Oral history interview with Harry Burger
Transcript
- My name is Harry Berger.
- And I'm a survivor of the Holocaust.
- I was born in Vienna, Austria on the 10th
- of May, 1924 to a middle class, rather affluent family.
- My father was a businessman in textiles.
- And I was supposed to follow in his footsteps.
- Basically, that's what it amounted to.
- I will describe in this videotape
- the events between 1938 and 1945,
- the Hitler era, a time that very deeply affected my whole life
- and future.
- I will begin in the beginning of 1938.
- I was not quite 14 years old.
- And we had indication of Nazi infiltration in Vienna
- at the time.
- Now remember that Austria was a small country
- of only 7.5 million population.
- We had a democratic government, which
- was mirrored after the United States government.
- It was identical.
- It had the same structure.
- But it was on shaky, shaky legs.
- Obviously, they hadn't overcome labor problems.
- People were poor.
- They were malcontented.
- And they tried for a change.
- So the Nazism which was already established in Germany
- since 1933 was a terrific idea.
- I recall the troubles at night, when Nazi mobs came up
- from the underground and in their brown uniforms
- attacked citizens in the street, usually
- people that went to concerts, operas, and so on, and came out
- at late at night.
- And they beat up on people.
- And there was a lot of blood in the streets.
- The Nazi technique at the time and always
- was create terror and people will agree with your methods.
- Well Austria was divided at the time.
- And in order to be fair about this,
- our chancellor Schuschnigg, Kurt Schuschnigg,
- decided he will call for a plebiscite.
- He will let the people decide if they
- would like to be annexed by Nazi Germany or stay Austria.
- The plebiscite was set for March the 15th, 1938.
- Well, Hitler put under pressure.
- He asked Schuschnigg to abdicate,
- to step down, and let Seyss-Inquart take over
- the government.
- Seyss-Inquart was a hand-picked Nazi by Adolf Hitler.
- Schuschnigg didn't go along.
- But the pressure became immense because Hitler
- said the Wehrmacht will have to walk in.
- The Wehrmacht will have to fight your army, which was
- actually not a terrific army.
- Austria had a small army.
- And there will be brotherly bloodshed.
- And he didn't think that Schuschnigg
- wanted that for his people.
- But nobody really thought in Austria
- that the Nazis would be victorious.
- My father was very optimistic.
- He was running around with a little Austrian flag
- in his lapel, like so many others.
- The city of Vienna was full of red, white, and red flags,
- very patriotic.
- The police was running around with armbands red, white,
- and red.
- And what struck me at the time as a 14-year-old who
- wasn't very bright politically and not really interested,
- was that nobody that I knew, the kids
- and so on, were really involved in this.
- They ran to rallies and stuff.
- But they didn't know what it was all about.
- Well, the night of March the 12th came.
- And unknown to me and so many others, the Austrian government
- fell.
- Seyss-Inquart took over the government.
- And the Nazi troops marched in.
- And I recall this.
- This was the real distinctive recollection
- that on the 12th, that night when I went to sleep,
- the whole city was full of patriotic red,
- white, and red flags--
- the windows, the flagpoles, everywhere.
- The morning of the 13th when I woke up,
- I saw nothing but flags represented the swastika,
- the Nazi German flags.
- Everybody was jubilated.
- The whole town was singing and chanting.
- Now Austria, ceased to exist at that particular moment
- and became the Ostmark.
- That was a part of Nazi Germany.
- And it was ruled by Mr. Seyss-Inquart
- who was one of the fiercest Nazis
- that Hitler could possibly send.
- At that point the new Germans, the Austrians,
- the non-Jews used to tell the so-called selected Jewish
- people, the ones like my dad who was totally integrated
- and didn't look for trouble to begin with,
- and they told us you have nothing to fear.
- We are not after you short of a small adjustment
- to make downwards, like from a first class
- citizen to a second class citizen,
- you really have no fear.
- What we are after are the Orthodox Jews,
- the ones that live in the second district, which was almost
- like a ghetto.
- They claimed that these were dirty people.
- They were filthy, smelled of garlic.
- They were imports from Poland and Russia after World War I.
- And they should be taken out of the country.
- Clean it up.
- And at that point the Jewish people in Vienna
- agreed with that.
- And that was the biggest mistake that could ever have been made.
- Once you become selective, and what's
- good for one is not good for the other, it doesn't work.
- You see, once it was totally presented to the Jewish people
- that one part of the Jewish people
- will be eliminated or taken out of the country,
- the other should have known better.
- And they didn't.
- They believed the Nazi propaganda.
- Well, the first day was a drastic day in Vienna.
- 70,000 people were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
- This was not even a secret because the new Nazi paper, Der
- Sturmer, the next day had all the information
- about what was happening.
- There were a lot of suicides daily of Jewish people.
- There were a lot of beatings in the street,
- so that the hospitals actually filled up
- and there was no more room, the Jewish hospital.
- The others wouldn't take Jews.
- Here's what happened to me.
- I went to school that next Monday like I was supposed to.
- And I went to a middle school in Schottengasse
- in the first district.
- And when I arrived there, I was told
- that I no longer belonged to that school because of the fact
- that I was Jewish.
- And I have to go to a public school in a different area,
- register, and go to class.
- So I did that.
- And when I got into class, there were maybe
- three or four other Jewish kids in the same boat.
- The first thing that happened to me and to the others
- was we were actually assaulted and beaten immediately.
- And the reason was given we were beaten because we were Jews,
- dirty Jews, pig Jews, [NON-ENGLISH]..
- Well, I got home.
- And when my father came from work that night,
- I told him about it.
- He says that it will pass not to worry.
- Everything will settle down and be OK.
- Well, it wasn't OK.
- It was that way every day for the next three or four days.
- And eventually, we got a notice.
- I got a notice that I no longer are
- to go to school at all because Jews
- are not to be educated anymore.
- It's all over.
- Well, as a 13-year-old, that was pretty good news.
- Who wants to go to school anyhow?
- I didn't want to be tortured with that.
- I'd much rather stay home, or play games,
- or do whatever young kids do.
- I didn't realize what was really attached to this.
- The Nazis went on a brutal tear in Austria, very anti-Semitic.
- At first, it was like a joke.
- People were caught in the streets
- when they went to work in their business suits.
- And they were given a pail, and water, and a brush.
- And they were kneel down in the streets
- and brush off anti-Nazi slogans that the Hitlerjugend was
- painting overnight, so that the Jews can scrub it up.
- And they were told, it was you Jews that did it.
- You were responsible for that.
- Well, that was a big joke.
- Who was caught doing this?
- Who was caught brushing?
- Who was caught scrubbing?
- And the Jewish people were ignorant to the fact
- that this was only a prelude.
- This was just entertainment for the Hitler Youth.
- But the pictures were in Der Sturmer
- every morning showing Jewish bastards, as they call them,
- the under race, doing this, putting dirty slogans
- against their fuhrer.
- One incident that happened to me is one of my ex-school friends,
- pardon the expression, and I walked in the street.
- It was not yet that he wouldn't talk to me.
- And every store in every window had a picture of Adolf Hitler.
- And he pointed to one and says, isn't he gorgeous?
- And I like an idiot said, well I think he's an ugly man.
- Well, my buddy turned away and walked away from me.
- And that afternoon a big rock fell through one of our windows
- and that was his retaliation for saying that Hitler was ugly.
- The Nazis not only pointed at Jews.
- I recall a monastery in the center of town.
- I think it was four stories high, the building.
- It was invaded one morning by the SS.
- And every priest and nun were chased to the top floor
- to the roof and thrown off and killed that way.
- And next morning, Der Sturmer announced with great pride
- that they had gotten rid of the center of the Catholic mission.
- And this was the way they were doing it.
- Well, my dad was doing a gangbuster business
- and he thought that he was in good shape with Nazis.
- See being in textiles and representing a French firm
- with factories in Czechoslovakia,
- there was an unlimited flow of great materials,
- textiles for men's suits coming into the country.
- Germans were starved for that kind of thing.
- So they kept coming to Vienna and buying, and buying,
- and buying.
- And my old man made a lot of money.
- And the Nazis let him do it because eventually they
- knew they were going to get it back anyhow.
- Well, my dad was faithful.
- He went to work every day.
- And he came home every day and he
- was doing any more, no more sporting events, no more
- theaters, no more operas.
- All the stuff my dad liked was gone.
- But he was optimistic.
- Nevertheless, he made an application
- at the American consulate just in case
- to emigrate to the United States.
- We had Cousins in Detroit that wrote us an affidavit.
- And we made an application for a visa.
- Of course, we were told the waiting period
- was enormous, at least two, three, or four years,
- which was immaterial.
- My dad thought this was OK.
- We can make it.
- Well, we made it till the 9th day of November, 1938.
- On November the 7th, in Paris, a young Jew, a 19-year-old Jew
- by the name of Grynszpan who was extremely upset with the Nazis
- because his parents, originally from Poland,
- were corralled and re-deported into Poland
- without being able to take any of their effects.
- And they were just thrown out of the country over the border.
- And he was upset.
- And he picked up a gun, went to the German embassy,
- and one of the Germans, high-ranking Germans
- came down the steps.
- And this guy shot him.
- And the German fell down.
- I recall big yell in the Vienna radio about Jewish murderers
- and what have you.
- Well, it took this German two days
- to die, until November the 9th, 1938.
- And what happened at that point, at least,
- I'm still not sure how the chain of command
- came down on this thing.
- But at 6 o'clock at night on the 9th, what happened at
- that point was in Germany, all of Germany,
- on the night of November 9th, total war
- was declared on the Jewish people.
- 267 synagogues were desecrated and set afire.
- More than 7,500 Jewish shops were vandalized.
- 29,756 Jews were sent to Dachau and Buchenwald, two
- notorious concentration camps.
- Over 250 Jews were killed, which now we know meant nothing.
- But it was an incredible amount for that time.
- Thousands were brutally beaten throughout every city
- and police station.
- This program was the beginning of the Holocaust.
- The Nazis called it Kristallnacht,
- the night of the broken glass.
- It lasted exactly 24 hours.
- Now the Jews started to pay attention.
- It became frantic in our town, in Vienna.
- Everybody had to run and try to get a visa.
- It was imperative to get out of the country.
- It was so proven now.
- The articles in the papers, and the radio, and the propaganda
- said now we want to get rid of the Jews.
- We don't care how it happens.
- Hitler, as a matter of fact, made a big speech at the time
- to the world and says, you better get rid of the Jews
- for us, or we will have to find a different solution.
- Today, of course, we know what that solution was.
- But at the time there were talks that they
- were going to send all the Jews to the Island of Madagascar,
- and this, and that.
- Everything was rumors and nothing made sense.
- Well, the end of December of 1938,
- when my dad got to work that day,
- the SS was waiting for him.
- And he was arrested and taken to a local jail in [NON-ENGLISH],,
- in Vienna, where he was sitting for six weeks.
- And finally was called for interrogation.
- And he was getting the news.
- Either you sign your business over to Nazi caretakers,
- or you will be sent to Dachau.
- Well the choice was very easy for my dad.
- He signed and he was released with the understanding
- that he will get out of the country as rapidly as possible.
- Well, now that the business was gone,
- they got to the apartment.
- We lived in an absolutely gorgeous apartment, which
- at one time belonged to the--
- I wouldn't say royal family, to the empress.
- And this was like a summer little place.
- It had three stories.
- The first floor was very lavish.
- That was our apartment.
- And there were two smaller apartments
- on top of that belonged to the help.
- Well, that apartment, of course, we
- weren't supposed to keep anymore.
- And the Nazis set up an auction for all the furniture
- and belongings that we couldn't have anymore as Jews.
- The auction of Jewish property was a very simple matter.
- It was put in the local newspaper
- that an auction will take place of Jewish property
- at such a day, such a time.
- And the people used to come with their trucks,
- and buy, load it up, and they were gone.
- Of course, the price that was requested
- was so small that anybody could afford anything.
- Now, we had a very, very beautiful three bedroom
- apartment with beautiful furniture.
- And the total price that was gotten for all of that was
- about approximately an American money $2.50,
- which we didn't get.
- My father had to sign that it was
- donated to a Nazi charity which usually was the Nazi party.
- Well, now we had nothing left, and we
- were put into a small apartment with other families
- awaiting immigration.
- There was no way that we could get to the United States
- in a big hurry.
- It was just impossible.
- So my father was looking for all kinds of ways to get out.
- And one of the ways that looked like a good idea
- was temporarily to get to another country which was not
- Nazi dominated, where you can get to fairly easily
- and await either immigration or the Nazis falling down,
- which was improbable, of course.
- So my dad was thinking in terms of getting to Italy, which
- was an ally of Germany, and where you didn't need a visa
- to get to, and then possibly get into France illegally, which
- means without a visa.
- Now my sister and her husband at that point
- already lived in Nice, in France.
- They suggested we should get to Sanremo,
- and then they will arrange for us to get over the border,
- and then arrange for residence in Nice.
- Well the first step in this, of course,
- was to get yourself a passport.
- You can't travel without papers.
- And that's the first thing we had to do.
- I recall that very clearly.
- We had to go to the Gestapo with all kinds of documents proving
- first of all that you were a full blooded Jew,
- that your four grandparents were all Jewish.
- Because at that time, already the Nazis
- would not give a passport to a non-Jew, an Aryan,
- because they already knew there was going to be war.
- And they're going to need soldiers.
- They didn't want to lose one man, not even one.
- So I recall, we had a paper from the [NON-ENGLISH] that proved
- that we were full blooded Jews.
- We had another paper from the local police,
- and from the government that we didn't owe any back taxes.
- And we paraded ourselves-- my mother, father, and myself
- into the Gestapo in Vienna to obtain a passport.
- That was a very, very, very difficult day.
- There was a lot of people lined up, a lot of Nazis in uniform,
- brown shirts, SS, walking by you and abusing, nudging, spitting,
- beating down.
- Because we were, after all, only Jews.
- And at the end of the day, we were given a German passport.
- This, my friends, was a Nazi passport.
- You see the brown color, the swastika.
- The only difference here was this
- was a Nazi passport issued to a Jew.
- This was the Jewish passport with the red J inside,
- so that the whole world should know this was a marked animal,
- this was a dirty Jew.
- By April, we were ready for immigration.
- I recall we boarded a train, and we
- were allowed to take 20 Reichsmarks per person,
- which was approximately $5 each, out of the country.
- Now it is quite clear that a man like my dad who
- had capabilities was able to get money, and gold,
- and what have you out of the country
- before we even got there.
- It was, of course, at a great price.
- But it was possible.
- Now I recall my dad had a lot of gold pieces made
- from gold coins that were given to myself
- and my sister at the time by an uncle of mine
- who was a jeweler.
- And every holiday we got a gold piece.
- Well my dad had it all melted down
- and had made cigarette cases, watch chains, and all kinds
- of good stuff that was brought out
- by non-Jewish people for a good fee.
- So that awaited us on the other side.
- We also had-- he bought a lot of good cameras
- like Leicas and Contacts, I think
- a total of about 10 or so.
- Which also were already on the other side.
- They were valued at a lot of money at the time.
- And my dad thought this will carry us over.
- Well, we got to the train and we were out.
- We went to Italy.
- The border was no problem.
- All you had to do is flash your passport,
- and the German border people let you right through,
- no arguments.
- And the Italians couldn't care less who you were.
- As long as you had some papers they let you in.
- So now we got into Italy.
- We went through Milan, changed trains we went to Sanremo,
- which was a paradise on Earth.
- And there we awaited my sister to come in and make
- the arrangements.
- And that was what happened.
- She was there.
- And I recall that night we were supposed
- to get over the border.
- And they hired a cab driver to take us up
- to the mountains, and through, and all kinds of good stuff.
- And of course, this guy never knew where he was going,
- and nothing really happened.
- So it did not work, you see?
- And had we not known what my sister knew at the time,
- we would have probably paid the money and never got to France.
- Well we got back to Sanremo.
- And new arrangements were being made.
- Something happened that day that remained in my brain.
- As I was walking on the boardwalk,
- and it was a beautiful day, and of course, it was different.
- There were palm trees.
- It was the Mediterranean and it was gorgeous weather.
- And as we were walking one way, down the other way
- came a small group of people in very familiar uniforms.
- They were Nazis.
- And as they came closer, and they
- were laughing and chatting.
- It was Field Marshal Goering and his entourage,
- fat Mr. Goering walking down and just crossing by these Jews,
- and never even knowing it.
- But it was an impressive thing to see such a big dignitary
- from Nazi Germany right in front of you.
- Well that night, we finally got out of it.
- It was arranged that we should enter a piece of property,
- which was on the border.
- As a matter of fact, half of the property was in Italy
- and half was in France.
- It was owned by a Russian scientist.
- I don't recall his name.
- But he wasn't living there.
- He was just using this area as a lab.
- He was working on a youth serum with a bunch of monkeys.
- I recall that.
- And that's all we heard at night when we got in there.
- Well, the plan was we should enter that property
- on the Italian side, walk through it, and get out
- on the French side.
- A cab would be waiting for us and take us to Nice.
- Well, most of it was true.
- We got in there at night all right.
- We were very scared because we didn't
- know what we was going into.
- And we just walked and walked, and now we
- were looking for the exit on the French side.
- And there wasn't any.
- All there was a gate which was climbable,
- and a lamppost which had to be climbed down, which we did,
- all of us even my mom.
- And when we got down on the ground there was no cab.
- There was a small street, of course.
- And then right away there was the Mediterranean, the water.
- So we walked that little street up.
- Came into a small town which we then knew
- was called Menton, a border town.
- And we saw a bus that had the name Nice on it.
- And we figured what can happen.
- We better take the bus and go to Nice,
- and see if we can wake up my brother-in-law,
- so we can get out of this.
- Because we were not used to democracies
- that people didn't bother anybody.
- That this was glorious country.
- This was the Monte Carlo country,
- where people came to vacation, to gamble,
- and have lots of fun, the rich.
- Well, we took the bus and we were
- scared to even open our mouth, because we
- couldn't speak French.
- But nobody cared because there were so many foreigners there
- anyhow.
- We didn't know.
- We had a little money.
- We paid for the fare.
- We got to Nice.
- And we didn't know where we were going, of course, when
- we got there.
- And we finally realized that we couldn't find anybody at night.
- We had no way of doing it.
- So we decided we're going to go to a hotel,
- after walking a little bit in the middle of the night.
- It was scary.
- And when we got to the hotel, again,
- nobody asked you for papers.
- All you had to do is like we do here.
- Sign a card, and they gave you a room.
- Well, next morning when it was daylight,
- we finally got to my brother-in-law.
- And he immediately took us to the local police station
- to make arrangements for residence.
- It was a very easy way to get the first piece of paper.
- The French had a policy.
- They did not issue immigration visas to anybody.
- But if you managed to get into the country one
- way or the other, they would issue you a temporary permit,
- usually for one month.
- It was a green piece of paper like a green card here.
- And it was good for one month, renewable.
- All you had to be able to do is support yourself
- without having to work.
- And of course, that was easy enough.
- Everybody had a little money.
- And the ones that didn't have any
- would borrow from other people to show them
- that they had enough.
- That's all the French wanted.
- And we were now really seriously waiting
- for our American immigration visa, which
- was very slow to come by, only because there
- were so many applicants throughout all
- of the German owned and occupied territories.
- Everybody wanted to come to the US, and rightfully so.
- We were in no hurry really because we were now
- in a free country.
- It was absolutely gorgeous.
- I got myself a little job in a photo place,
- even though I wasn't supposed to work.
- But nobody really cared.
- Didn't make any money, but I learned myself a trade.
- Well, everything was moving along pretty nicely
- until we got into a situation which
- got very dangerous with war.
- As we all know, Hitler was negotiating with the French
- and the British about peace.
- And they were appeasing it, and everybody was believing
- Hitler which was a big mistake.
- And finally, we are talking about September the 1st,
- I believe it was, Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
- And that was a very serious thing.
- Because the French and the British
- had a non-aggression pact with the Polish people.
- And therefore on September the 3rd, the French and the British
- declared war on Hitler Germany.
- What that meant to us was that immediately we Austrian
- or ex-Austrian Jews, now became pretty much undesirable.
- Because we were not French and we
- were living on the French border with Italy.
- And therefore we weren't supposed to be there
- because we were foreigners.
- So we were told to get ourselves out of there
- into the interior somewhere, where we are not
- dangerous to the country.
- And they put us on the train in Nice,
- in a train that went to Biarritz, which
- was on the Spanish border.
- And there again, they said, well,
- you can't stay here because you're foreigners.
- So by the time we got through with this thing,
- they sent us to a small town close to Paris.
- And I recall the first day we were there,
- there was an aerial alert.
- The sirens went off in the middle of the night,
- because one small plane crossed the border.
- I believe it was really nothing at that point.
- But the whole country was alerted because of that.
- And we had to get into the woods.
- We hardly had time to put our pants on.
- And we stayed three hours until the alert was over.
- Then that went on for about three nights.
- And then finally my dad, and my brother-in-law, and my sister
- were there.
- And we said, that's no good.
- Let's go somewhere where it's normal.
- And we decided to go to Vichy.
- Now Vichy was a nice tourist town with baths and spas,
- and it was quite nice--
- and the French were involved in World War II,
- and they were claiming that they would
- be in Germany within five or six weeks, no problem at all.
- They were so superior.
- And they will finally get them.
- And that will be the end of everything.
- And we believed that.
- We believed the French propaganda
- that they would have an offensive and go into Germany
- and terminate this whole nonsense.
- Well, nothing happened.
- The French were sitting in their Line Maginot,
- a defense line they built right after World War I,
- so that the disaster shouldn't happen anymore.
- The Germans had built a defense line
- right across from them which they called the Line Siegfried.
- And they set in that one supposedly.
- Well, everybody was sitting contented.
- This was another one of those trench warfares
- where nobody's going to do anything.
- And finally somebody is going to quit.
- Well, I'll tell you what really happened.
- The Nazis were preparing for the Western invasion.
- And on May the 10th, on my birthday,
- they decided to invade France.
- But instead of coming straight on against their really tough
- defense Line, the Line Maginot, they went by North.
- They invaded Holland and Belgium,
- beat both of these countries into total submission
- and entered France through the northern border, where
- there were no fortifications.
- And to make a very, very difficult story very short,
- the Nazi troops marched in the Champs-Elysees in Paris
- 41 days later.
- June 21, France capitulated without any reservations.
- Marshal Petain became their president,
- shook hands with Adolf Hitler.
- And France was now a beaten country.
- The armistice that was given to them was brutal.
- They had to pay for their own occupation.
- They had to furnish Nazi Germany with labor
- that every able-bodied French man
- had to serve two months of work in Nazi Germany for the war
- effort.
- Well on September the 13th, in the same country
- Pierre Laval took over the French government.
- And he was one of the radical brutal Nazi followers
- that they could possibly find.
- And he made a speech on that September 13.
- And he said that he wanted total German victory,
- that he believes in the German super race.
- And if the French people do not understand what it's all about
- and who to follow, he will have to pay dearly.
- Well, this was the country we were living in now.
- It was a free unoccupied zone we were living in.
- Because the Germans did not find it
- necessary to occupy the whole country,
- because the French were so collaborating.
- So even though we were not German occupied in Nice,
- we were still under German domination.
- Because every month when we had to go to our permit renewal,
- they could have picked us up and sent us away.
- Now, I don't mind telling you that Jewish people in this
- were totally unaware of the deportations.
- They were totally unaware of ghettos and death camps
- for that matter.
- So once in a while, some Jewish people
- went to renew their permit and didn't come back.
- So we said, well they sent them to work.
- Big deal.
- They'll come back.
- We never really believed that this was final.
- 1941 came, and my father was arrested by the French.
- And the reason for his arrest was
- that he was so desperate to get his American visa
- and it didn't come, that he tried
- to purchase a counterfeit Cuban visa for the family.
- I recall, there was a lot of money involved in that.
- And he went to get it.
- And came home with the piece of paper.
- And it was done so badly that a kid could
- have done it with a stamp set.
- And he realized that when he showed it to me at the time.
- And he realized that he was being taken.
- And he was very angry.
- And he was going to go back and get his money back.
- Well, he got back there already and they were already
- the French police was there to arrest
- the so-called counterfeiters.
- And he and seven other Jews were in the same boat.
- And they were asked if they would
- like to testify against these terrible counterfeiters.
- And of course, my dad, he wanted his money back.
- He said, sure.
- Well they took him into the police station
- and they booked him.
- And they put him in the local jail in Nice
- where they kept him for six months,
- awaiting trial, a trial for what nobody knew.
- But it was a trial.
- We had a very, very good attorney
- from Paris that was brought in.
- He defended all the Jews for that matter
- and won an annulment.
- It wasn't even a case.
- It was an annulment.
- I recall he left before the verdict even came up.
- Well my dad was brought back to prison.
- And I expected him to be liberated that night.
- And he didn't come out.
- I went to wait for him the next day and he didn't come out,
- and the next day he didn't come out.
- And finally I was told by the local prefecture
- that he will not be liberated because being Jewish,
- he would have to be put into what
- they called at the time a holding camp, probably in Gurs.
- And I recall my dad was taken by a streetcar
- to the railroad station in handcuffs with the other seven
- guys.
- And he was taken away.
- And that's the last I ever saw of him.
- We'll come back to him just a little bit later.
- At this point, of course, all immigration to the West
- had stopped.
- There was no more transportation.
- There was absolutely no way anybody can go to the West.
- And what Hitler really wanted was the immigration of the Jews
- only to the East.
- And only the Nazis knew what was awaiting them in the East.
- Well on December the 11th, Hitler
- did probably the most stupid thing
- that he ever could have done.
- A couple of days after Pearl Harbor,
- he decided it was time to ally himself with the Japanese.
- And he declared war all the United States of America.
- That wasn't the best move.
- Well, after my father was deported,
- there was really no more chance to get out of the country.
- And it was a question of going underground every time
- that the permit renewal came about.
- I had a little contact in the police station
- where they told me, if it was safe to go this time,
- or if I should go underground the next time.
- And we knew a family, my mom and I,
- they were French Nazis, S-O-L. He
- was walking around in a uniform all the time.
- And he decided to hide us.
- Was it something he knew or what it was?
- We were taken care of in their apartment in Nice.
- And of course, this went on until November of 1942.
- And then something drastic happened.
- The Nazis were very unhappy with the performance
- of the non-occupied zone in France.
- And there was not enough labor coming forth to them,
- not enough contribution to the war effort.
- So they decided to occupy the rest of the country.
- And they sent the second SS Panzer division to do the job.
- Of course, there was no resistance.
- So there was no big deal.
- But what happened at that point was
- that the French fleet which was anchored in Toulon,
- was supposed to join the German fleet
- in the war against the Allies.
- They decided to scuttle that fleet.
- And what happened is they knocked off 89 craft.
- They sank them, battleships from big to small, even u-boats.
- The whole thing went down the drain.
- And that really made the Germans extremely angry.
- Now, I was bracing myself in Nice for the arrival of the SS.
- And sudden disaster, of course, and to my surprise
- instead of the SS, I saw Italian soldiers arriving in my town.
- Now, the Italians were given a small part of France
- to occupy because after all they were Allies of Hitler.
- And they were helping in the war in Russia and so on.
- So what happened at that point was a total miracle.
- We realized all of a sudden that the so-called fascist Italians
- were total pussycats.
- They didn't care if you were a Jew or not a Jew.
- They didn't want to really make war.
- They just did their thing.
- So they came into Nice and they established a headquarters.
- And they let the synagogue reopen.
- I recall the headquarters, the Italian headquarters
- was right next door to the synagogue,
- which was closed forever.
- And all of a sudden it was reopened.
- Jewish people were put in charge to protect other Jewish people.
- And of course, this area now the South East of France
- became a haven for people that were wandering,
- trying to escape the Nazis.
- And whoever could get in the Jewish synagogue
- would issue papers with the Italian benediction,
- so that the French police couldn't touch them.
- And the next thing that they did, they set up the Italians
- set up some forced residence areas throughout the area.
- By that we mean that they put Jews into good hotels
- in the Alps, anywhere, resort areas.
- And gave them the lodging and the food
- and protected them, so that the Nazis couldn't touch them.
- This was incredible.
- But we were still in Nice.
- And we still had a problem.
- The problem was the renewal of the permit, it still went on.
- And by January of 1943, finally came the time
- where I was told by my contact this is it.
- If you come now, even though the Italians are here,
- you're going to Germany.
- And in a desperation move, I went
- to the Italian headquarters and I begged them to help me.
- I found myself in good company, and about 40
- other Jewish people were in the same boat.
- And what the Italians decided at the time was to just arrest us.
- And they would send us to a prisoner
- of war camp, a civilian prisoner of war camp in the area,
- hold us there for a few days for processing,
- and then send us to Italy to a small town next to Rome
- into one of their famous forced residences.
- I had no idea what they were talking about.
- But it was a good idea.
- And I went for it.
- Well, we were put on a truck.
- And we were traveling to a town called Sospel.
- There was a French army installation
- which was converted to a civilian prisoner of war camp.
- What that meant, that's where they
- kept the British and American citizens that
- lived in that rich French area.
- They had their villas and their money,
- and they were, of course, taken prisoner.
- But they wanted to treat them well
- because they wanted reciprocity.
- They wanted the Italians in this country being treated well,
- too.
- So we got put into that camp.
- And the first thing they did, they fed us.
- They opened up the kitchen and they gave us
- a good Italian solid food, Italian meatballs
- and spaghetti, and a piece of white bread,
- stuff we hadn't seen in ages because we were starvation
- bound in France.
- There was no food stamps for Jewish people.
- Therefore, we had nothing to eat.
- Well, we got in there and it was a festivity.
- And they assigned us to a big room with cots in it.
- And that everybody got a bed to sleep in.
- It was clean.
- And the next morning when we got up they
- called us for breakfast.
- And while we were at breakfast in the mess hall,
- the Italian soldiers were making our beds.
- And this was some kind of prison.
- Let me tell you.
- This was unbelievable.
- Three beautiful meals a day, the Italian soldiers
- were congenial.
- They had an infirmary that treated people.
- Even a couple of Orthodox Jews that
- did not want to eat non-kosher foods
- were given their own raw food to cook for themselves.
- So I recall they set up a kitchen outside,
- like a barbecue type thing.
- And they were cooking their kosher food
- and they were allowed to eat it.
- But Passover came.
- They had a Seder.
- And the commanding officer came in
- to participate and see what was going on.
- So it was quite incredible that the Italians were so nonchalant
- about the Jews, even though they were fascists,
- and Mussolini always ordered stern measures
- against the Jews, just to please Hitler anyhow.
- The only problem with the Italians
- was they had a very slow memory.
- For the three or four days we were
- supposed to stay in that camp, we stayed four months.
- They forgot about us.
- Something happened about two months into our stay.
- I will never forget that one.
- That morning, several trucks of Nazis
- arrived in front of the gate.
- I recall they were SS.
- They were Totenkopf SS, the ones that
- were created exclusively by Adolf Hitler
- to eliminate and kill Jews.
- Well, they arrived with quite an armament-- cannons,
- something that resembled bazookas, whatever.
- And they set themselves up and their main man
- came into the camp and negotiated with our commanding
- officer to surrender all the Jews in the camp,
- not just us 40, but all the American and British
- Jews, the same.
- And the refusal was total.
- He was led out of the camp.
- Our nice Italian commander ordered his troops
- to set up the armament against the Germans.
- And there was a standoff.
- And finally, the Germans left.
- They took the hint.
- And we were saved again.
- That was an incredible situation that this should even happen.
- That two Allies were fighting over a bunch of Jews.
- But it did happen.
- Well, after two months later, we were finally
- all of a sudden called into the office,
- and we were told that we are now liberated.
- We are free to go.
- Not really free, they assigned us to a forced residence
- in a town called Saint-Martin-Vésubie.
- Same thing here, there was a town with about 1,000 Jews.
- I didn't even know it existed.
- We were given a room, my mother and I, and food.
- And the only thing we had to do in order to be in good graces
- was twice a day to sign in with the Italian commander.
- There was a small little hut in the middle
- of town, a small town, with a couple of soldiers in there.
- And all you had to do is give them your name,
- and they marked you down that you were here.
- You didn't escape, like we wanted to.
- Well, this was incredible.
- This was beautiful, what a way to wait out the end of the war.
- We were very hopeful that maybe eventually somebody
- is going to be victorious against the Nazis,
- and maybe we can escape this nonsense.
- And even if the Nazis win when the war is over,
- finally go somewhere and even as second class citizen, survive.
- We had made up our minds we didn't really want to die.
- And it got clearer and clearer that this was really
- the objective, death.
- But while we were with the Italians,
- it was a safe situation.
- It was safe all right.
- But on September the 8th of 1943,
- the Italians decided they had enough of the war
- and they surrendered to the Allies.
- Mussolini was arrested.
- And on the 23rd of September, Maresciallo Badoglio
- signed an armistice with Eisenhower in Malta.
- What that meant now is that the Italian troops decided
- the war was over for them and they were going to go home.
- Of course, you can imagine how ticked off the Nazis
- were at the fact that their Allies broke up the axis.
- And they were now coming up the valley
- with their armament to take over the area, to take over all
- the Italian occupied territory.
- Now, we had about out of the 1,000 Jewish people
- in this town, 700 decided they were
- going to follow the Italians wherever they went.
- And the only way the Italians could get out of there
- now is by foot.
- They had to leave all their stuff behind.
- And they took to the mountains to get into Italy.
- They wanted to go home.
- They didn't want to become prisoners of war.
- So as they prepared to leave, so did 700 or so Jewish people
- of all ages.
- Because of the fact that I spoke at that point fluent Italian,
- I was declared the leader of the Jews, which was neither
- here nor there at the point.
- But what developed out of this was very important.
- As we went into these mountains, the Alps of course,
- nobody knew what we were going into.
- What we did, we went into an elevation
- of 16,000 feet of altitude.
- It took us two days and one night to achieve that climb.
- And the amazing part was that even
- though it became very rugged and difficult, everybody made it.
- We finally got the last 500 feet which was the toughest,
- and we got over.
- And now we were in Italy.
- And we realized that we were in Italy.
- Everything got smooth, and nice, and easy.
- And as we descended from that crest, that mountain crest,
- there were no roads there--
- we got into an old Italian Fort, a fortification,
- which was built during World War I against the French.
- And we heard a lot of singing going on and celebrating.
- And what it was, was the Italian soldiers were
- celebrating their newfound peace,
- their armistice was signed.
- They were going to go home, discharged from the army.
- It was all over.
- Well, we were received by an officer, a first lieutenant,
- who was in charge.
- And he asked me at the point what we had here.
- And I explained to them there were about 700 Jewish refugees
- [NON-ENGLISH].
- And they were very hungry and tired.
- And could he help us.
- He gave orders to set up cots.
- He gave orders to set up the kitchens.
- They were cooking meals.
- They were feeding the people.
- They were laying them down to rest.
- And he went to this office with me
- and he made a phone call to Cuneo,
- which was the nearest city.
- And he was questioning his commanding officer
- what he should do with the 700 or so Jewish refugees that
- had come from France.
- He was put on hold.
- And after a couple of minutes, whoever came on the phone
- told him to stay put, to keep them there,
- that they will be taken care of.
- And at that point, we both knew we were not talking
- to Americans and British.
- We were talking to Nazis.
- We did not want to get anybody upset or into a panic.
- So by early morning, everybody was awakened.
- And we marched them down the mountain
- on a side path, not the main road now.
- There was a main road getting to that fort.
- And we didn't take it because in the middle of the night
- I thought I heard a Nazi patrol come in.
- They didn't enter the fort.
- But they just checked it out.
- Well, we got down the mountain and we arrived at a small town.
- The town was called Valdieri.
- It was in the [NON-ENGLISH].
- It was a gorgeous September day.
- And the 700 Jewish people were very, very happy
- with what they had accomplished.
- They were all assembling in the center of that little town.
- And they were singing.
- And they were having good fun.
- And there were a couple of little grocery stores,
- and they were able to buy some salami and bread
- and feed themselves.
- And they were jubilant that they were now free.
- And the British are going to come,
- and the Americans are going to come,
- and they're just going to wait for them.
- Well, I had a hunch this wasn't that simple.
- Because I knew there were Nazis in the area.
- And I had a bunch of friends.
- My mom and myself, and about 10 of our friends
- decided we had a little powwow that this didn't look too good.
- And we should get on the side of this little town,
- maybe in the little woods, and see what's going to happen.
- I presume maybe others did the same.
- But I don't know of it.
- But what we did at that point was a wise move.
- Because around 4 o'clock in the afternoon it happened.
- 40 trucks of the Wehrmacht arrived, encircled the town,
- set up a loudspeaker system and surrounded it with soldiers,
- with weapons drawn.
- The announcement over the loudspeakers
- was in German that all the Jews are to surrender on the spot,
- and march peacefully into the trucks
- or they will be machine gunned.
- Well, there wasn't much of a choice.
- There were all kinds of Jewish people of all ages, unarmed.
- And out of despair, they marched into the trucks.
- The Nazis wrapped it up and left.
- Well, I knew later what happened to them.
- They were taken to Cuneo, and given to the Italian army
- to guard.
- And that was a terrible thing that really happened,
- because even so the Italians were very good to the Jews
- and they didn't torture them or nothing,
- they gave them food and lodging in that camp.
- And they gave them even passes to go to the movies.
- It wasn't long lived, of course.
- But what happened in the meantime to us
- 12 was we went up a little mountain and down the next one.
- We now found ourselves in a big valley, a valley that
- had two roads, a main road.
- It had a military road on the side, and it had a river.
- It was the Valle Stura.
- The river was called the Stura, and it
- looked like there were on the side of the one mountain
- a lot of barns and little peasant houses.
- And we decided to cross the road,
- and got to one of those farmers who immediately offered
- one of his barns as a shelter, brought food,
- never accepted payment.
- And he just helped, which was again an incredible story.
- But we were under German occupation,
- and there was no question about it.
- And as safe as this might have been,
- I didn't think it was safe enough.
- And I was very lucky at the time.
- Because at the age of 19, you are bait.
- And there were a group of people coming through in uniform,
- and they were all lieutenants, Italians.
- They called themselves deserters.
- And their purpose in life was to wait it out
- in the mountains for another week or two until the Allies
- come, and then go home.
- And this is just a little group they
- created to be able to feed themselves, and not
- surrender to the Nazis.
- And I begged them to accept me, and they did.
- They gave me a rifle, and said you're in the army now.
- And we went up higher and higher and higher.
- And it was gorgeous.
- I recall it was in the Alps.
- There was a little mountain lake,
- and we were fishing for trout with hand grenades, German hand
- grenades.
- They took seven seconds to explode.
- So when they went into the lake and then exploded
- all these fish came up and we ate and we shot deer
- and it was terrific.
- But one day, one of the lieutenants came up to me.
- And he says, I would like you to do us a favor.
- We don't know what's going on in town,
- maybe we are already liberated.
- Let me have your civilian clothes
- and I'll give you my uniform, and I'll investigate.
- And when I come back we'll change clothes again.
- And like an idiot I gave it to him.
- And of course this man never showed up again.
- He now gave me his uniform and his identification papers.
- And overnight, I had now become a first lieutenant
- in what is to become the Italian underground.
- As I was told, this was the beginning
- of the first Alpine division.
- Us 30 would be the nucleus of the military police,
- and we would accept deserters, and new members
- from wherever we could.
- This was a resistance group, and it was going
- on all over northern Italy.
- Well, I found myself to be a partisan.
- And good so, it was a good thing.
- Because I was given the chance to fight back.
- In 1944, the Allies landed in Anzio and Nettuno
- in Southern Italy.
- It was slow to Monte Cassino.
- But by May, our division was 20,000 men strong.
- And now we were doing little raids.
- We were attacking German positions.
- We were attacking electrical plants,
- whatever we could with a limited amount of armament.
- And this went on till June 6th which was D-day, of course.
- And now the Germans had to attack our valley.
- They had to attack it because it was one of the main routes
- into France and our job now was to hold them back.
- This was throughout all of Northern Italy,
- our partisan groups now were fighting the Nazis.
- And it wasn't a fair fight, because they had tanks.
- We had rifles.
- But even so, the terrain lent itself
- to delay them, and delay them with the minimum amount
- of losses.
- And it took them, at least, I would say two weeks.
- It's hard to remember now exactly the time
- limit but about two weeks to get to the border.
- And by that time the Allies were implanted firmly.
- They had already had a secondary department
- in the South of France.
- They were on the borders and the Germans were trapped in Italy.
- Now, we were attacked by the Wehrmacht, of course.
- And there were soldiers from the Afrika Korps,
- Rommel's Afrika Korps was stuck in there.
- And then we had the Waffen-SS.
- They were stuck in there.
- And there was no breakthrough over the borders.
- We now got a tremendous amount of deserters.
- They were coming freely because the Germans were here.
- They had created a tremendous climate of brutality.
- There were executions of civilians, hostages, torture,
- all kinds of Nazi stuff that the Italians never really knew.
- And that got them to us.
- And the more they came, the more we took them.
- And now we got our orders now from the Allies.
- You see, now that France was being liberated
- and it was liberated, and the Allies were implanted firmly
- and they were going for their last push into Germany,
- they told us what they wanted from us.
- And what they wanted from us was very simple,
- attack their supply lines.
- Knock off power plants.
- And the reason was simple.
- All the trains in northern Italy were running on electric power.
- And if you knocked off the power plants, there were no trains.
- They wanted us to destroy all the little bridges.
- As they rebuilt them, we blew them up.
- So they couldn't get into the valleys freely.
- One of the main jobs we had to do
- was to salvage B-17 crews that were shot down.
- In those days, the Allies especially the Americans,
- did carpet bombing, mass bombings
- of the northern Italian industrial areas.
- And by that, I mean they came in with 800, 900, 1,000
- planes at one time.
- It was an awesome sight to see the sun disappear
- under airplanes.
- It was an incredible thing that they
- could fly so close together and not kill each other.
- And they went in and they bombed Milano, Torino
- where the industry was, the help for the Nazis.
- And then on the way back, anybody
- that was hit by flak or it was very little airplane left,
- airplane power, the Nazis had nothing left.
- But they had anti-aircraft fire.
- And some of the planes were hurt and shot down.
- And the flyers were told to parachute
- over our occupied lands, which they usually did.
- And our job was to get these guys.
- Pick them up so they don't fall into German hands,
- and bring them back into France.
- The paradox of the whole thing was that the war in France
- was over.
- And I was still sitting in a war.
- Had I picked myself up at that point and go into France
- and stay there, I would have been liberated a year earlier.
- But it never occurred to me.
- And also my mother was in Italy, hiding
- from one little barn to the other, and amazingly enough,
- making it.
- Well by April 30 of 1945, our division was 60,000 men strong.
- And we were told to come down from the mountains.
- At that point, April 30 was a due day.
- We were ready for the final attack.
- We had one major problem.
- 90% of our boys were in green uniforms.
- They were deserters.
- They had fascist uniforms.
- And how are you going to go attack green uniforms when
- your guys have green uniforms?
- So the main project was how do you get clothes for them.
- Of course, that was impossible.
- But the farmers' wives found a solution.
- They all used to be very good in dyeing clothes.
- And I recall they brought out the big kettles.
- And they set up, fires outside.
- And all these uniforms were dyed into multi colors.
- We were red soldiers, and blue soldiers, and brown soldiers,
- and anything but green.
- And it was a real funny look to them.
- But it was an important thing.
- We laughed a lot at the time because I think we knew already
- we had won the war.
- And we were ready to go.
- Well, we came down from the mountain.
- And we found nothing.
- The Germans had retreated.
- They had blown up the main bridge.
- And we occupied Cuneo without any shooting really.
- I traded my mule for a Fiat ambulance.
- The only problem with that car was
- that it didn't have a reverse, but otherwise it
- was quite a new thing for me, and quite pleasurable.
- We took over the government of Cuneo.
- The military police was put into action.
- Now our jobs were very distinct.
- We had to clean up the area before the Allies arrived.
- And everything would come back to normal.
- We had a lot of collaborators in our hands,
- what we called spies, women that slept with Nazis,
- all kinds of terrific stuff.
- And these people had to go and be judged.
- Now our 30 guys were not only tribunal,
- but they were executioners.
- Most people that came through us were really guilty people
- and they had created quite a hardship,
- death among our people.
- And they were condemned to die.
- And when we had 30 of them condemned to die,
- which took about 60 minutes to do,
- they would be lined up against the prison wall and shot.
- That was the only way to try to get some kind of reasoning
- to this thing, and clean it so that when the Allies come in we
- can proceed to go home.
- One of the main jobs we had, of course,
- was at this point take care of the SS.
- The SS were to be executed without a trial, reason
- for it being the Ardennes.
- The last German push trying to win the war against the Allies
- was in the Ardennes in France.
- Even though it failed, the Nazis executed
- without even blinking an eye a lot of American soldiers
- that they captured.
- They put them into an open field, pulled up some trucks,
- and machine gunned them.
- And because of that brutal situation,
- the Allies executed an order that any SS
- that is being captured is to be shot on the spot.
- Well, there was nothing wrong with that,
- except the SS ran into the mountains
- where we just came from.
- And we weren't about to go back there and being shot by them.
- So we just decided we going to wait
- for them to get good and hungry and come down one by one,
- which eventually they did.
- You will probably want to know how can we recognize and SS
- in civilian clothes.
- Well this was such an elite group
- that Adolf Hitler decided that they had priority
- in being helped in case of a problem in the war
- or being wounded and so on.
- So they had their blood type tattooed
- under the right armpit.
- And that was a dead giveaway.
- The SS were being captured one by one.
- The SS were being shot one by one.
- The SS were being made to dig their own graves one by one.
- And then one or two were kept behind
- to just cover the graves.
- It was one of the finer moments of my life.
- The German troops refused to surrender to the partisans
- because according to their propaganda,
- we were total animals.
- We were cutting off ears, torturing to death,
- and doing all kinds of wonderful things that they did,
- and they really taught us.
- I'm sure that some of it was true.
- But in order not to be submitted to that kind of problem,
- they decided to march towards a prisoner of war camp
- that the Americans had established for them
- close to the city of Milan.
- Now the German army was totally defeated.
- We had taken care of all their wheels
- for the last year of the war.
- We had orders to destroy everything
- that rolled from baby carriages, to fire engines,
- to tanks, to trucks and so on.
- And that was done.
- And that once proud German army retreated by foot to Milan.
- And what we finally found out was like a death march.
- Even though they looked like hell.
- They were dirty, filthy, without shoes, without transportation,
- on their way to a prisoner of war camp
- and to being finally repatriated to their home.
- And they had lost the war and they knew it.
- They burned every house and barn, they found on the way.
- They took every inhabitant out, lined them up against the wall
- and shot them, except for the smallest infant.
- They let that lay there and cry.
- Why they did this I'll never know.
- All I know is it was a brutal Nazi operation that
- was totally unnecessary because the war was over.
- The armistice was signed.
- They unconditionally surrendered to the Allies.
- And they all knew it, but they still did it.
- Well, I had to stay as I said, another month in Italy.
- We took care of our little SS problems
- and so on, and arranged for a re transportation to France.
- I realized now that I was a very lucky guy.
- I was alive.
- I was never captured by the Nazis.
- And I'm going to go home now.
- And the fact was I won the war.
- So it was arranged with the American commander
- to transport my mother and myself back to Nice.
- Because we did not know that there was such a thing as death
- camps the Nazis had created.
- And I figured that my dad's going to come back
- from his workplace in Germany, and the only way
- he knew how to come back is where they took him from.
- So we decided we were going to go back to Nice,
- and then we're going to see what's going to happen.
- Well we were repatriated.
- My mother was picked up.
- I was riding a lead Jeep of that transport column.
- I was in the uniform of the 101 airborne at the time, which
- we had about 200 of those guys parachuted with us.
- And the military police was given their uniforms.
- And we were kind of part of them, not really officially
- but they adopted us.
- Well, we got into Nice.
- We were brought to a hotel on Boulevard Victor Hugo,
- where they did the screening.
- And this was an important thing because they never knew
- who infiltrated the country.
- It could have been some long lost SS that came back
- and they were just going to go and hide and go underground.
- So I was interviewed by a French lieutenant.
- Mind you I was speaking perfect French, of course.
- And we had a good chat.
- I was a lieutenant.
- He was a lieutenant.
- And we were happy the war was over, and so on.
- It was quite a chat.
- And the only thing was when it came
- down to the nitty gritty, my name, birthplace, and so on,
- when he wrote all that down and he wrote down Vienna, Austria.
- He did not write Vienna, Austria.
- He wrote Vienna, Germany.
- He still thought that Austria was Germany.
- He couldn't put it in his head that it separated again.
- So he said to me, I have some very bad news
- for you, young man.
- See, you are a German.
- And I have to put you in a small area.
- I have to detain you, until we find out exactly who you are.
- And I had no choice in the matter.
- I was put in a car with my mother.
- And we were driven to a place which
- I knew well was called the Hotel Suisse.
- It was very scenic.
- It was right on the Mediterranean.
- But when I got in there, I realized
- this wasn't the hotel I knew at one time.
- This was like a prison.
- That's where they kept all the people they were unsure about.
- And it was a stay of three weeks.
- I was liberated.
- And I was in prison.
- And the most terrible part about it,
- of course, these rooms these was nothing in there
- but a bit of hay to sleep on.
- And the French fed you so-so food,
- because they couldn't care less about you to begin with.
- And finally, I broke through that barrier.
- And I got a hold of an officer.
- And I explained to him, where he could
- go to find out who I really was, that my papers were
- in the French police.
- That my attorney was Monsieur Augier.
- And please contact him.
- Here's his address.
- And within two days, I was given my freedom.
- This officer did it for me.
- My mother and I were liberated.
- We were set free.
- We had really nowhere to go.
- We had very, very little money, only a little bit
- was given to me at my discharge.
- I didn't know what to do.
- So I went back to the people that rented
- us the apartment at one time.
- And they took us in without asking for money at that point.
- They knew it would come.
- And they gave us our old apartment,
- a furnished apartment back.
- At that point, I saw things that I never knew existed.
- I was waiting for my dad and he didn't show up
- I saw people walking the streets.
- They looked like walking dead, skeletons with numbers tattooed
- on their arm, shaved heads with the women
- in Russian, old Russian peasant shoes and clothes.
- And when I asked, questions nobody would speak.
- Nobody would say anything.
- It took about a few weeks for them to open up.
- And now the news came out, the news
- about death camps, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen.
- All these names appeared, the millions
- of people that were gassed, burned, or shot,
- put into mass graves, Babi Yar-- all the stuff
- that happened that nobody knew.
- I presume they knew it in this country.
- But we didn't in Europe.
- It was such a well-kept secret.
- Well while this was going on and I was trying to resettle,
- it occurred to me I should go by the last place,
- the last known address I had in Nice that my sister knew.
- And I went by there to tell these people who were also
- Nazis at one time that I was alive,
- and the woman who was in a wheelchair
- told me that her husband had left her.
- But there was a telegram for me.
- And it was from my sister from Cuba.
- And she wanted to know if anybody was alive.
- But you see she sent the telegram as soon as France
- was liberated in 1944.
- And for one year, I did not respond.
- Of course, I wasn't there.
- But that telegram had a prepaid response.
- And I set up a telegram and sent it to her
- after the war was over.
- And I presume she almost fell over realizing
- that after one year of not knowing
- two people of her family were still alive.
- She immediately sent us a $100 bill,
- which was a heck of a lot of money at the time,
- and started us back on the road of recovery.
- I'm going to resume this by giving you some details.
- We're going to summarize this whole thing.
- Excuse me.
- The 700 that were taken by the Nazis in Italy
- were finally deported by the SS and wound up in Auschwitz,
- and all of them were executed.
- I do not know of any survivor from that area.
- Out of the 12 that went in the mountains with me, 11 really,
- only two were lost.
- One was shot by a German who was picking strawberries
- at the time.
- And when the man saw the two Germans
- in the side of the mountain, and he ran, they just shot him.
- And the other one, a fellow by the name of Siegfried Schwartz,
- very, very bright guy, a little weird but bright very bright.
- He was taken by the fascists.
- And he was taken to Cuneo to jail.
- And when we got to jail to liberate the jail,
- I was trying to get to him.
- They had just shot him that morning.
- They executed him.
- So these were the two people we lost out of 12.
- And that was a very good percentage.
- My dad was deported to Auschwitz.
- The French had issued me a paper where they gave me
- the itinerary and dates.
- He was taken to a camp in the non-occupied zone.
- He was then taken to Drancy, which
- was the occupied zone, which was a holding
- camp for deportations.
- It was one of the most horrible holding places--
- filthy, dirty, rat infested.
- It was just as bad as a ghetto really.
- And he was taken from there to Auschwitz.
- He met a kapo who fortunately my dad used to help in Vienna when
- he was in good shape.
- And this man was pretty poor.
- And my dad used to help him out.
- And he remembered.
- And he took my dad under his wing.
- So my father lasted a long time.
- But I met that kapo, after the war and he finally
- under threat of his life gave me the information what
- I wanted to know.
- My dad was executed during a moment of Nazi testing.
- They were experimenting with how they can get rid of the Jews
- without spending the gas.
- And what they did is they starved the people to death.
- And when they were in such shape,
- where they just went into a coma they just
- put them into the crematorium and they burned them.
- And that's what happened to my dad.
- He was executed without gas.
- I have this to good authority.
- I have the Red Cross right now investigating the exact date.
- Maybe I can put this to rest.
- I have an aunt that survived Bergen-Belsen.
- The last day before liberation, all the women in that camp
- were hurtled into the center of the camp itself.
- And they were all machine gunned.
- My aunt fell under whole bunch of bodies
- and didn't dare to breathe for three days and three nights.
- And when the Allies finally came in with the bulldozers
- to take the bodies away, she had to get up.
- She was in shock.
- But she was alive.
- She was taken back to Vienna where she later died.
- Because she forgot to give herself a shot for diabetes.
- Well, I can see why.
- My grandmother was almost 90 years old in Vienna.
- And she was taken down from where she lived.
- I recall it was in the fourth floor apartment
- in the second district.
- She was taken down to be marched to the train
- station for deportation to Auschwitz in Vienna.
- And when they started walking these people,
- she was in ill health and old and she fell.
- And I understand that a 19-year-old soldier went up
- to her, pulled his gun out of his holster
- and shot her in the head.
- And that was the end of my grandma.
- I don't know how my grandfather died who was left behind,
- probably the same way.
- We were faced, of course, with mass shootings
- all over the Eastern areas, mass graves.
- 85% of my family died in the Holocaust.
- A total of 30 million people perished during World War II.
- 6 million Jews died in death camps,
- and 6 million non-Jews died in death camps too.
- Can you imagine 30 million people
- dying because of one mad man?
- But just remember one thing.
- Hitler didn't do this by himself.
- He had to have a lot of help.
- My mother and I emigrated to the United States
- on February the 11th, 1950.
- And my life turned around and became just beautiful.
- I became a citizen five years later.
- And it's only been up.
- I enjoy every minute of it.
- I'm proud to be alive.
- And I'm glad that I can tell this story so that nobody
- should ever forget that it ever happened.
- Thank you for listening.
Overview
- Interviewee
- Mr. Harry Burger
- Date
-
interview:
1993 February 16
Physical Details
- Language
- English
- Extent
-
1 videocassette (VHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..
Rights & Restrictions
- Conditions on Access
- There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
- Conditions on Use
- No restrictions on use
Keywords & Subjects
- Topical Term
- Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Personal narratives.
- Personal Name
- Burger, Harry.
Administrative Notes
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received a copy of the interview from Harry Burger
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 08:10:36
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn520449
Additional Resources
Download & Licensing
- Request Copy
- See Rights and Restrictions
- Terms of Use
- This record is digitized but cannot be downloaded online.
In-Person Research
- Available for Research
- Plan a Research Visit