofficially.
    I saw the orders.
    Small world, again, you know, what three hours can do,
    what a man like Shibata can do.
    It's so hard to tell all the stories, the narrow escapes
    that you have, that people had.
    This area would have killed thousands of us, thousands.
    Would have destroyed--
    What was the point of that?
    Well, it was a military target.
    It was an ammunition dump.
    The entire basement of the Shanghai municipal jail,
    which was a large institution-- very large,
    it covered several blocks--
    it was full of ammunition.
    Well, in war, that's what you want to destroy, ammunition.
    But they canceled it.
    War was over.
    Well, now, we had an interregnum, a period of time
    when nobody was in charge.
    The Americans had not come in.
    The Chinese nationalist forces had not come in.
    The Japanese had lost the war.
    And they were worried, the Japanese, particularly,
    that we would have a situation in Shanghai
    like the one in Hong Kong between the time
    that the British forces pulled out
    of Hong Kong and the Japanese forces pulled in,
    when the Chinese suddenly started rioting,
    and smashing things, and stealing things, and killing
    people, and whatnot.
    They wanted to avoid that.
    So they set up machine gun posts in all major intersections.
    Who's the they?
    Japanese.
    They had lost the war.
    The war was over.
    But they were still there.
    As a matter of fact, when the emperor made his speech,
    the commander, the Japanese commander of the area
    refused to lay down his arms and quibbled with his commanders
    in Tokyo.
    And these are stories that I heard.
    And I can't swear to them, but I've heard it so many times,
    I feel sure that they're true.
    They flew him to Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
    And they said, look, if you want to keep fighting in China,
    this is what your place is going to look like.
    That's when he gave in.
    Took a day or two.
    So Shanghai was a little late in giving up,
    not that we noticed it in any major way.
    But the Japanese put in a curfew.
    After 10 o'clock at night, you don't go out in the street.
    Everybody off the street.
    And during the day, machine guns all over the place controlling
    traffic.
    Can I make a break here?
    Yeah.
    Sure.
    Getting back to ward?
    We need about five seconds to let the tape start rolling.
    OK.
    OK, you tell me.
    Do you want some [INAUDIBLE]?
    No.
    How did you live?
    You were talking about that.
    How what?
    How did you live?
    OK.
    We're all set.
    How did we lived?
    Yeah, this goes back to the war years.
    We lived hand-to-mouth.
    And sometimes, the hand was empty.
    Some people were fed by the committees.
    Some people, like ourselves, sometimes went to the committee
    for food.
    And sometimes, we were able--
    since I had a job and my brother had a job,
    we were able to do our own shopping.
    But what you did there was to buy things just enough
    for one meal and sometimes enough for a half a meal.
    For one thing, you didn't have refrigerators.
    You didn't have ice boxes.
    And if you had an ice box, you couldn't afford to buy the ice.
    During the war, there was a minimum of natural gas
    available.
    So you had charcoal burners, little
    charcoal hibachi-type stoves.
    We would go out for the shop for an evening meal
    and buy a half an ounce of liver sausage and a half an ounce
    of margarine or butter.
    And butter was very expensive, margarine cheaper.
    And you'd buy maybe an ounce of coffee
    if you could afford it and a slice or two of bread.
    And that was your meal.
    And my mother would go out, as long as she was still around.
    And she would bargain with this one, and that one,
    and the other one for vegetables or rice.
    A lot of those things were rationed during the war.
    And you couldn't even buy them if you wanted to.
    Or you'd hand them a ration ticket for them.
    And so you kind of scraped along.
    And you lived day by day, hoping that the war would
    be over soon.
    Well, she never realized--
    which was a good thing-- that the war
    would last as long as it did.
    Now, a few weeks after the war was over, Mother got sick.
    And she developed what looked like a tropical disease, what
    looked like relapsing fever, the kind of fever
    where every other day, you suddenly
    get these heavy attacks of fevers,
    shake you, almost like malaria, and last an hour,
    an hour and a half, and then they abate again.
    And so of course, since we were still
    an ex-medical family, Father having died,
    we still had medical care from all kinds of physicians
    for no charge at all.
    And immediately, our house family physician came.
    And he checked her over.
    And he did lab tests.
    And nothing, negative in malaria,
    and negative on relapsing fever.
    He couldn't figure it out.
    Couldn't figure it out, and finally,
    took her to the hospital for a head-to-toe checkup
    and discovered she had cancer, ovarian cancer.
    That was Monday.
    She was scheduled for surgery Tuesday morning,
    died during the night.
    That's how quick it was, two weeks.
    That's how really fast it was.
    And so we buried her in September 1945,
    just after the war was over.
    She was just-- the war was just over.
    She was just able to say, oh, boy, maybe now,
    we can all go to America, enjoy peace again.
    Nothing.
    Well, shortly after that, my brother and I got jobs
    at the air transport command, today, a military air transport
    service, I believe it's called.
    And that was at Kiangwan Airfield.
    They were hiring.
    And other American military units
    were hiring local civilians to replace GIs and officers who
    were going home on points, because that was the big thing.
    The war was over.
    Everybody wanted to go home.
    They didn't want to stay in Shanghai.
    So we were hired.
    My brother was hired for the operations department.
    And I was hired for statistics, what they call stat control--
    statistical control office.
    And I started working there.
    And after a very short while, I became chief clerk
    in that department.
    And my brother became the chief operations man.
    Operations is the outfit that sends airplanes out,
    that determines how much fuel they take, where they go,
    what the weather is like, this kind of thing--
    controls crew requirements.
    Stat control is more reporting sort of an office.
    We made sure all the reports go out,
    morning report with a major document in military life,
    aircraft reports, aircraft out of service report.
    There's a million reports that have to be sent.
    And once every week, once every month, month every year.
    And so that was my department.
    When we came to the United States--
    and I'm jumping ahead a little bit there--
    in 1947, my brother joined the air force almost immediately
    on arrival.
    And he was sent to Texas for basic training.
    By then, the unit of the Air Force that had been in Shanghai
    was at Fairfield-Suisun Airbase, now Travis Air Force Base
    here in California.
    And so my brother tried to get assigned there
    because he knew those people.
    So he went to the personnel office and made an application.
    And they called him back in and said, well, we will assign you
    wherever we have to.
    And sorry, we can't fulfill the request of a simple GI.
    Then he got his morning orders to report to Travis Air Force
    Base, which was still Fairfield-Suisun in those days.
    This was before General Travis was killed there
    in the airplane crash.
    He checks into the airbase, goes to the adjutant office,
    opens the door, and there's Major McNally,
    the adjutant in Shanghai, and the adjutant now in California.
    He takes one look at my brother, says, Eric,
    where the heck have you been?
    Let's see, he says, you were in operations.
    Why don't you go out, do operations, and talk
    to a captain out there?
    He goes out to operations, reports in, says,
    Captain Dunbar, his old boss from Shanghai,
    as Eric Frank, who is a--
    what was he called-- and they didn't call him this
    in private.
    Somehow, the rule was that you were promoted
    to private first class immediately on termination
    of basic training.
    In his case, somebody goofed someplace.
    And he wasn't promoted.
    He was a private, the lowest animal in the air force.
    So Captain Dunbar said, Eric Frank, Eric,
    let me introduce you to Master Sergeant So-and-so.
    This is Tech Sergeant So-and-so.
    This is Master Sergeant So-and-so.
    These are the guys that run the operations office now.
    He says, I'm going to change the plans a little bit.
    He says, gentlemen, Private Frank
    is in charge here from now on.
    Wow.
    Because he knew more about operations than those guys did.
    And he was more motivated too.
    So Eric was made the chief of operations
    there, Private Frank, was promoted almost immediately
    to corporal, which was skipped one rank,
    and then was made sergeant.
    And then shortly after that, in 1949, I think it was,
    the Berlin airlift came up.
    And he was ordered for temporary duty 90 days
    to Germany, the longest 90 days he spent anywhere.
    Came back after eight months.
    He was back in Frankfurt.
    He was back in our hometown of Wiesbaden.
    He wrote back a letter, saying, I'm walking around Wiesbaden.
    And it's like walking around with ghosts.
    He was in Berlin.
    And he was in Hanover.
    He came back here.
    And then he was discharged from the Air Force,
    just to give you that part of the story,
    went back to school to study more formally
    the kind of job that he had done for the Air Force,
    and then got a job with Pan American Airways in New
    York as a dispatcher, airline dispatcher, where he worked,
    where he made a career in the Airline Dispatchers
    Association.
    He became the president of the International Airline
    Dispatchers Association, flying all over the world
    to check on his troops, then became ill and died in 1971,
    rather unfortunately.
    He was 48 years old at the time, young man.
    Well, back to Shanghai.
    War was over.
    I had gotten a job with the Air Force.
    I made my career there.
    I was awarded a couple of civilian decorations.
    Most people got them that were able to breathe and hold a pin.
    Met a number of interesting people.
    One of the kids at the airfield was a fellow,
    name of Mike Blumenthal, just a kid folding parachutes
    or whatever he was doing.
    He made a nice career too.
    Last job I heard where he was in public life,
    he was a treasurer of the United States.
    Oh, really?
    His name is on a lot of the money
    that you carry in your pocket.
    That's little Michael Blumenthal.
    How do you know it's the same one?
    Well, I've met him.
    I talked to him, had correspondence with him.
    He was out here for our Shanghai reunion as a featured speaker
    just after he left the Carter administration.
    He now runs Unisys, one of those really giant corporations
    in this country, little Mike Blumenthal.
    I met in Shanghai and I had lunch and dinner many times
    in the restaurant that was run by--
    where there were two brothers, waiters, Lewin--
    Henri and Werner Lewin, good waiters.
    They used to run the Fairmont Hotel.
    Oh, really?
    After that, they ran the Hilton.
    Werner's Cellar was one of the restaurants in the place.
    And Henry's Room at the top was the top-flight restaurant
    at the Hilton Hotel here in San Francisco--
    Henry and Werner Lewin.
    The story goes that when they came to San Francisco
    after having left Shanghai, they allegedly
    asked a cabbie, what's the best hotel in town?
    And he said the Fairmont.
    Said, well, take us to the Fairmont.
    And that's how they got the job there.
    That was the story.
    How true it is, I don't know.
    Does that mean that a lot of people in Shanghai
    came to San Francisco?
    A lot of-- this was the port of entry for most of them.
    I wouldn't say all of them.
    Seattle was another one, Los Angeles was another one.
    But San Francisco was, really, the main port.
    When my brother and I left-- and he left two weeks
    before I did because he got his visa earlier,
    you know, all the paperwork, and the follow-up,
    and the red tape.
    He got his visa.
    And I said, go, get passage and leave Shanghai,
    even if I can't get out of here.
    As it turned out, I got my visa a few days later.
    And I got passage on two weeks later.
    He came here.
    I came here.
    And we have on our package--
    had on our luggage our destination--
    Middletown, New York.
    That's where my cousin lived, who
    was arranged-- who had arranged for all our affidavits
    of support, all the papers to get to the United States.
    And so we were coming to San Francisco to grab a train,
    go to New York, and go up to Middletown, a little town
    up in the Catskill Mountains.
    Then when I arrived here, after my brother had been here
    for a couple of weeks, I was met by a cousin of mine who
    lived in Pittsburgh, had been living there for many years.
    And I met my brother again.
    And he said, you know, I met Harry Sapir
    from the Jewish Federation in Oakland, was called Jewish
    Welfare Federation in those days.
    And Harry said, why do you want to go to New York?
    He says, it's a terrible place to live.
    It's hot there.
    And it's humid and too many people.
    And it's hard to get jobs there.
    San Francisco is a lot nicer, the Bay Area.
    Why don't you stay here?
    If you go to New York and you don't like it,
    you've got to come back.
    And it costs you train fare both ways.
    He says, if you stay here, what the heck?
    So we kicked it around.
    And I said, it makes a lot of sense.
    We stayed.
    And I got a job very quickly at HC Capital Company, which
    is today part of the Emporium.
    They changed the name from Capital Emporium--
    Emporium Capital to Emporium now,
    in Oakland, on 20th Street.
    At this point, the building is earthquake damaged.
    They got to redo it.
    But I worked there for about a year.
    But a few days after I got my job--
    and this was maybe two or three weeks after we arrived in San
    Francisco--
    the Key System, which was a forerunner of the AC Transit
    bus system in the East Bay, went on strike.
    My brother got so disgusted with all
    that, he joined the air forces.
    This is why he got into the air force.
    Because of the strike?
    Yeah.
    He didn't want to run around.
    And we didn't know which side was up,
    and where is north and south, and we had very little money.
    And he said, oh, I'm not going to look for jobs anymore.
    I'm going to join the air force.
    After all, it's a decent job.
    You get paid.
    You get a uniform.
    And you get your food and your housing.
    And you got to be a citizen a lot faster.
    Normally, it would take five years.
    In this case, it took three years to become a citizen.
    It made a lot of sense.
    And I might have done the same thing.
    But I already had a job.
    And then I went back to school.
    I talked to a bunch of accountants here.
    And they recommended I take certain courses.
    I had already a lot of accounting background
    from Shanghai, but nothing formal.
    So I went to a University of California Extension.
    And I took a correspondence course
    from LaSalle Extension University in Chicago.
    I don't know whether they're still in existence,
    but very good school.
    And so working during the day as a stock boy at the Capitals,
    I studied at night, took a course
    that is scheduled to last 2 and 1/2 years.
    And I finished it in 11 months because I
    could do it in my own speed.
    Instead of sending in an assignment once a week,
    I sent it in one day.
    And then I went to the personnel department at Capitals
    and asked for a promotion.
    I wanted to get out of dragging gift boxes,
    and wrapping paper, and sales books around the store,
    and out of my dirty clothes.
    And I wanted to get into something more decent.
    And they said, all right, we'll give you a test.
    I came up with a very high test score, the third-highest
    the store had ever had.
    And they promoted me to the rug department.
    I said, as what, as an assistant manager?
    No, as a stock boy.
    I said why?
    They said, well, you have a very heavy German accent.
    Well, I knew that I didn't have--
    if I had an accent--
    I probably do-- it wasn't as heavy, and as bad,
    and as German as one of the building manager--
    or the building engineer, who was a German.
    And so I said, well, thanks but no thanks and quit.
    And I was able to quit because I'd gotten married.
    My wife had a job.
    And of course, she was bringing in some money.
    She worked for the Veterans Administration.
    And so I went out and looked for a job
    and got a job in public accounting.
    Tell me about meeting this woman, about your wife.
    Who is that?
    Well, it's an interesting story.
    She had a sister out here.
    And they had met some other Shanghaiers.
    First of all, was there a kind of Shanghai community
    that formed there?
    There was a Shanghai community, yes.
    There was.
    This is a natural thing.
    We kind of clumped together.
    In fact, when I came through the Golden Gate,
    I remember that very vividly, and I saw my first sights
    of the hills of San Francisco, Telegraph Hill,
    I guess it was, I wondered which of the streets
    were the streets where all the Shanghaiers were living.
    You know, I still had this ghetto sort of picture
    in my mind, where in Shanghai, we
    were all living in the same neighborhood.
    You know, you couldn't walk down the street
    without meeting 10 or 15 different people that you knew.
    And if you didn't know them, you knew them from somewhere.
    So I figured, well, maybe it's--
    I wonder where they are all living.
    Well, it turned out they weren't all living
    in the same neighborhood.
    But there were quite a few of them living in Shanghai
    in the Fillmore District, which was
    heavily Jewish in those days.
    And then in the East Bay, they were living more scattered,
    because there was not quite a concentration with them
    living in one neighborhood.
    They weren't living in one neighborhood here, too,
    but there were more of them in together.
    And so we kind of stuck together.
    We'd meet each other.
    So where did you live?
    Where did you move?
    I got a room--
    let me think.
    First, we got a room on 14th Street,
    about four blocks west of Broadway in Oakland, which
    was a fairly good neighborhood.
    It was almost a block over from the Jewish Community
    Center, which was then on 14th Street in Oakland, Downtown,
    close to City Hall.
    And then I moved over to East 14th Street,
    about three blocks east of the lake, Lake Merritt.
    I had a room up there.
    House was owned by a Jewish family, the Laubs.
    Their son is now big real lawyer.
    Then, he was just a little kid.
    And I had a little room up there.
    And the Singers, the Singers were
    living-- these were the friends of ours
    that we visited every now and then-- they were living
    in 11th Street, 12th Street, someplace the other side
    of town.
    And they had two boys that we knew about our age--
    Bernie Singer and Paul Singer.
    And they told us, there are some girls
    that are visiting for dinner.
    Why don't you come for dinner, you know?
    And those were the Katz girls--
    Ida and Eva Katz.
    Well, it turned out, I got friendly with Ida
    and we married.
    My brother was friendly with Eva and they married.
    No.
    That's right.
    Now, had you had a very active dating life up to that point?
    Did you have a girlfriend before?
    Not really.
    Not really.
    I was pretty shy.
    And I had no money.
    I was going-- I didn't have a car.
    And you needed a car to get around.
    And you needed money to take your girl
    to at least a drive-in, if not to the regular movie house.
    And with the kind of money I was making, I--
    gee whiskers And I figured, for a while, at least,
    I got to study.
    I got to concentrate my time on that business.
    I got to pick up my career.
    I was 27.
    I was doing the things that normally a kid of 18 and 19
    does-- prepare for a career in a profession.
    I was debating, when I'd come here, what am I going to be?
    I knew medicine was out, because that took too long.
    Law and all, you have to study full-time.
    The only thing I knew that I could
    study on a part-time basis was accounting.
    And since I'd been doing accounting
    and gotten some encouragement from people here,
    I studied accounting.
    I always kicked around the idea of studying law afterwards.
    But then by then, I was married, and had kids,
    and decided I'd stay with accounting.
    Never went into law.
    So tell me about this so dinner.
    So then we went to dinner at Singers'--
    Mr. and Mrs. Singer, and Paul, and Bernie.
    And we met those two girls.
    And I didn't have her married in 1948
    by another Shanghaier, Rabbi Gunther Gates, who was a rabbi
    in Alameda.
    He used to be in Shanghai.
    He was a teacher there at the school that my boss, Paul Komor
    had organized, the Kadoorie school--
    [? Gunther ?] [? Gassenheimer, ?] very nice
    fellow, very nice guy.
    And when he heard that I was getting married, he said,
    she was going to marry a Singer boy.
    And he says, oh, well, you're going to marry Bernie?
    No.
    Are you going to marry Walter Frank?
    Oh, a much better choice.
    Well, I don't know.
    She might have been happy with Bernie.
    I'm not so sure she would, looking back on it.
    She married you.
    She married me.
    As a matter of fact, we had planned a double wedding.
    And the girls had worked like heck
    and prepare for the 20th of August, 1948,
    when we'd have it.
    We'd rented the-- or made arrangements with the Claremont
    Hotel in Berkeley, which was a very prestigious, but very
    inexpensive facility.
    And they were shopping for wedding gowns.
    And all of a sudden, this Berlin airlift comes up.
    And my brother gets orders to go to Germany almost overnight.
    And so he and his fiancee went to City Hall in Oakland,
    got married by a judge.
    And Ida and I were the witness.
    And he packed up, and went back to the airbase,
    and flew off to Germany.
    And so we canceled the double wedding.
    And we were married in the temple in Alameda.
    We had a very small wedding meal, maybe 15 people or so.
    Again, the budget was low.
    And Ida's parents came out.
    And that's how we started married life.
    She was from California?
    No, she was a New Yorker, born in New York.
    And so was her sister.
    And her parents were from Russia by way of Argentina.
    And they had been in New York.
    And they were not happy with New York.
    They didn't like the men there, wiseguys--
    at least that's what she said.
    Maybe there were some nice people,
    she just didn't meet them.
    And they didn't like the life like that.
    So they came out to see what the other half looks
    like, what people in the Wild West do, you know.
    And Ida had worked for the navy for quite a while
    during the war and after the war and then worked
    for the Veterans Administration.
    She was an old government employee.
    Her sister was studying at University of California,
    was younger.
    And so she since she had a job at the VA
    on 13th Street in Oakland, at the old hotel
    Oakland, a huge building, which has suffered
    a lot of earthquake damage last October,
    I was able to quit my job at Capitals
    and look around for someone else.
    At least, I had time for a few weeks
    without all that money coming in-- not
    that I was making that much.
    Anyhow, Capitals, I had--
    I think it was--
    I'd made $48 a week.
    So I got my public accounting job.
    And I was making $35 a week.
    That's what happens in the professions, you know.
    The theory was that I would be getting
    $40 a week from the government under the GI Bill of Rights.
    That was the theory that they used in that particular office
    where I got my job.
    So they would pay $35 a week out of their pocket.
    The government would pay $40 a week.
    I'd make $75 a week, which is pretty reasonable kind
    of a salary.
    There's one problem with it.
    I wasn't an ex-GI.
    I wasn't under the GI Bill of Rights.
    But in order to compete to get into public accounting,
    I had to take the $35 a week.
    So between my wife's salary and my few bucks,
    we were able to make a living.
    A year later, I took the examination for--
    CPA examination, which is a three day sort of ordeal.
    I was lucky enough to pass it, all parts, on first try.
    And then in early 1950, I was getting to the point
    where I was making $75 a week.
    I was supposed to make $75 a week, not from the government,
    from my boss and city council.
    --the date and the people, and--
    Is this the 25 or--
    Fourth.
    Fourth.
    24?
    Yeah.
    Any time we're OK.
    OK.
    I'm Constance Bernstein, and I'm talking with Walter Frank.
    It is July 24, and we're at the Holocaust
    center in San Francisco.
    And this is my third interview with Walter, delightful.
    I think, Walter, that we have covered
    most of the events of your very rich life in terms
    of the experiences--
    Interesting life, not rich, but interesting.
    Well, I mean rich in experiences.
    And you're so remarkable because you remember so much.
    I want to ask you now about some personal repercussions
    or personal--
    the results of all these rich experiences,
    how it's affected you.
    But first of all, let's talk about some of the people
    you know.
    I know that you were very actively involved
    with many of the--
    with the Jewish community in the East Bay
    and with many people who are survivors
    or who come from-- who were with you in Shanghai.
    And let me ask you, how do you think
    that the experience, that kind of experience
    of being a survivor, has affected some of your friends
    that you know?
    Well, it's pretty hard to tell how my experiences affected
    my friends--
    No, how their--
    --how experiences affect them.
    I know it affected different people in different ways.
    Some people just can't talk about it.
    If they do talk about it, they made a point
    of talking about it once.
    As a matter of fact, in connection
    with this project that you're running here,
    I asked one of my friends here in San Francisco,
    a woman who's a little younger than I am,
    whether she'd be willing to be an interviewee for the program.
    And she told me that she'd been interviewed
    with some difficulties by the city of Berlin,
    by a part of the city of Berlin, and they
    invited her and other ex-Berliners back to the city.
    And she just couldn't see how she could do it again.
    Some people can't talk about it at all.
    I've been able to talk about it.
    In fact, I was asked at the University of California
    when I talked to a group of students
    there a number of years ago in a Berkeley Project
    where, I guess, there were four or five
    of us invited to talk to them whether I'd
    mind talking about it.
    And I said, no, I don't mind talking about it at all.
    Somebody's got to witness.
    I think somebody has got to be there
    and say, yes, I was there.
    This is what happened.
    And there are lots of others that do that.
    Why I can do it without some other kids breaking down
    about it, or choking up on it, or whatever I don't really
    know.
    It would probably take a psychiatrist
    to really figure it out.
    What I can visualize is that somewhere along the line--
    and this could have started in Buchenwald--
    I just built a shell around all these feelings to contain them
    and to protect myself against them.
    And this is why I can sit here and reasonably, coolly
    and, quite often, with some humor talk about all this.
    Another aspect is, of course, that,
    as you sit here comfortably among friends
    in a nice part of the United States,
    having had a reasonably good lunch--
    you can talk about these things.
    You can remember them.
    And you remember, usually, better the nice parts
    than the bad parts.
    What is much more difficult to recall, and talk about, and put
    into words is the terror, the fear, the hopelessness
    that you're actually experiencing
    when you're in a situation such as being in a concentration
    camp.
    Being in a death-- in a death camp
    it is even worse because at the time that I was in Buchenwald
    it was not really a death camp.
    It was a camp in which death came not only unsolicited
    but it came at random.
    Some SS men might take into his head to fire a shot at you.
    I know people were--
    the SS guards outside the camp would say, come over here,
    and the man went over there.
    Give me your hat, and he'd give them the hat.
    And they threw the hat outside and say, go pick it up.
    And then the prisoner, stupidly enough,
    would go and pick it up.
    And of course, walking past a sentry
    was equivalent to escaping.
    The sentry turned round and killed him,
    and the official report was "trying to escape."
    But that was random.
    It wasn't the killing by the numbers
    that started after Eichmann and the meeting
    in Wannsee, I guess it was, where they
    discussed the Final Solution.
    But when you're in the camp, you don't
    know when you'll get out, whether you'll get out,
    what shape you'll be in if you get out, and when you get out.
    You don't know that you're going to live,
    when you wake up in the morning, that you live out the day,
    or that you may be tortured that day one way or the other.
    You don't know any of these things.
    And you don't know what is going on outside.
    Is anybody working to get you out of there?
    Is your family all right?
    Are they still around?
    And on a larger scale, you don't know what the world
    is doing about all this.
    Is America intervening with the German government,
    protesting about this treatment of people, Jews and others?
    Does the world care?
    You don't know.
    And there is very often that feeling of either hopelessness
    or just about to lose hope.
    Why should you worry?
    Why should you carry on?
    Why should you try to survive another day, another hour?
    And so you keep going anyway.
    Some people didn't.
    Some people walked into the electric fences
    and killed themselves or, on the way to the electric fence,
    were shot by guards because they were passing
    through prohibited territory.
    But that's very difficult to recall,
    very difficult to recall.
    I saw an article in the Moment magazine--
    it just came out the other day--
    a first-person-singular account, "I captured Eichmann."
    And he reports that after Eichmann
    was put on a plane from Argentina
    to Israel, after the plane was airborne the flight crew was
    notified whom they had on board there.
    And there was one crew chief who broke down.
    He just went into a corner and broke down
    because he remembered at that point how, in the camp--
    and he'd been in the camp--
    the SS tore his six-year-old brother from his hand
    and killed the little boy.
    And he had to control himself not to turn around and kill
    Eichmann.
    As I say, I sit here, and I'm fairly cool about it.
    And I probably will remain that way, and I'll talk about it.
    And I will be talking about it to anybody who is interested
    in it, who wants to listen.
    And I wish I had more words, better words,
    had a bigger vocabulary to express all the things
    and remember the things, the bad things.
    You do remember the nice things.
    You remember the sunny days.
    It's very hard to remember the rain, and the mud,
    and the muck, the cold, freezing cold,
    and you're wearing nothing but a thin cotton
    uniform, practically no underwear, no gloves, shoes
    that are torn.
    It's very difficult to remember that.
    And of course, unfortunately, no one
    could make a on-the-spot report about it.
    A while back, a series of photographs was discovered.
    These were theirs-- color slides,
    which were a rarity during the war because color
    photography was fairly backward in those days,
    fairly expensive process.
    And they were taken by an SS official
    in Lodz, the Ghetto of Lodz, who was quite officially taking
    pictures.
    In fact, he took pictures of the camp commandant, city mayor,
    all those very proud and well-fed officials.
    And he also took pictures, of course, of the Jews,
    and they are now an exhibit in Frankfurt, the Jewish Museum.
    I'm going to try to see if he can get a copy of that exhibit.
    I'll have to see how expensive it
    is to translate that all to English because it's in German.
    But it might be an interesting exhibit for this area here.
    Another thing, I just had a letter from a photographer
    in Wiesbaden, to whom I wrote months ago.
    What happened there is that during the deportation
    of the last 480 Jews in August of 1942, 80 of whom
    committed suicide on one day, 80, mostly old people,
    a security service policeman took photographs secretly
    of what was going on there.
    And those photographs were found after the war.
    I think when he died, his widow turned them
    over to that photographer that I wrote to,
    and when I was over there a year ago,
    I asked him whether I could get copies of these pictures.
    And at that time, there was a copyright hold
    on those pictures.
    They were writing a book, publishing in the book.
    He just wrote me that the pictures the photographs are
    available at 9 marks a copy, which is, I guess,
    around $6 a copy.
    So I'll have to see how many of them
    there are and see whether it's financially feasible to buy
    them.
    But what I want to get eventually
    is a book that they're going to publish because, again, that's
    documentation.
    This is what happened.
    And the reason why I'm doing it--
    well, another 10, 20 years, 30 years, none of the people
    that went through all that will be around.
    If they're around, they probably won't remember much about it.
    And this has got to be part of our history.
    The next generation, the generation after that--
    it's got to remember it.
    Every year we celebrate Pesach.
    We have Passover Seders.
    We remember the exodus from Egypt.
    That's got to be remembered, a minimum of 2,000 years.
    And so we got to talk about it, and write about it,
    and increase the size of libraries such as the one
    you have out here.
    That's why I'm doing it.
    When you were in the camp, did you--
    when you talk about a shell being--
    you formed a shell around you, were you
    aware of that happening?
    No, no, you're not consciously aware that.
    It's not like building a radio, or fixing a watch,
    or building a house.
    I suppose your unconscious or your subconscious does that.
    And again, I'm guessing at it.
    I'm an accountant.
    I'm not a psychiatrist.
    I'm just guessing at it.
    And again, I'm talking to the layman about something
    I shouldn't be talking about.
    It's a defense mechanism.
    You've got to survive, and the only way to survive
    is to say, well, maybe it isn't happening.
    Maybe it isn't going to be so bad.
    Maybe you're going to get out, maybe.
    And you cast aside whatever fears there are.
    You try to.
    You try to get around it, and then you do, not always,
    but sometimes you do.
    And when did you notice that it was there, this shell?
    I don't think I noticed that it was there.
    I'm guessing that it's there.
    I'm just guessing I don't know that it is there.
    I don't know whether that is the explanation.
    And I'd probably have to spend a year or so in analysis
    to see whether there is a shell or not or whether I'm just
    dreaming, and I'm not going to spend that kind of money.
    It's $90 an hour even if I get a fairly inexpensive
    psychiatrist, and I got other uses for my money.
    Have you ever felt that you needed to talk to somebody--
    No.
    --a therapist, a doctor?
    No, no, I hadn't.
    I never felt that there was a point where I couldn't go on,
    where the only way out was to get somebody
    to try to explain it to me.
    I had given some thought to that because several times
    I've been asked, how come you can talk about it?
    And why can you talk about it?
    And all this thing, and don't you mind, all this thing.
    Why is it that I can talk about it and some others cannot?
    But then I'm not the only one.
    You've got 700 or so people on your roster
    here that are talking into the camera and into the tape.
    I remember seeing Eddie Weinschenke, who is--
    if you haven't got him on the tape, you should.
    He's a Dutch Jew, lives down the Peninsula,
    and he's very active in talking about his experience.
    He goes to schools and all that, and he
    talks about it very fluently and very eloquently.
    And I'm sure he's gone through the same sort
    of psychological--
    call it toughening-up that I've gone through without realizing
    it, without knowing about it.
    What about your brother?
    Did you notice with your brother any--
    He wasn't in the camp, so he was more on the outside.
    But he was-- when he was born and when
    we were young together, he was the kind of guy
    that wouldn't shut up.
    He was a talker.
    He had something to say about everything.
    And I remember one time when he might
    have been three or four years old my father said,
    if you can sit on this chair--
    or I think it was the kitchen range.
    It was cold range.
    If you can sit on the kitchen range for 15 minutes
    without saying anything, I'll give you 5 marks.
    And he sat in the kitchen range for 15 minutes,
    and he got his 5 marks.
    But he made up for it afterwards.
    He stopped talking.
    He doesn't-- he became very quiet,
    and he was quiet and didn't say very much.
    He kind of internalized it.
    Did he get quiet in Shanghai, from that experience?
    Yeah, well, I saw him again, of course, after I came home,
    and this was just a few days before we went to Shanghai.
    And while he wasn't the withdrawn type of person--
    but he had changed.
    He had changed already.
    He had changed.
    He had changed.
    Here he was still with it, and we
    played ping pong on board ship.
    But he was noticeably different more--
    call it more mature if you will.
    And he stayed that way, and he died just about 20 years ago,
    48 years old, some kind of a brain thing.
    I'm not sure what it was.
    I never found out quite what he died off.
    He was a dispatcher for Pan American Airways.
    He was the International President of the International
    Airline Dispatchers Association which involved his
    traveling all over the world, and inspecting airfields,
    and checking out facilities.
    And so he was a very good professional man
    within the field of dispatching aircraft and operations
    activity.
    But he was quieter.
    But maybe he would have been quieter anyway as he grew up.
    Kids do one thing, and adults do something else.
    So how do you think you changed?
    I?
    I don't know.
    One of the things that changed is
    that, having survived so many opportunities, not just
    Buchenwald but others, of cashing in my chips,
    I don't get too excited anymore about stuff.
    The question when I get excited is I ask myself,
    is this worth dying for?
    And if it isn't, then I don't get excited,
    which may have something to do with keeping my blood
    pressure under control.
    I had a chance--
    many chances of dying, of course, in the camp
    and afterwards in Shanghai.
    It was a very unhealthy place to be,
    and I was quite sick a couple of times with specific illnesses.
    Then after the war, when I worked for the Air Force,
    I was in a very bad Jeep accident
    and given 24 hours at the most, and I survived that.
    So I can't get too excited I'm living on borrowed time.
    I have been living on borrowed time for quite a while.
    I just celebrated my 70th, and I'm still around.
    And I can't get too excited, and that
    may be one of the philosophical results
    of all these experiences.
    So you measure everything against, is this dying for?
    In a way, in a way, yeah.
    Is this really worth dying for?
    If it isn't, then I don't get excited.
    There are very few things that are worth dying for.
    So you don't get worried, you mean?
    No.
    Like I'm coming here on the bus, getting number 31 Balboa bus,
    and I think we spent 15 minutes just
    going through Market Street.
    On one traffic light we watched it change seven times.
    That street was just blocked.
    I don't know what was going on there.
    Well, normally I say, God, why doesn't that bus move?
    I've got to get out of there.
    I've got to be there at 2:30 and so forth.
    But I had plenty of time anyway, so I didn't get excited.
    But even if I hadn't had any time, so I'm going to be late.
    So what?
    As it is, I was early.
    Nobody's going to kill you for being late, right?
    No, no, no.
    This is one thing I--
    that's a habit I picked up, I guess, in Germany.
    When somebody says, be there at 6:00,
    I'm there at 6:00, not at five after 6:00.
    It frustrates my wife.
    We get invited for dinner, and dinner's at 7:30.
    So I try to be there at 7:30, and my wife says,
    oh, you get there late, it's fine, plenty of time.
    But I had some early life experiences.
    I remember one time, going to school, I've been ill.
    I've been out with a cold for four or five days.
    I went back to school.
    I show up in school, and nobody there.
    Where's everybody?
    Well, there's a field trip.
    Oh my God.
    I'm missing out on a field trip, and there's a lot of fun.
    Where'd the field trip go?
    Such and such a place.
    I said, tell somebody--
    I found a kid that's going over there.
    Tell them to wait for me.
    I run home to quick, quick, pack me a sandwich.
    I got to go out on the field-- no, you can't go out on field.
    You just got out of bed with a cold.
    Well, the next day I got hell in school.
    Why didn't you show up?
    We waited for you, and so forth.
    Well, my mother didn't let me go.
    And it's kind of stayed in my mind till the day,
    and so I kind of hate-- when I promise something,
    I want to be--
    They expected you to be there.
    They expect me to be there, and the teacher
    gave me a big to-do.
    We waited a half hour for you.
    I said, well, I would have been there,
    but my parents wouldn't let me go, the kind of excuse
    that Calvin uses in his experiences
    if you read the Calvin comic strip.
    Oh, no.
    You don't?
    Well, you're missing something.
    I still read the comic strip, buy the books,
    and catch it up to date [INAUDIBLE]
    it's in the San Francisco Chronicle.
    That's not a commercial for the Chronicle, however.
    At least buy-- if anybody sees this in the future.
    That I can understand.
    If I ask your wife, also, what she thought
    the experience of being in the camp
    and being in Shanghai as a survivor, how
    she thought that affected you, what would she tell me?
    Gosh, I don't know.
    I don't know.
    She probably thinks I'm a little bit too German in my--
    and not necessarily survivor German but just
    generally German-- my approach to being
    on time, for example, which, as I understand it,
    is very un-American.
    You see, when you're invited, you're
    supposed to be 15 to 20 minutes late.
    Well, I just kind of hate to be late.
    You say 6:00, you mean 6:00.
    One time I had a speaking engagement
    in Salt Lake City at 6:00.
    I was supposed to meet an attorney at 6:00 in his office,
    and we were going over to where I was going to give my lecture.
    And I had figured it out.
    I left here, and drove to the airport, and took the plane,
    and got on a bus in Salt Lake City,
    and I walked into his office at 6:00 sharp,
    all this distance with all the possible delays.
    But I was there on time.
    It's the kind of thing I like to do.
    I haven't been able to do it all the time, but I like to do it.
    Well, there's something about being
    able to plan, isn't there, so that the outcome, which maybe
    has something to do with your experience of being
    out of control?
    You like to be in control and to feel
    that you can do something--
    Maybe that's it.
    Maybe being in control is one of those things that's--
    I wasn't in control during the Hitler period.
    The control was taken away from me,
    and I like to be in control.
    That includes planning ahead.
    When do you leave?
    What kind of transportation do you take?
    How do you get there?
    If necessary, I get myself maps of the area.
    I check for car rental facilities if it's out of town
    and I can't take my car.
    And it's all planned ahead.
    We are planning to go to the University of Judaism
    in August for a week on an Elderhostel trip.
    And I've got it all pretty well-worked
    out so that I know when I'll get there.
    And unless the airplanes are late or fall down unexpectedly,
    we'll be there on time, and I got that under control.
    So you have everything planned.
    Yeah.
    Except for one thing--
    I know that once I'm--
    once I'm at the airport I'm subject to whatever
    delays the airlines have, and there's not
    a thing you can do about it.
    And there's no point getting frustrated and excited about it
    because that's the way it is in the airline business.
    When I went to Germany a year ago,
    I was supposed to leave at 2:00 from San Francisco,
    and so my son took me over there, dropped me off at 1:30.
    And I went to the check-in counter and checked my baggage,
    and then I was told, the plane isn't here yet
    and it's going to be delayed.
    How long?
    Oh, I don't know, an hour or two.
    So what?
    Once I'm in transit, I'm in transit.
    It turned out I left at 3:00 instead of the 2:00, or 3:30.
    That doesn't get me excited.
    But where I am in charge I want to be on time.
    So what does excite you?
    Well, lots of things, I suppose.
    Good food, good books, an interesting problem
    in the office.
    My grandchildren-- they excite me, four, five, and seven--
    it's a handful.
    Last Saturday, we had them over to our house.
    We were babysitting while their parents went
    to see Les Miserables, which we'd send them to as a birthday
    present.
    We had hamburgers for dinner.
    We had only one bun in the house.
    We hadn't planned that.
    And I had that bun, and my four-year-old granddaughter
    insisted that she wanted a piece of that bun,
    so I gave it to her.
    Well, sure.
    Well, she took a bite out of it, and she decided, no, she
    doesn't want it.
    So her seven-year-old cousin next to her grabs it and says,
    I'll eat it.
    That's the way it goes from generation to generation.
    That's exciting, from generation to generation, seven years old.
    So I asked her whether she knows what that means in Hebrew,
    and she didn't know that.
    But now she does.
    I taught her that, l'dor, v'dor, from generation to generation.
    So did you send your-- did you raise your children as very--
    As Jews?
    Very much as Jews in Hebrew school and--
    Oh, yeah, Oh, yeah.
    Oh, yeah, yeah.
    They went to-- they went to a public school in Berkeley,
    but they went to all the Jewish schools, and Hebrew classes,
    and all that stuff at Temple Beth-El,
    and they were bar mitzvahed, of course, naturally.
    And then they married--
    my youngest son married a daughter of a survivor
    from Germany.
    They live in the Peninsula.
    The parents live in the Peninsula.
    And my youngest son and his wife live in Forestville.
    My oldest boy announced that he was planning
    to get engaged to a young lady who wasn't Jewish, which
    caused a lot of discussion.
    She converted, became Jewish, and now they're
    members of the Orthodox shul in Berkeley
    and are strictly kosher, strictly
    observant, to the point where I'm not that strict.
    And their kids go--
    the daughter goes to a Jewish day school now,
    and their son, Will, when he gets
    to-- the five-year-old, when he gets to be six,
    will go to that school.
    And of course, the grandparents help out financially.
    So they're, if there's such a thing, more Jewish than we are.
    Now, how do you explain that?
    I don't know.
    I don't know.
    My grandparents on my father's side were Orthodox.
    That is my father's parents.
    Our house-- we were a member of what
    might be called the liberal temple in Wiesbaden.
    Here you might call it Conservative.
    My wife's parents were Orthodox.
    She grew up in an Orthodox household.
    We have a Conservative household.
    We try to keep kosher, but not that strict.
    My son, when we have--
    when he comes over for Friday night Shabbos dinner,
    he takes a look at the package of cookies
    to be sure that there's no milk in it
    if we had meat or milk powder or anything like that.
    It's not kosher.
    He is strictly Orthodox, and he knows more
    about customs and rules than I do now.
    When I give a talk and I do that quite often
    at either the Torah study group we have at Temple Beth-El
    or at the prayer book study group, which was just
    started out, I use his library for research
    because he's got more stuff than I do, which is nice.
    It's nice, in a way.
    It's a step backwards--
    not backwards in the sense of bad, but in a step back to--
    Conservative to Orthodox Judaism.
    It's fine.
    But it's interesting--
    It's interesting.
    --that he married a non-Jewish woman.
    And she is-- she is more--
    she watches out more than he does, as a matter of fact.
    She speaks Hebrew more-- she speaks more Hebrew than my wife
    does, and my wife grew up in Brooklyn, New York,
    which is the cradle of American Judaism, very, very, very--
    she's right with it.
    How did you feel about that initially, though?
    Well, initially we were upset, marrying a non-Jewish woman.
    You can't do that.
    There's just no way.
    There's just no-- just no way.
    We've got to talk to her.
    If she wants to convert, fine, but if she doesn't convert,
    boy, it's going to be some real trouble.
    She converted, and she became more Jewish than we are.
    So it really was--
    because sometimes parents object to the non-Jewish man or woman
    not because they're non-Jewish so much religiously
    but because of the culture, or the ethics, or the family,
    or the blood.
    But for you it was a matter of the religion?
    Religion.
    My point was we have lost six million Jews in World War
    II during the Holocaust.
    We cannot afford to lose even one.
    And if there is a mixed marriage,
    usually you lose the Jewish part, usually,
    not always, but usually.
    It kind of drifts out of the fold.
    And next thing the kids--
    Jewish father, non-Jewish mother, the kids are nothing.
    But it's not unusual that sort of thing happens.
    I've known a number of Jewish ladies
    who started out as non-Jews, became converted, and became
    Jewish and very much so, very much so.
    In one case I'm familiar with, the woman
    became so Jewish and so locked into the Orthodoxy
    that her husband couldn't take it anymore.
    And she moved to Israel.
    He's here.
    She insisted that's the way she wants to be, with her folks,
    their kind.
    There is a convert.
    But it's interesting because in Germany it was the time--
    the last century and during the beginning of this century
    there was a lot of conversion or a lot of integration,
    and is that something you are responding to now
    that you see this happening in this society
    and you don't want it to happen?
    You're afraid that--
    Well, in a way.
    I don't think I'm responding to what happened in Germany.
    I'm simply saying that at this point,
    having lost six million people, we Jews
    should make every effort not to lose any more.
    There's a lot of this assimilation going on.
    There's a lot of intermarriage going on,
    a lot more in the States and elsewhere,
    but particularly in the States where the largest
    Jewish group lives nowadays.
    And we've got to make every effort not to lose any more.
    I know-- I'm reading a book that was published by a Leo Baeck
    Institute, which--
    a rough translation of the title -- it's in Germany.
    A rough translation is, Life Experiences
    of German Jews from 1780 to 1945.
    It's a collection of diaries, memoirs,
    personal recollections, first-person-singular
    recollections, or recollections by children
    of what their fathers and mothers did,
    all covering that period from 1780
    the time of Frederick the Great to 1945,
    the end of World War II.
    And you read that, and as you get into the 1800, 1820,
    '30, '40, '50 era you'll find a lot of this moving
    out of the faith.
    A lot of the people who became judges or other major officials
    found it was a lot easier being a judge if you were a Catholic.
    And there's the old story about the Jew who wants to convert,
    and he becomes a Catholic.
    And about a year later, he converts again,
    becomes a Protestant.
    So he's asked, how come Catholic and Protestant?
    He says, well, it's very simple.
    He says, if I'm in court for something
    and the judge asked me what's my religion, I'll say Protestant.
    And he says, and what was it before?
    I'll say Catholic.
    He doesn't say Jewish.
    It's Catholic.
    Well, it's a story that may be typical of the days
    and the times.
    There were a lot of intermarriages.
    There were a lot of people drifting out of the faith.
    But there were a lot of them that stayed right in it.
    Incidentally, that book has one of those memoirs which
    were written by a Wiesbaden resident, a former Wiesbaden
    resident name of Max Berger, who recalls his days in Buchenwald.
    He was there at the same time I was there
    and my father was there.
    And he says that as he's stumbling around,
    and in this muck and mist and there's
    a roll call, and confusion, he comes upon a man lying
    on the ground semi-conscious.
    And there's six other Wiesbaden people standing around him
    to prevent people from stepping on him,
    and it turns out to be my father.
    And so he had a bottle of mouthwash
    in his pocket, so he was able to wet my father's lips
    and let him smell the smell of the peppermint
    or whatever it was and revived him long enough so that they
    could stand him up, two people holding him,
    because there was a roll call, and they're supposed to stand.
    And my father revived some more, and then people around him
    were collapsing.
    And so my father, as a physician with this little bottle
    of mouthwash which he borrowed, kind of
    walked around trying to help other people that
    collapsed until the SS came and told him to cut it out or else.
    I hadn't known about that incident
    because I'd been separated from my father
    almost immediately upon arrival in the camp.
    And Max Berger, Hans Berger, who told that story, was my boss.
    I worked for him before I was arrested
    and before he was arrested.
    He wrote that story in Belgium after he was released and left
    Germany and sent it to somebody who
    wrote it up and sent it to Leo Baeck Institute, I suppose.
    Berger himself and his family disappeared in France,
    no trace, probably captured by the Germans.
    His brother is in the States, or at least he was--
    I don't know whether he's still alive--
    somewhere in Southern California, Tulare,
    something like that.
    Did you tell us about your father in the--
    did he come home earlier than you?
    Yes.
    He was in the camp for two weeks and was released.
    During those two weeks, I saw him once,
    and he looked terrible.
    He apparently had some kind of a breakdown, and maybe
    that first day or second day when Berger ran across him
    and he was in what was called The Revier.
    Revier was sort of a first aid station.
    And he may have been released for any number of reasons.
    One is the breakdown he had.
    The others-- that he had the Iron Cross from the First World
    War.
    He was a medical officer in the German army, captain.
    That may have been what got him out,
    but he was released after two weeks.
    He went home, and then he and my mother
    got busy getting our immigration together,
    and I told you about that.
    And I was there five months.
    Now, you know they have groups for children of survivors
    to come together and to talk about their experiences.
    Can you understand that some of them
    might need to talk to each other?
    I know they do.
    I don't exactly know why because again we get into psychiatry
    and what moves their minds.
    We had been involved with one of those groups
    many years ago when we had some minor problems with our kids,
    and we thought that maybe this was one of the reasons,
    that they were kids of survivors.
    But it turned out it had nothing to do with it,
    and it was a short-lived sort of a problem which
    was solved rather quickly.
    But I had read books about it, and I
    understand that, in some cases, the children pick up--
    call it the vibes of their parents, tension, nervousness,
    unhappiness, nightmares, whatever.
    In that case, if that happens, the children of survivors
    need help.
    And I can understand it.
    I have no personal experience with it, though.
    Sometimes they can carry the pain for their parents.
    Yeah, it could be that some cases, people
    who went through what I did or went through a lot worse--
    because I can't, by any means, say
    that I went through the things that people
    did that went through Auschwitz or that
    went all the way to 1945 and managed to survive by a hair--
    that they maybe have much shorter fuses.
    They get excited more easily.
    They fly off the handle more easily.
    And that, of course, reflects on the children, more nerves,
    more tense.
    In that case, the children need counseling
    or whatever other psychiatric help is necessary.
    If I were to ask your children how
    they felt being the children of a survivor,
    do you think they would--
    I don't know what they would say.
    I really don't know.
    I don't know that they would respond one way or another.
    I can't speak for them.
    I just don't know, with the exception at one point where we
    thought there might be some problem,
    but it turns out there wasn't.
    I haven't seen any evidence that they would be affected
    or infected in any way.
    My younger son studied psychology and became a--
    he has a master's degree in psychology
    and has been practicing, hasn't practiced recently,
    has been practicing in that field for some time.
    And he'd probably know more about it than I do.
    Yes, it would be interesting to hear his whole situation.
    I don't know how he would respond.
    Then he went into psychiatry?
    Well, more psychology.
    For psychiatry you need an MD.
    And what did your other children do?
    What did they become?
    Well, the two boys--
    one became a psychologist and stopped his--
    didn't continue on for a PhD, became married.
    His wife was a potter.
    She studied pottery at UC Santa Cruz, where my son went.
    That's where they met.
    And so she started a business, and he went in with her.
    And he does all the chemistry, and he
    does all the bookkeeping.
    And he goes out to the shows and sells it.
    They're so busy with that he has no time
    to practice his profession.
    So she's a potter?
    He's a potter in a way.
    He does--
    And they do well?
    They do reasonably well.
    They'll never be rich with that little two-car garage workshop
    type of thing.
    In pottery, you don't get much money
    unless you can hire 100 people to do the work that you do
    or that you design and then they turn it out en masse.
    They do almost everything themselves.
    They have one or, at the most, two employees.
    But they make a respectable living.
    And the other one became a registered nurse.
    He started out--
    This is the Orthodox one?
    That's the older one, yeah.
    He started out with a degree in political science,
    and when he graduated from UC Berkeley
    the only job in that field that he was really interested in
    had already been taken.
    Fellow name of Kissinger had it.
    He wanted to be Secretary of State.
    And since the job was taken, he decided to do something else,
    so he got a job in a restaurant as a busboy and a salad man.
    And then he took some courses from the Red Cross
    in first aid, and that was interesting.
    Then he switched to get a job with Acme Western Ambulance
    Company in Oakland, which is one of the outfits that runs
    ambulances and emergency calls.
    And so he worked in that field for about a year or two,
    driving the ambulance and helping people.
    And then he decided to study nursing
    and went to Merritt Hospital School of Nursing, which
    is one of the oldest in the area and put himself
    through school running the ambulance job, became an RN,
    and then went to work at Dominican Hospital in Santa
    Cruz in the emergency room because you liked
    that adrenaline-charged atmosphere,
    quick, quick, quick, quick, quick,
    there's somebody bleeding to death.
    You've got to do something about it, code blue.
    A person-- the heart has stopped and breathing stopped.
    What do you do?
    It's one, two, three stuff.
    And then he went to Stanford at the expense of the hospital,
    and studied further, and became what's
    called a mobile intensive care nurse.
    That's a nurse that's at the radio,
    at the hospital, and then the people in the field,
    the paramedics, radio in, say, we have a man, age 56,
    and his heart is slow, and his pulse is such, on a respirator.
    What do we do?
    The nurse gives them instructions,
    whether you give him an IV with ringers
    and transfer it immediately or whether you bandage him up,
    or you do this, or you do that.
    He studied for that.
    And then after a while that got to him.
    It's a highly charged atmosphere,
    a lot of pressure, a lot of tension.
    A lot of stress.
    So he left that job, moved into the Bay Area,
    and got a job at Children's Hospital in Oakland,
    and worked there for a number of years,
    working in pediatric nursing.
    And now he works for a registry primarily at Kaiser Hospital
    in San Francisco in the pediatric unit
    because he likes working with kids.
    That's his big thing.
    And he's good with them.
    That's what he does.
    And his wife is a nurse, and she's not working now
    because she just doesn't want to be in that field anymore,
    but she was in obstetrics.
    So they were on both ends of the scale.
    She was bringing people into the world,
    and he was working on the other side,
    with people coming in that were just about ready to die.
    He wanted to have cards printed, "William Frank, RN.
    If you're at death's door, call me.
    I'll pull you through."
    He's a character.
    He has a sense of humor.
    He wrote a-- there was a contest for a number of years
    as to who can write the best Hemingway parody.
    In the Bay Guardian.
    Well, it's not the Bay Guardian.
    It was the-- oh, what's that restaurant called
    on Van Ness and McAllister?
    It's a restaurant which is in Venice, Italy,
    and that's where Hemingway used to hang out,
    Harry's Bar and Grill, Harry's Bar and Grill.
    And they sponsored it every year, and he ended it.
    He was one of the 25 finalists.
    Oh, was he?
    Didn't quite make the final cut, but they published a book,
    and he's in that book, a story that he wrote.
    It was a typical Hemingway story.
    And I think I mentioned that I had written up
    my memories from day one, May 26, 1920, to the day
    that I left Shanghai.
    But I had them on an old system, on an Apple III using VisiCalc,
    and I needed them translated.
    And I turned this over to Convert.
    Somebody here mentioned Convert.
    They couldn't quite cut it.
    They were able to get it to some point,
    but they couldn't do it all the way,
    so they gave me back my disk and whatever they had.
    And I turned it over to Will, and he turned it
    all the way around.
    Oh, really?
    And now I've got it on my machine, and I can massage it.
    And he found out that I'd written the introduction
    as the last chapter, which--
    you write an introduction after you got the book together,
    not first.
    That was my last file.
    So he sent me a note along with the disks
    that he had converted successfully, and he says,
    next time you write a book, start at the beginning
    and then write it to the end.
    He said, it makes a lot more sense that way.
    Trust me on this.
    Which could be signed "Chutzpah."
    You know what that is?
    I know what that means, yeah, one of the words--
    You know the definition of Chutzpah?
    It's the child that killed his father and mother
    and throws himself on the mercy of the court
    because he's an orphan.
    There are other definitions, but not for the tape.
    Tell me-- I'm going to ask you a kind of political question now.
    But it's a personal question, too.
    About the Holocaust Museum, how would you--
    do you have any feelings about how
    you want to see the Holocaust remembered
    in terms of a museum?
    Because I understand there's a lot
    of debate about just what it should be.
    Are you talking about the big one that's
    planned for Washington, DC?
    Yes, that one as well.
    Any ideas you have about how you would like this experience
    remembered?
    There are so many ways in which you can put a museum together.
    I'm involved in a museum.
    As you know, I'm involved with the Magnes Museum in Berkeley.
    I'm the Chief Financial Officer.
    It used to be called treasurer.
    Under the new legislation, it's called Chief Financial Officer.
    It doesn't mean more money, either in salary
    or for the museum, but that's what I'm doing.
    There's so many ways in which you
    can emphasize what you want to show about the Holocaust,
    and I've seen a number of those museums.
    I've seen, of course, the Holocaust room at the Magnes
    Museum, which is a very, very miniature sort of thing.
    I've seen Holocaust museums in Israel.
    That is the, of course, Yad Vashem, which
    is probably the best known.
    There's one in one of the kibbutzim
    that is very well-done.
    So I don't have any preconceived ideas about how to do it.
    If I were to ask-- if I were asked to design one,
    I'd probably sit down, and give it a lot of thought,
    and maybe design and lay out what I would emphasize on it.
    But I have no opinions on it right now one way or the other.
    But there are so many different ways in which you can do it.
    The main thing is you don't get kitschy about it.
    What do you mean by that?
    Well, you know what kitsch is?
    It's a German word.
    Kitsch was-- nationaler Kitsch, national kitsch, for example,
    were ashtrays with a swastika in the center.
    That was-- and they sold this type of stuff
    during Hitler period.
    Everything had a swastika on it.
    They made an ashtray, put a swastika in the middle.
    So you flick your ashes on the swastika.
    And of course, that's desecrating the flag,
    not exactly burning it, but it's desecrating the flag,
    German flag.
    From my point of view, do it 20 times, but that
    was considered nationaler Kitsch, sort of schmaltzy,
    poorly done.
    That's what I wouldn't want to see.
    But I just don't have an idea right now.
    I haven't given any thought to it.
    I think some of the differences of opinion
    had to do with, do you want to remember the Jews--
    the Holocaust survivors should be just Jews?
    That's one of the big issues.
    Should it be just the Jews, or should it
    be other, estimated, five million non-Jews, Gypsies,
    and homosexuals, and whatever else that Hitler considered
    to be less than worthwhile citizens or Untermenschen,
    you know, subhumans?
    The mental defectives, the handicapped people--
    handicapped-- they can't even run.
    You just have to feed them.
    Kill them.
    Should that be remembered?
    And that's a big debate.
    It seems to me that the Holocaust should remember--
    if you ask that question, the Holocaust
    should remember all the people that were killed,
    not merely the Jews.
    If you put out--
    if you put up a Jewish Holocaust museum, of course,
    the emphasis should be in the Jews.
    But the museum and the public should not
    close its eyes to the fact that others were killed.
    I said, I, think on the tape first time
    around that when I came to Buchenwald, when
    we, November Jews, came to Buchenwald, almost 10,000
    of us, there were already 12,000 prisoners
    in the camp, regular prisoners, people that
    had been there for a while ever since the camp had opened
    since 19--
    the summer of 1937.
    That's about a year and a half later.
    Of those 12,000 prisoners, 10,000 were not Jewish.
    2,000 were.
    10,000 were Catholics, people who refused to work,
    homosexuals, criminals.
    The custom in Germany was that, if you had committed a crime,
    you served your sentence imposed by the court-- two years,
    three years, one year, six months--
    and you walked out to the jail a free man.
    And there was a Gestapo, picked you up
    and threw you into a camp, indefinite period of time.
    And there you rotted.
    And so 10,000 of those people in Buchenwald,
    part of the regular camp of 12,000, were not Jewish.
    Now, they weren't gassed.
    They weren't burned.
    They weren't poisoned the way we were,
    and particularly, as the war went on, I think a lot of them
    were released and transferred into, possibly,
    punishment battalions on the front someplace.
    But they suffered.
    The Gypsies were wiped out, and that should not be overlooked.
    It should not be parochial.
    It should not be a narrow view.
    And I know there's a lot of debate about that.
    I've said it before and I've had some people complain about it.
    And they said, we shouldn't worry about the others.
    We should worry about our six million, et cetera.
    Yeah, that's true.
    Six million died, and percentagewise
    is a lot more than the others.
    Outside of that, any organization
    of the size of Holocaust Museum in Washington--
    it's bound to be political in some ways, even
    with its internal organizational politics or whatever it is.
    And I hate to get involved in that.
    Well, have you seen the sculpture by the Palace of--
    Yes.
    I think it's the Legion of Honor.
    Legion of Honor, the one where they had the brass
    railing stolen the other day.
    Oh, really?
    You didn't know that?
    No.
    It was in the papers.
    The caretaker came in the morning.
    He comes here, I think, once a week
    or so, maybe even every day, and washes off
    the figures, hoses off the dirt, dust, and whatever.
    And they check, and he found that the brass railings
    around it had been removed.
    And according to the newspapers, the police
    are treating that as a pure theft
    not as a antisemitic desecration.
    The brass is very expensive.
    You can sell it in the secondhand market.
    Yes, I've seen it.
    What do you think of that?
    It's impressive.
    I've seen the photographs.
    We've had an exhibit of the photographs
    of that particular exhibit at the Magnes Museum.
    I know the photographer very well who did that,
    and I know the sculptor who did it.
    It's an impressive figure.
    But it's hard to convey.
    It's very hard to convey the real horror of it
    all, and I go back to what I said when we started off
    this session.
    It's very hard to convey it.
    I remember seeing that film, The Holocaust, the television show,
    not film, television show, a series of one
    or two-hour shows for a period of days.
    Well, I remember that scene where the doctor
    and his former patient and friend
    walking towards the gas chambers and kind of joking.
    They didn't look like they'd been in the concentration camp.
    They looked too well-fed.
    And it's hard to do.
    I mean, you can't take an actor for a movie
    and starve him for three or four months
    so that he looks like somebody--
    you can try to make it up.
    Makeup and so on will do some of it.
    But it's very tough, very tough to really bring back
    the actual happening, the fear.
    You stand there at roll call, and it's ice-cold.
    And the whistled right through you, through your ribs.
    And you don't know whether you're even
    going to make it to breakfast.
    It's 5:00 in the morning.
    It's hard to convey that.
    I'm sure it is.
    It's even hard to remember.
    I'm sure-- I'm sure it is really difficult to translate
    that for anybody else.
    So what you remember, which is normal in the human mind--
    you remember the funny things that happened.
    You remember the fact that you survived.
    But you didn't know that you were going to survive.
    You didn't know that you--
    I didn't know I was going to be there five months.
    And there's something about translating the reality
    into words that--
    Very difficult.
    --misses the point.
    It's very difficult.
    The words just can't have the emotion of what you're feeling.
    That's right.
    So that whole translation process loses the impact.
    It's filtered.
    It's filtered.
    Your memories are filtered through time.
    You forget some of the things.
    Sometimes you remember something that, all of a sudden,
    comes to mind.
    Here, this is what happened.
    And there are people--
    Eli Wiesel is one of them-- who try
    to convey that as eloquently as he can, and he's eloquent.
    He's very good, both in writing and in speaking.
    And I've heard him speak.
    And there are others that may be good or that are good,
    but it's hard.
    What did you think of Primo Levi?
    He kind of reminds me of--
    the way he writes is kind of the way you talk, I mean,
    with such detailed precision and everything.
    And I was always just so impressed by the details
    he remembered.
    I thought he did a good job of translating.
    And then there are some novels that are based loosely
    on the Holocaust.
    I think The Last Just Man-- was it?
    What was that?
    Oh, yes, The Last of the Just.
    The Last of the Just.
    That's one of them.
    It's a wonderful book.
    Excellent, excellent.
    I think that's probably--
    And they can bring it--
    --poignant book that I have ever read about the Holocaust.
    Yeah, they can bring it to mind.
    Yeah, by Schwarz-Bart.
    Or a little capsule like the story
    I mentioned to you from Moment magazine, from the--
    that scene on the plane, the Israeli plane
    that's taken off from Buenos Aires for Israel.
    And the air crew at that moment is
    informed whom they have on board, Eichmann, and their crew
    chief breaks down.
    You read that, and tears come to your eyes.
    All of a sudden it hits you.
    Little vignettes kind of translate the message.
    That's right.
    Any movies that you've seen that you thought
    conveyed the message?
    Well, sure, of which I've seen the part was
    very stark in the cold-blooded, cold-blooded
    telling by former SS people.
    One of the famous scenes in Shoah
    is the discussion and the--
    the man who was-- the SS officer who
    was from one of the camps in Auschwitz or whoever he was,
    doesn't even know he's been photographed.
    And he's being interviewed about what's going on in the camp.
    Is it really true that you killed
    and gassed 20,000 people a day?
    And he said, oh, that's a gross exaggeration.
    He says, no, no, maybe 16,000, at the most 17,000, not 20,000.
    Like it's a job.
    How many typewriters you turn out every week?
    700?
    No, no, at the most 500.
    Or Eichmann, when you discussed his activities
    with one of the guards, in fact, with the man who captured him--
    again, it's on the plane to Israel and sometime afterwards.
    He can't understand what all the fuss is all about.
    He really had nothing to do with it.
    I didn't know it was going on the camps.
    My job was to transport them, and that's what I did.
    And I did a great job.
    But didn't you realize--
    well, yeah, but I had nothing to do with that.
    My job was transportation.
    I'm very proud that I did such a great job.
    In fact, I had a lot of difficulties
    with the German army.
    They wanted to take my trains away to move troops,
    and I just wouldn't let them do it.
    I had a job to do.
    I had to move those Jews to Auschwitz, and Birkenau,
    or whatever, and I'm very proud of it.
    But don't you realize there were children there?
    Yeah, I know, but after all, it's a job.
    I did the job right.
    What's the matter with you?
    That's the kind of thing that gets you,
    the mind, the doublethink.
    The incident which I also related
    about where my father's cousin had been released
    from Buchenwald, Dr. Emil--
    Dr. Julius Fackenheim, the father of Dr. Emil Fackenheim,
    was a very well-known rabbi and philosopher in Israel.
    And he'd been released in the middle of December.
    And about a week, 10 days later, I
    was called up to department one at Buchenwald,
    and I was taken into an office by an SS officer.
    And he said, do I know Dr. Julius Fackenheim.
    I said, sure do, yes.
    And where is he?
    I said, well, he released about a week, 10 days ago.
    Oh, where did he go?
    I said, I assume he went back to Holland.
    Why do you want to know?
    And he said, well, we found a savings account passbook,
    and we've got to return it to him, registered mail.
    We want to be sure he gets it.
    I think I said Kafka.
    That kind of thing that--
    that's the German mind.
    At the same time, this fellow wouldn't
    have had any hesitation to either beat him or me to death.
    But now that he was out of the camp,
    I have to return his property.
    Strange.
    And that's Eichmann.
    That's a lot of these people.
    That's the fellows interviewed in Shoah.
    What impressed me about Shoah, I remember the little boy
    who had such a golden voice--
    that was in the first part of the Shoah.
    And they used to-- the soldiers used to, every morning,
    I guess, take him down in the boat, and he would be--
    they'd make him sing the whole trip down.
    And the villagers, the Polish villagers, years
    and years later--
    I remember that.
    --when the crew went back, they said, oh, sure,
    we remember him.
    He was the one with a golden voice.
    We called him Little Boy With the Golden-- oh, sure,
    we know him.
    We were-- like they blocked out everything that was going on,
    and it was like they didn't put this little boy
    in the context of his being from the concentration camp.
    No, they wouldn't put that together.
    They didn't experience it.
    They were non-Jewish.
    They didn't have the problem.
    Concentration camp is something that they heard about maybe,
    and if they did hear about it, that built a shell
    around themselves.
    There was someone I don't want to talk about because I
    might get into trouble.
    The real problem right now is the answer to the question,
    could it happen again?
    And I think it could.
    There's no such thing as never.
    It can never happen again?
    There's no such thing.
    In 1492-- that's just about 500 years ago--
    the Jews of Spain were told to get out
    of Spain in one night, 24 hours, out, finished.
    Well, today no one really talks much about it.
    It's a historical footnote, not to us as much as to others.
    More people remember that 1492 was
    the year in which Columbus discovered
    America for the second time.
    Eric the Red discovered it earlier.
    But there was Columbus and his allegedly Jewish mapmaker,
    Amerigo Vespucci.
    So America is named after a Jew after all.
    But this happened 500 years ago, and when you read exodus,
    the second book of the Bible, chapter one-- you read in 21--
    I think it's 21 very short verses how the family of Jacob
    came to Egypt, and grew, and became the people of Israel,
    not the family of Israel but the people of Israel,
    and how they got very numerous.
    And then pharaoh got nervous about it
    and decided to wipe them all out.
    So it's happened before, and if you don't watch out,
    it's going to happen again.
    So what do you think the Jews should
    do to be vigilant about this?
    Be very careful, very vigilant, be
    very vigilant, very vigilant, as vigilant you can be.
    Don't look for another guy with a little mustache
    and a hair slicked back.
    Maybe the next guy has a kindly face and has no hair at all.
    What are the warning signals that Jews should be aware of?
    Any infringement of personal liberties,
    any infringement of personal liberties.
    On a group.
    On a group.
    On a group.
    On a group, whether that is an infringement
    of the liberties guaranteed in this country
    by the Constitution or in other countries similarly.
    Some very nice people might turn out to be not so nice at all.
    Hitler looked nasty, and everybody is looking around.
    Is there another guy around with a mustache?
    The next guy doesn't have a mustache.
    Are you concerned about that now--
    Oh, yeah.
    --about that happening?
    Oh, yeah.
    And what makes you concerned?
    Do you see antisemitism on the rise?
    I'll give you an example.
    You remember McCarthy, Senator McCarthy?
    Mm-hm.
    I remember during Senator McCarthy's time Joe Asher, who
    passed away a little while ago, a Rabbi at Temple Emanu-El,
    and I were having lunch.
    And he said-- well, he says, I can always
    go back to Australia.
    I still have Australian citizenship.
    I'm a member of the Australian Air Force during the war.
    And he says, where are you going to go?
    And I said, I don't know where I'm
    going to go, maybe Canada, maybe somewhere.
    But we were giving some serious thought of getting out
    of the United States because it looked like there
    was another Hitler coming, except his name was McCarthy,
    and he spoke English.
    You just don't know.
    And you've got to read the books of people,
    and you got to read their opinions
    if they happen to be judges.
    If we had read the book that Hitler wrote, Mein Kampf,
    and if we had believed it, we would
    have gotten out in 1925, 1926.
    He wrote it in 1923.
    He said in the book what he was going to do.
    Crazy, he isn't going to do it, a lot of baloney.
    He's never going to make it.
    And when he was elected, well, the next election
    they're going to vote him out again,
    and he isn't going to do that.
    He just got to say that to get elected.
    But now he wants to do business internationally,
    and so he can't really do all these-- well, he did.
    We were too complacent.
    I'm not saying I was complacent.
    I was too young to know what's going on and make decisions,
    but a lot of German Jews thought that they
    were more German than Hitler.
    And that's why-- don't pay attention
    to an Austrian corporal.
    And so, not believing Hitler's book,
    they stayed, and I. So you've got to be careful.
    Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
    Somebody said that.
    I didn't know, I know.
    I just repeat that.
    Well I want to thank you very much.
    I want to make sure you get across the Bay
    before the traffic.
    My pleasure.
    Yeah, I think I will.
    Thank you very much.
    By the way, this audio tape--
    this is off the record now?
    You want me to turn this off?
    Yeah, I think so.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Walter Frank was born Walter Fackenheim in May 1920 in Wiesbaden, Germany. His father was a physician and his mother was a homemaker. Mr. Frank was educated in Wiesbaden and, unable to continue on to college due to antisemitism in Nazi Germany, worked as a commercial apprentice and attended commercial training school. After the events of Kristallnacht in November 1938 and the arrest and imprisonment in Buchenwald of himself and his father, the Fackenheim family fled Germany for Shanghai, China.

    While in Shanghai, Mr. Frank worked as a clerk in a laundry and became involved with a relief committee established by Hungarian diplomat Paul Komor - The International Committee for the Organization of European Immigrants in China. Mr. Frank's father died in 1943, and his mother died in September 1945. After the end of World War II, Mr. Frank and his brother Eric worked for the Shanghai air transport field which was under the control of American troops.

    In 1947, Mr. Frank and his brother immigrated to the United States, and changed their names from Fackenheim to Frank. Mr. Frank became an accountant. He met and married his wife Ida Katz in 1948 and they had two sons.
    Interviewee
    Walter Frank
    Date
    interview:  1990 May 15
    interview:  1990 June 14
    interview:  1990 July 24
    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
    Genre/Form
    Oral histories.
    Extent
    3 videocassettes (SVHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    The Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project conducted the interview with Walter Frank on May 15, 1990, June 14, 1990, and July 24, 1990. The interview was received by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Branch in December 2003.
    Funding Note
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:47:01
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn515856

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    Summary (English)

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    Oral history interview with Melvin Suhd

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bernard Benjamin Broclawski

    Oral history interview with Bernard Benjamin Broclawski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Julius Drabkin

    Oral history interview with Julius Drabkin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renee L. Duering

    Oral history interview with Renee L. Duering

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner Epstein

    Oral history interview with Werner Epstein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lore Gilbert

    Oral history interview with Lore Gilbert

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rita Goldman

    Oral history interview with Rita Goldman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mala Holcberg

    Oral history interview with Mala Holcberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kate Kaiser

    Oral history interview with Kate Kaiser

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tatjana Khepoyan-Viner

    Oral history interview with Tatjana Khepoyan-Viner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Vera J. Lieban-Kalmar

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nadine Lieberman

    Oral history interview with Nadine Lieberman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Bernard Offen

    Oral history interview with Bernard Offen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Pels

    Oral history interview with William Pels

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Plainfield

    Oral history interview with Ruth Plainfield

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Schneider

    Oral history interview with Thomas Schneider

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Shlyapochnik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gisela Spigel

    Oral history interview with Gisela Spigel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Erika Weingarten

    Oral history interview with Erika Weingarten

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Weingarten

    Oral history interview with Max Weingarten

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herman D. Wiener

    Oral history interview with Herman D. Wiener

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Liza Avrutin

    Oral history interview with Liza Avrutin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Aleksandr Belfor

    Oral history interview with Aleksandr Belfor

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshteyn

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshteyn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lev Dumer

    Oral history interview with Lev Dumer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anisim Dworkin

    Oral history interview with Anisim Dworkin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest Feld

    Oral history interview with Ernest Feld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lya Galperin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mae Lopatin Herman

    Oral history interview with Mae Lopatin Herman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Inna Kagan

    Oral history interview with Inna Kagan

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with J. Daniel Khazzoom

    Oral history interview with J. Daniel Khazzoom

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Vilem Kriz

    Oral history interview with Vilem Kriz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Lapan

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Lapan

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sofiya Manoylo

    Oral history interview with Sofiya Manoylo

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Shaya Neys

    Oral history interview with Shaya Neys

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Sieradzki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rahilia Sirota

    Oral history interview with Rahilia Sirota

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tom Szelenyi

    Oral history interview with Tom Szelenyi

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irving Zale

    Oral history interview with Irving Zale

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tamara Albukh

    Oral history interview with Tamara Albukh

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bernard Broclawski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Audrey Doughty

    Oral history interview with Audrey Doughty

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sofia Ginzbursky

    Oral history interview with Sofia Ginzbursky

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Genia Likwornik

    Oral history interview with Genia Likwornik

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mark Malamud

    Oral history interview with Mark Malamud

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Annemarie Roeper

    Oral history interview with Annemarie Roeper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irina Rozhanskaya

    Oral history interview with Irina Rozhanskaya

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Clara Tsukerman

    Oral history interview with Clara Tsukerman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sam Weiss

    Oral history interview with Sam Weiss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edith Wertheimer

    Oral history interview with Edith Wertheimer

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Laszlo Vass

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Jakob Atlas

    Oral history interview with Jakob Atlas

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Isaac Silber

    Oral history interview with Isaac Silber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Grunwald

    Oral history interview with Lotte Grunwald

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Roeper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Janina Swift

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Polya Liza Pekker

    Oral history interview with Polya Liza Pekker

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Meier Lichtenstein

    Oral history interview with Meier Lichtenstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Janice Auerbach

    Oral history interview with Janice Auerbach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helmut Kobler

    Oral history interview with Helmut Kobler

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ellen Leeser

    Oral history interview with Ellen Leeser

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Yellin

    Oral history interview with Anne Marie Yellin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Adele Silber

    Oral history interview with Adele Silber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sylvie Marshall

    Oral history interview with Sylvie Marshall

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elena H. Javor

    Oral history interview with Elena H. Javor

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Denes

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Joseph Welgreen

    Oral history interview with Joseph Welgreen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosnow

    Oral history interview with Morris Rosnow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gary Schoofs

    Oral history interview with Gary Schoofs

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ilse Eden

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eva K. Breyer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kurt Levi

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Paul Nebenzahl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Weinman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Olga Nepomyashy

    Oral history interview with Olga Nepomyashy

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Floyd Dade

    Oral history interview with Floyd Dade

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Peter Oppenheim

    Oral history interview with Peter Oppenheim

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ellen Van Creveld

    Oral history interview with Ellen Van Creveld

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lola Welgreen

    Oral history interview with Lola Welgreen

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Semyon Berenshtein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sara Gelender

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral history interview with Ilse Sternberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jenny Friedlander

    Oral history interview with Jenny Friedlander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Leonid Bobrovsky

    Oral history interview with Leonid Bobrovsky

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sam Genirberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagi-Talavera

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Edith Eva Eger

    Oral history interview with Edith Eva Eger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Otto Springer

    Oral history interview with Otto Springer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Greta Stuehler

    Oral history interview with Greta Stuehler

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Magda Silberman

    Oral history interview with Magda Silberman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eric Willgott

    Oral history interview with Eric Willgott

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cecilia Kornbluth

    Oral history interview with Cecilia Kornbluth

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Steiner

    Oral history interview with Ruth Steiner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Trudy Lyons

    Oral history interview with Trudy Lyons

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margrit Schurman

    Oral history interview with Margrit Schurman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edith Deutsch

    Oral history interview with Edith Deutsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Francis E. Cappel

    Oral history interview with Francis E. Cappel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Wittenstein

    Oral history interview with George Wittenstein

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Thomas Trier

    Oral history interview with Thomas Trier

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rita Grunbaum

    Oral history interview with Rita Grunbaum

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lily Robinson

    Oral history interview with Lily Robinson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herman Apteker

    Oral history interview with Herman Apteker

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagy-Talavera

    Oral history interview with Nicholas Nagy-Talavera

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Semyon Veyber

    Oral history interview with Semyon Veyber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chaya Fuhrman

    Oral history interview with Chaya Fuhrman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peter Mueller

    Oral history interview with Peter Mueller

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Cohn

    Oral history interview with Eva Cohn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Fred Baum

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Cantor Hans Cohn

    Oral history interview with Cantor Hans Cohn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gilbert L. van Mourik

    Oral history interview with Gilbert L. van Mourik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bernard Broclawski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sam Zelver

    Oral history interview with Sam Zelver

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Asya Grunkina

    Oral history interview with Asya Grunkina

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kurt Mostny

    Oral history interview with Kurt Mostny

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral history interview with Hanna Cassel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Vera Korkus

    Oral history interview with Vera Korkus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Steffi Black

    Oral history interview with Steffi Black

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Parket

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Parket

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ann Burger

    Oral history interview with Ann Burger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Volf Gershaft

    Oral history interview with Volf Gershaft

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Klara Garmel

    Oral history interview with Klara Garmel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Polina Sorkin

    Oral history interview with Polina Sorkin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Blank

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Blank

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kurt Gronowski

    Oral history interview with Kurt Gronowski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rosa Wigmore

    Oral history interview with Rosa Wigmore

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral history interview with Gerta Wingerd

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Evelyn Lowen Apte

    Oral history interview with Evelyn Lowen Apte

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Annette Herskovits

    Oral history interview with Annette Herskovits

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Guta Zlotlow

    Oral history interview with Guta Zlotlow

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Alfred Cotton

    Oral history interview with Alfred Cotton

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marion Mostny

    Oral history interview with Marion Mostny

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Roy Calder

    Oral history interview with Roy Calder

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alfred Batzdorff

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Mikhail Felberg

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Sandor Hollander

    Oral history interview with Sandor Hollander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Abraham Jaeger

    Oral history interview with Abraham Jaeger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Judy Kirkham

    Oral history interview with Judy Kirkham

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rita Kuhn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Greta Reisman

    Oral history interview with Greta Reisman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Schein

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dan Dougherty

    Oral history interview with Dan Dougherty

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Erlichman

    Oral history interview with Max Erlichman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marianne Gerhart

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Rose Herskovic

    Oral history interview with Rose Herskovic

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Eugene Katz

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Tillie Molho

    Oral history interview with Tillie Molho

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edith Newman

    Oral history interview with Edith Newman

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Agnes Allison

    Oral history interview with Agnes Allison

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ann Gabor Arancio

    Oral history interview with Ann Gabor Arancio

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Valerie Balint

    Oral history interview with Valerie Balint

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yanina Cywinska

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Ilse Lewy

    Oral history interview with Ilse Lewy

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Esther Kemeny

    Oral history interview with Esther Kemeny

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ray Redel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Roma Barnes

    Oral history interview with Roma Barnes

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margot Braun

    Oral history interview with Margot Braun

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ted Ellington

    Oral history interview with Ted Ellington

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anna Hollander

    Oral history interview with Anna Hollander

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Theo Joseph

    Oral history interview with Theo Joseph

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Katz

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Katz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jim Sanders

    Oral history interview with Jim Sanders

    Oral History

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