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Oral history interview with Danguole Gabis

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2015.477.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.0856

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    Oral history interview with Danguole Gabis
    Transcript
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Mrs. Danguole Gabis on December 10, 2015
    in West Tisbury, Massachusetts on Martha's Vineyard.
    Thank you very, very much, Mrs. Gabis,
    for agreeing to speak with us today,
    for agreeing to share your story,
    your experiences and in this way help
    us understand how the awful things that
    happened during World War II and the Holocaust occurred,
    how it affected ordinary people.
    I will start with from the very beginning
    and ask you about your life, about your family,
    about pre-war years, about your experiences,
    about how your family was affected.
    And we'll go from there.
    Can you tell me--
    one of the simplest questions is, what was
    your name when you were born?
    My name is Danguole Gabis.
    Mm-hmm.
    What was your maiden name?
    Puronaite.
    Puronaite.
    Uh-huh.
    So you were born Danguole Puronaite?
    Danguole Puronaite.
    Did you have a middle name?
    I was born in Kaunas, and [LITHUANIAN] 1929, August.
    What was the day in August in 1929?
    August 7.
    August 7, 1929.
    [LITHUANIAN]
    All right.
    And Kaunas, you mean Kaunas, Lithuania.
    Is that correct?
    Kaunas in Lithuania, yes.
    All right.
    Did you grow up in Kaunas?
    No.
    My father worked at that time for the Lithuanian border
    police.
    And they were just visiting Kaunas.
    And after I was born, they moved somewhere.
    I'm not sure.
    But they left Kaunas.
    [SPEAKING LITHUANIAN]
    All right, why don't we say that in English?
    You said your memories from Lithuania
    are having lived in Zeimelis.
    Zeimelis [LITHUANIAN]--
    Excuse me for a second.
    --and also visiting my uncles on their farms.
    I see.
    We'll get there.
    I wanted to hear about all of that.
    But first, I'd like to know a few other basic questions.
    So we know your date of birth was August 7, 1929.
    Yes.
    You were born Danguole Puronaite.
    And you were born in Kaunas.
    Can you tell me, did you have brothers and sisters?
    I had brother and sister.
    My brother was born--
    they are both younger.
    So you're the oldest.
    I am the oldest child in the family, yes.
    OK.
    Who was born after you?
    My brother.
    What was his name?
    Or what is his name?
    Romualdas.
    Oh, his name was Romualdas Puronas then?
    Uh-huh.
    Romualdas Puronas.
    And what year was he born?
    [LITHUANIAN]
    You don't remember very accurately.
    No.
    OK.
    He was three years younger than I. So it would be '32.
    OK.
    And then your sister was born.
    She was the very youngest one.
    She just turned 79.
    OK.
    So she was about seven years younger than I am.
    So she was born '35, '36?
    Uh-huh.
    All right.
    And I think--
    I don't know where my brother was born.
    My sister I think was born in Zeimelis.
    OK.
    And what's her name?
    Gerda.
    Gerda.
    Gerda Puronaite.
    OK.
    Let's talk about your parents a little bit.
    Tell me about your mother.
    What was her-- what was her first name and her maiden name?
    Ona.
    Ona was her first name?
    Ona Martinaviciute.
    Her maiden name was Martinaviciute.
    OK.
    And your father's name was?
    Pranas Puronas.
    All right.
    Tell me a little bit about your mother's family
    and what you know of it.
    I know very little of my mother's family.
    We never lived anywhere close to them.
    And my connections were with my father's family but not
    my mother's.
    OK.
    So did you ever--
    you never knew any aunts or uncles
    or grandparents or anything?
    Not on my mother's side.
    OK.
    I knew that her mother was dead.
    And, actually, when I--
    I had met her sister, who lived at one point in Kaunas.
    And my father and I went to Kaunas
    when I was probably seven, eight years old.
    And we stayed at my aunt Julie's.
    So her name was Yulia.
    Yulia.
    Mm-hmm.
    I do not know her last name.
    She was divorced.
    She was divorced.
    She had two sons, I believe.
    And I knew one of her two sons, who was a priest.
    I see.
    And he came to visit me here on the island,
    on Martha's Vineyard, yes.
    He had come to Martha's Vineyard to visit me.
    He is now dead.
    I see.
    I see.
    But he was, in truth, your first cousin.
    Yes.
    And so you met his mother one time
    when you were a seven-year-old girl.
    Yes.
    And then you met him only when he came to Martha's Vineyard.
    I met him here in United States.
    And I don't quite remember now when I met him first.
    But he did come to United States.
    I met him when I was in Chicago.
    Oh, I see.
    I see.
    And at one point, he was a priest in Oklahoma, I believe,
    somewhere.
    And I remember taking a train to go there--
    we lived in Chicago then--
    to visit him.
    I see.
    And he had come to visit me here on the island.
    And I also-- my aunt, who took care of us after my mother
    was deported, my father's sister,
    had a small house in New Jersey, and I visited her there.
    And he was there, too.
    He came to visit her, too.
    I don't know where from.
    OK.
    So we will talk about some of these events
    that you mentioned in a little bit.
    Right now, I'd like to--
    I'd like to find out more about your family,
    the background of your family.
    [PHONE RINGS]
    So you would like to know--
    More about your mother's family.
    So if you'd never met them--
    I don't know much about my--
    as I say, I do not know much about my mother's family.
    Did she ever tell you anything about it?
    She told me that she was very fond of her father,
    but she did not think much of her mother.
    But I haven't met either of them, either one of them.
    Did she talk about her own childhood, her own youth?
    She told me that she was sent--
    she went to school.
    She finished high school, gymnasium.
    And they lived somewhere around Panevezys, I believe.
    Uh-huh, Panevezys, which is one of the larger cities or towns,
    shall we say, in Lithuania, one of the five largest.
    Uh-huh, uh-huh.
    But not in this city because they were on the farms.
    OK.
    Was it a well-to-do family?
    Was fairly well-to-do family.
    Uh-huh.
    You knew that?
    She had-- she had a couple brothers and two sisters.
    I think there were five in her family.
    OK.
    One of the sisters had married very well,
    the one who lived in Kaunas but divorced.
    Then she had another sister--
    I don't remember her name now--
    who was a nun for a while and then left the--
    The order.
    --monastery and married.
    And from what I understand, it was not a good marriage.
    But at one point, we visited them.
    Mm-hmm.
    I don't know much, not much.
    So tell me.
    It sounds unusual.
    She comes from such a large family,
    and she has siblings, many siblings.
    How did it come about that you didn't
    have much contact with them?
    We didn't live close by.
    And remember, at that time, to get together was not as easy.
    I mean, you had to take a train, expense, where to stay,
    even if you stay with the family.
    And we had, my family--
    my mother had me, and she had another baby,
    who died a little--
    he was still a little baby.
    I have no memory of him.
    Then she had my brother, who lived.
    Then she had--
    I think there was another child that died.
    And then she had my sister.
    And also my father continued to work on the Lithuanian border,
    usually, my memory is, working on the Latvian border
    with Lithuania.
    And my mother then, at one point when we lived in Zeimelis,
    she worked in the library.
    We'll come to that.
    That's interesting.
    It shows she had enough education
    that she would be working in a library, which
    is unusual in those times for young women and girls to do so.
    I think most of her family were well-educated.
    I see.
    OK.
    All of them.
    OK.
    Now let's turn to your father's family.
    You say his name was Pranas Puronas.
    Uh-huh.
    And what part of Lithuania did they come from, did he come
    from?
    They were farmers.
    And they had-- the family had--
    his mother had 12 children.
    Oh, my.
    His mother could neither read nor write.
    Family thought that my father was very bright,
    and they send him to school.
    What part of Lithuania were they from?
    They lived-- let me see--
    Plunge.
    Uh-huh, Plunge.
    So they were--
    Somewhere in that area.
    Aukstaitija.
    Well, that's Zemaitija.
    Plunge is Zemaitija.
    Zemaitija.
    Yeah.
    So Plunge is also very close to the Latvian border.
    It is in the northwest corner of Lithuania.
    No.
    My father's education at that point
    had nothing to do with the borders.
    OK.
    They were all farmers, and not large farms but small farms.
    Were they well-to-do as well, your father's family?
    They did OK, but they were not a wealthy family.
    Did you ever visit your grandmother--
    Yes.
    --who had the 12 children in her own home?
    Yes.
    But by then, I mean, my father was married,
    and I went there sometime since summer
    to stay with my grandmother and my uncles.
    One of the uncles had my grandmother living with him.
    Another one had his farm not too far away.
    You could walk there.
    And my uncle Danielius, I spent time with him.
    And he was your father's brother.
    Yes.
    So of the 12 children that your paternal grandmother had,
    did all of them survive?
    Eight survived.
    Four died in infancy?
    Yes.
    OK.
    That's what I hear.
    OK.
    That's what I was told.
    Eight survived.
    I know that one emigrated to South America.
    And actually, my sister had been in touch with him.
    Oh.
    But he's dead now.
    OK.
    And the rest of them lived in Lithuania.
    I don't know all of them.
    I never met all of them, but I met quite a few.
    I'd like to find out more of what
    it was like when you would visit them
    in the summertime on your grandmother's
    farm or your uncle's farm where she lived.
    Can you paint a picture for me what the house would be like,
    how much land they had?
    Describe it.
    I don't know how much land, but it was not a big land.
    Hectares.
    OK, it was in hectares.
    Yes.
    And it was--
    I really can't tell.
    Nobody told me.
    I did not discuss that kind of thing.
    Of course.
    But it was a mother's house.
    It had a big oven in the kitchen where you baked bread.
    You put it inside and bake brick loaves of bread.
    There were other buildings.
    There was an-- there was a--
    where the animals woke up.
    The barn.
    The barn.
    There was another building where the grain was stored and also
    had a bedroom there that was used in summer.
    There was a-- most of the living went on
    in the kitchen in the main room with benches
    around a large table and benches by the table.
    And the day meals were served there.
    During the day, the family had servants
    who worked in their fields, never in the house,
    in the fields.
    How many other rooms were in the house?
    Or was it--
    No.
    OK, there was this big room where the big stove was.
    And there was a smaller room.
    It's almost like a cool room where they
    kept smoked meats and things.
    Then there was a hallway and led into the other part of the house
    where there was a very lovely bedroom.
    OK.
    There was a bed in the hallway.
    There was a bed in that first large room.
    So I would say there were probably three rooms.
    And all the family lived in those?
    All the family lived in there.
    But when I met them, when I went there,
    there was only my uncle, his wife, my grandmother.
    I see.
    The others were off.
    They had gotten their land portions.
    I see.
    The farm was divided.
    The large farm was divided.
    They had their own land, their own houses, and they went away.
    But did they all grow up in this house?
    All of those surviving children?
    I assume so.
    OK.
    I assume so, that the eight of them grew up there.
    And was your father amongst the youngest or the oldest?
    He was not the youngest, and he was not the oldest.
    OK.
    I think he was somewhere in the middle.
    OK.
    I know he had a younger brother.
    Danielius was his younger brother.
    He had an older sister, Ona.
    His brother Peter was older.
    His brother Paul was younger.
    He married a woman from not the same village,
    a bit farther away, who apparently had no brothers
    and who inherited her parents' farm and property.
    And Paul married her.
    And in such way, he--
    Became a larger--
    --became larger farmer.
    One of my brother's sisters, Marita,
    whom I knew very well because I met her
    when I went back to Lithuania after the wars,
    married a man who turned out to be a drunk.
    Ah.
    So this is one of your father's sisters.
    Yes.
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    --all my father's siblings.
    I see.
    Marita was the youngest.
    I see.
    Did you know your paternal grandfather?
    No.
    He died.
    He was dead.
    When I started coming to the farms, he was dead.
    OK.
    Did you--
    I never met him.
    Did you like going to the farm in the summertime?
    Yes.
    Mm-hmm.
    What is it that was the most fun for a little girl
    to be on that farm?
    I liked-- everybody was very nice to me,
    people who were working there on the farm in the summer.
    I had a great deal of freedom to go through the fields
    and see them mowing the hay and then raking the hay,
    playing in the hay piles.
    Did your brother and sister go with you?
    Yes.
    So it would be the three of you.
    It would be three of us.
    Sometimes I will go just with my brother
    because my sister was too small, and my mother
    didn't want to leave her.
    OK.
    But in some ways, this was both a relief for your parents
    that they were able to have a little bit of a break
    from raising children.
    I don't know.
    It was never put that way to us.
    Ah.
    How was it put to you?
    How was it put--
    Just simply, do you want to go to see your--
    Your grandparent.
    Yeah.
    Yeah, your grandma.
    --your grandmother and go to the farm?
    And we say, yes, I want to go to the farm.
    And we were taken.
    What was your grandmother like?
    What was her name?
    Barbora.
    Barbora.
    Mm-hmm.
    Yucite.
    Yucite.
    Yeah.
    Barbora Yucite.
    Did you like her?
    I liked her very much.
    She was a lovely woman.
    Yeah?
    She was very kind, very loving.
    I remember her saying that--
    talking about me, that I would be such a pretty girl,
    except my dresses were way too short.
    [LAUGHS]
    Because in the villages then even little girls
    wore dresses practically below their knee,
    and my dress barely covered my butt.
    [LAUGHTER]
    So my dresses were too short.
    Ah.
    What kind of a person?
    She was very kind to you.
    Was she also somebody who was like the family matriarch?
    Was she the person who--
    Not exactly.
    I mean, they respected her.
    And she was very much involved in the work
    in the kitchen, the making that cheeses,
    the probably smoking the meats.
    And the family was quite religious,
    and they would go to church.
    We would go to church on Sundays, not every Sunday,
    though.
    I don't remember.
    And she was-- she wore long clothes.
    She wore a kerchief on her head, tied under her chin.
    The white kerchief that so many used to wear?
    Not necessarily white.
    Not necessarily.
    Not necessarily white.
    But I remember that if they went to church,
    and that would be going to church--
    where would that be?
    Palevene.
    Palevene.
    Was that sort of like a small little village
    that had a church in it?
    Small little town.
    Maybe a couple stores, the church,
    the house where the priest lived.
    [LITHUANIAN]--
    That's right.
    --in Lithuanian.
    That's right.
    And they had-- that's about all.
    But I had sweet memories that on summer--
    some saint's day or what, everybody would bring food.
    And after the services, they would
    gathered in the grounds around the church and sit and eat.
    And they would have very good sweet cheese
    that I loved made from milk that was not soured.
    Ooh, ooh.
    And actually, one of my uncles married a town woman.
    From this town?
    From this little town.
    Mm-hmm.
    OK.
    She was a seamstress.
    Did she lengthen your dresses?
    She went from farm to farm and sewed.
    I see.
    Mm-hmm.
    And my uncle-- one of my--
    my uncle Danielius, my youngest uncle, married her.
    OK.
    I forget her name.
    OK.
    And--
    It was a good--
    it was not a rich life, but it was a good life,
    I think, all in all.
    It sounds very nice.
    It sounds very warm.
    Yes.
    The family was very close.
    They visited on the holidays.
    They visited each other and other farms.
    And it was a good time.
    I mean.
    My father, as I say, was sent to school,
    and then he went to the 1918 Lithuanian independence.
    He fought with the Lithuanians army, the partisans.
    And then he worked--
    he was in the army, and then he was-- so he did not farm.
    So was he the only one from all the children
    who were sent to have more of an education?
    Yes.
    However, they all could read and write.
    Except Grandma.
    Except Grandma.
    OK.
    Though she carried a prayer book to the church
    all the time, though she couldn't read it.
    Oh.
    I remembered a pretty flower garden that she had.
    Mm-hmm.
    Did you help her either in the garden
    or with preparing any of the foods that you mentioned?
    I did not work.
    You played.
    I played.
    I was so little to do anything.
    Not even wash dishes.
    I was not asked to do anything.
    I would just run around with my brother.
    My brother, though he was three years younger, was a tall boy,
    and I was not big.
    So we were like twins.
    We spend a lot of time together.
    That sounds idyllic for a child.
    Yes, it was a very easy life.
    Few demands.
    Yeah.
    When we read in town, I quickly--
    after I learned how to read, I loved to read.
    And since then, later on when I was now nine--
    eight, nine, I used to take books out
    of the library since my mother ended up working in the library
    there in Skapiskis.
    OK.
    In Zeimelis, actually.
    In Zeimelis.
    I would go and take books out.
    And sometimes I would take books out that
    were not appropriate to my age, and I would read them, hiding.
    Oh, really?
    Yeah.
    Do you remember any of the books that were so not appropriate?
    Romances, some kind of romances.
    That's all I remember.
    Yeah.
    Well, they're much more interesting because they're
    forbidden as well.
    Yeah, yeah.
    But I read-- and I remembered another thing that I used to do.
    I liked very much Karl May.
    Do you know Karl May?
    Tell us who Karl May is.
    I have heard of him mentioned.
    He is a German writer.
    OK.
    And he wrote books about American Indians,
    though he had never been in America
    or seen a live Indian in his life.
    But he wrote about--
    what did he write--
    about Winnetou, one of the--
    he glorified American Indians.
    So he was translated into Lithuanian.
    He was translated into Lithuanian.
    He was quite popular.
    And I read the books, I remember.
    We used to play Indians.
    Did you?
    Well, it's interesting because a whole generation of people--
    I have heard him mentioned before by some of the people
    I've interviewed who are from Germany.
    And they would remember Karl May, reading him
    as they were growing up as well.
    And we never heard of--
    here in the United States, it was not
    part of our childhood, not part of the books
    that we would remember.
    Let's turn a little bit now to your father and your mother.
    You say your father was fighting in the 1918 war
    for independence.
    Is that right?
    That's what I understand.
    1915, 1918.
    He was very nationalistic.
    The whole family was nationalistic.
    Your father's family.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    It was a value for them.
    They weren't marching anywhere, but they certainly--
    How would you-- when someone says someone is nationalistic,
    different images come to mind.
    How would it express itself?
    OK.
    They liked the fact that there were Lithuanian schools,
    that the children were taught Lithuanian reading and writing.
    Because I don't know if you know it, but under the tsar's
    occupation, it was forbidden to print books in Lithuanian.
    And they all remembered this then.
    I remembered the stories about it.
    I mean, it was before my time.
    But I remembered people talking about stories about it,
    that you had--
    and we were even taught it, explained to us
    that they used to print books in Lithuanian
    across the border in Prussia and smuggle them into Lithuania.
    And that's how they had books, Lithuanian books
    in their villages.
    I see.
    And you could be punished very severely by the tsar's agents
    if they found out that you had Lithuanian books.
    So there was this feeling that now they cannot tell us.
    We have our own books, our own government.
    I don't think anybody was too interested in how the government
    ran or what was happening.
    Their lives concentrated on their farm, on their families,
    on the weather.
    Because it affects the farm.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    That's it.
    But as they say, they would not have--
    they would never have welcomed any foreign country
    taking Lithuania over.
    Well, some people will call that patriotic, not
    necessarily nationalist, that definition of it,
    that people find themselves to be patriots of their own country
    and willing to defend it.
    Well, defend it.
    It's interesting how it happened from what I remember.
    Again, keeping in mind that I was now
    talking about the first thing that happened
    was the Russians coming in.
    Are we talking now about World War II or World War I?
    Two.
    OK.
    In 1918, Lithuania became separate.
    The tsars were defeated.
    Now I'm talking because I learned about it, not because it
    was much discussed in my family, because that was way before.
    Got it.
    Nobody would sit down and--
    we didn't have TV or radios.
    We did have a radio.
    Nobody listened to it much, except operas.
    But what I learned later on, after the communists
    took over Russia government and then stopped a war,
    Lithuanians declared independence.
    We're talking 1917, 1918.
    1917, 1918.
    1918.
    And my father fought then to get everybody out of Lithuania.
    He was in the army then.
    So what year was he born?
    Do you remember?
    Hmm?
    What year was your father born?
    What year was my father born?
    I don't know.
    You don't know.
    I don't know.
    Do you know how old--
    He must have been then--
    he must have been then in his early 20s.
    So in 1917, 1918.
    Uh-huh.
    OK.
    So he would have been born in the 1890s.
    Probably.
    OK.
    OK.
    And tell me a little bit about, how did your parents meet?
    Do you know about this?
    I have heard about it.
    I don't know quite how it happened.
    But my mother used to tell stories
    that they met somewhere not where the farms were.
    OK.
    Not in Zeimelis.
    Somewhere-- I'm trying to remember
    where it could have been.
    Panevezys maybe or Kupiskis.
    Anyway, my father showed up there.
    My mother in lived in that area, and she actually
    was dating somebody.
    And that friend of hers was not--
    she found out he was cheating on her.
    Again, my mother tells the story.
    And so she got mad at him and mad at my father to spite him.
    So your father was a rebound.
    He was a rebound, and it was not a happy marriage.
    Oh.
    It was not a happy marriage.
    In what ways?
    Well, my mother felt that my father never accomplished much,
    that he was not ambitious enough,
    that he was sort of happy-go-lucky person
    and that she made a mistake marrying him.
    Did you children used to hear that?
    She would talk about it to her friends.
    And I would hear that.
    I see.
    She did not talk about it to me or any of us children.
    But she would talk to her friends about it sometimes.
    And that's how I heard about it.
    Did they argue?
    Yes, they argued.
    What did they argue about?
    Money.
    I think my father probably had a relationship with somebody.
    And my mother just simply did not
    have much respect for my father.
    Ooh.
    It just was not a happy couple.
    Was the atmosphere then much different in your home?
    It was not happy atmosphere in my house, no.
    So it's a big contrast to when you would go spend the summer
    in your grandmother and uncle's--
    Yes.
    OK.
    They do not abuse each other openly, or in front of us,
    there was not much arguing.
    But it just was--
    I think in some ways, my father loved my mother.
    But he just never measured up to her expectations.
    Now, you described what she thought of him.
    How would you characterize your parents' personalities?
    He was-- my father was easy going, I would say.
    And I think he really loved my mother.
    It's just that she did not really love him,
    and he could just not measure up to what she expected of him.
    That's pretty harsh.
    That's pretty harsh.
    Yeah.
    So it was not a happy marriage.
    And they were both very caring as far as we
    were concerned, the children.
    Were you closer to one or to the other?
    I think as a little girl, I probably
    leaned more towards my mother, but not really,
    because they were wise enough to never in front of us
    bring their troubles, bring their disputes,
    and try to tell us, oh, he's not good or she's not good.
    They never did that.
    OK.
    So it would be what you had overheard
    and just the general sense.
    That's what I overhear, that he is not ambitious enough,
    that he's not really supporting his family the way he should,
    that he's not working hard enough.
    Mostly, that was coming from my mother.
    I never, ever heard my father talking against my mother,
    never.
    What kind of personality did your mother have?
    My mother?
    Yeah.
    Hard.
    Really?
    [LITHUANIAN]
    How did that express itself?
    Well, my father was much more open and loving and fun,
    where I don't remember my mother playing with us so much.
    I mean, she made sure that we looked as good as possible.
    When you see that photograph, we are wearing beautiful red velvet
    outfits with my brother.
    I remember the-- they both expected me to do well in school
    when I started going to school.
    But I would say my mother was not very affectionate,
    whereas my father was.
    My father was not much of a disciplinary person.
    And he was not much of a--
    he was very easygoing.
    So in some ways, all of this fell to your mother.
    Yes.
    She had to do all of the hard work.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    She did.
    Tell me--
    And she got that--
    she got that job.
    She did not work all the time, as I remember.
    But she did get a job running that library because they
    did need the income.
    Got it.
    Tell me how that library looked.
    Can you describe the building?
    The library?
    Uh-huh.
    Sure.
    I loved the library.
    I still love libraries, though I can't read now
    without my machine.
    And it was on a corner of street and market square.
    In the middle of the town, there was a square where
    they would hold market days.
    They would have a market day.
    And farmers from the area would come and sell eggs.
    They sometimes had animals to sell to other farmers, even
    horses.
    And they would sell all kinds of fun produce, garden stuff.
    And on that square--
    I mean, on that open place, there
    was a Jewish bakery on one side, I remember.
    And on the other side on the corner was the library.
    Steps in, one story, my mother's desk there,
    and bookcases in the room.
    I don't think there was no second floor.
    OK, so it was a one room library.
    Yeah.
    But fairly large room.
    I mean, like the whole floor.
    OK.
    And you took the books out, you brought it to the desk,
    and how she marked them, maybe wrote it in by hand
    that so-and-so took this book.
    OK.
    And I think so, because I would take them
    out whenever I decided to go and browse around.
    So that was my accent.
    And I remember I would ask my mother to give me $0.10.
    And I would go to the Jewish bakery and buy a sweet.
    Oh.
    Did you have a favorite sweet?
    I know exactly what kind of a sweet.
    [LAUGHS]
    It's made from what we call now gingerbread.
    But it was made in the shape of a mushroom.
    And it had icing on top.
    And that's what I would get.
    That was my sweet.
    And it was-- it was very easy life.
    There was no other buildings in town.
    But I remember down away from there was a very nice Lutheran
    church.
    You're talking about Zeimelis now?
    Yes.
    And Zeimelis, can you place it for me geographically?
    You said it was close to the Latvian border.
    Yes.
    And would it have been in Samogitia, Zemaitija?
    Or would it have been in Aukstaitija?
    I think it was farther west.
    I think it must be Aukstaitija.
    You think it's Aukstaitija?
    OK, we'll eventually take a look on the map and see.
    Yeah, uh-huh.
    Was it a large town?
    No, small town.
    OK.
    When I started reading, really continued reading as an adult,
    and started reading Chekhov, it reminded me
    of some of Chekhov's stories.
    Really?
    Yeah.
    Your town, Zeimelis.
    Yeah.
    Little provincial town.
    Was nothing there.
    Had a train station.
    But that was about it.
    I mean, there were no--
    the big cats in the town were the mayor.
    I used to play with the daughter, mayor's daughter,
    now and then.
    And I used to go to her house to play, too,
    and she had a very fancy house.
    And then there was the chief of police.
    The wife of the chief of police was my sister's godmother.
    And I remember one Christmas, she
    gave my sister this beautiful doll
    that had eyes that closed up.
    And I never had anything like that.
    So I was very jealous.
    Aw.
    Aw.
    I was very jealous of my sister to begin with.
    And why is that?
    Because everybody said, oh, what a beautiful child.
    Oh my gosh.
    And up to then, everybody said I was beautiful.
    [LAUGHS] My sister arrived.
    Suddenly, she was beautiful.
    [LAUGHS] The nerve.
    The nerve.
    Yeah, the nerve.
    Exactly.
    So who is she, this little, bitty thing?
    Yeah.
    So actually, it took us a very long time, though she--
    when she was growing up, she said she adored me.
    Really?
    She said, I would think, if only I could be like Danga.
    Oh.
    Well, see, that's the memories that children have
    and the urges, you know?
    The little ones always want to be with the bigger ones.
    Yeah.
    And the bigger ones don't want [? them. ?]
    No.
    Now, as I say, I got along with my brother just fine.
    But my sister did not count.
    I didn't even see her, if I could avoid it.
    [LAUGHS]
    Well, she had this doll.
    Yeah, she had this doll.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    You mentioned the Jewish bakery where you would get some sweets.
    And that brings me to a question that I had.
    In Plunge, when you would visit your--
    well, it was outside of Plunge--
    when you would visit your grandmother Barbara
    and your father's family, was it all Lithuanian,
    or were there other peoples?
    Ah, it wasn't Plunge.
    It was Palevenele.
    Palevenele.
    Yeah.
    OK, is that close to Plunge or not?
    No.
    OK.
    No.
    So I was wrong in thinking Plunge at all.
    So it's Palevenele.
    Plunge was where my mother's family--
    some of her family lived.
    But no, we were Palevenele.
    Palevenele.
    OK.
    And so were there any Jewish people in Palevenele?
    There could have been.
    Zeimelis had some Jewish people.
    Uh-huh.
    More than just the bakery.
    More than just the bakery, yes.
    How many, I don't know.
    I do remember that there used to be some kind of Jewish holidays,
    and they would all go wrapped in some garments to the river.
    There was a river that ran through town.
    We children were talking that--
    I don't know.
    Children stories went-- nobody really--
    I mean, I did not believe.
    I don't know who believed.
    But there were stories that the Jews
    used the blood of Christian children for their baking
    at a holiday, some holiday.
    OK, so those were the types of--
    when Jews were talked about, that was something
    that you remember--
    The kids.
    --the kids would say.
    The kids would say.
    Kids gossiping.
    My family did not really had prejudices.
    But there was a kind of a separate feeling.
    I think somebody arrived in that town,
    and he had a position as a banker maybe or even a lawyer.
    And I remember my mother said, well, I--
    she had a dinner party, and she had this man
    included meet her friends.
    And she said, and I served pork.
    She said, I did not know he was Jewish.
    I served pork.
    Butt she said, well, he ate it.
    OK.
    OK.
    I mean, my family as such, I did not
    hear them saying anything bad about Jews.
    Did they have interaction--
    But they were separate.
    They really-- some of them did not speak Lithuanian,
    or they knew just enough to run the store.
    Were there more stores than just the bakery?
    Yes, there were.
    There was a butcher store.
    I don't think that was run by Jews.
    There was some kind of dry grocery store,
    because I remember my mother used to send me there
    to buy her cigarettes.
    She smoked?
    She smoked.
    Yeah, she smoked.
    And I don't think there was really much more.
    If you wanted clothes made, you got yard goods,
    and you went to the seamstress, and she made it for you.
    And this was a Jewish seamstress--
    No.
    --or Lithuanian?
    No.
    OK.
    And you say there was also a Lutheran Church in this town,
    in Zeimelis.
    So were there many Protestants there?
    There must have been Protestants there.
    And there was a Lithuanian church.
    And probably there was a Jewish temple,
    but I did not know about it.
    When you say you, we had a Lutheran Church,
    did that mean they were not Lithuanian speaking?
    It was also either Latvian or German or something?
    I had so very little to do with Jewish families.
    I did have a Jewish girlfriend for a while--
    You did?
    --who was in school.
    I think she was a little older than I was.
    OK.
    Do you remember her name?
    And I don't remember her name.
    I don't think we were friends for too long a time.
    But I do remember going to her house, which
    was so much nicer than mine, and it smelled funny.
    It did not smell like my house.
    And it probably was garlic.
    Ah.
    Spices that we did not use.
    We lived in rented apartments in Zeimelis.
    We did not have a house.
    We lived in an attractive rented apartment,
    and then we left that I think when the Russians came.
    I don't-- something went on in the family.
    I don't know.
    But we moved out of there and moved in sort of very rundown
    place, I would even say.
    OK.
    That's where we-- there was like a small stable
    in the back of our yard.
    There was no grass around.
    In your rented places, did you have
    running water and electricity and so on?
    I want to get a sense of how modern the town was.
    There was electricity.
    You had a radio, you told me, yes?
    We had a radio.
    There were telephones.
    There was a train station.
    Did you have telephone in your home?
    Yes, mm-hmm.
    OK.
    There was-- at least for a while, we did.
    And we hardly ever used it.
    I couldn't call anybody, I think.
    The farms did not have telephones.
    Post office, police office.
    And, to me, the police seemed to be--
    chief of police seemed to be much bigger shot than my father.
    I don't know why.
    I think maybe they lived somewhat better than my family.
    I don't think they had any children.
    The townspeople basically had their friendships
    in their own social class.
    They had their jobs.
    There were no demonstrations of any kind.
    No political demonstrations.
    No.
    Except on February 18, I think, was the day of independence.
    16th.
    That there would be a parade.
    My father would be dressed in his uniform
    and maybe even carried a sword.
    I don't remember.
    But it was definitely--
    that schools would be closed, and there
    would be speeches and very often cold and miserable.
    But that was about all.
    And then, people also were connected to their churches.
    Did your family go to church?
    Your father and mother?
    We went sometimes.
    Got it.
    We were not a very religious family.
    Sometimes-- all the children were baptized.
    I was prepared to go to communion, first communion.
    And I remember my mother had a very pretty white dress made
    for me, but no sleeves.
    Just little straps, flowers.
    But there was no celebration at home at all for that.
    And my father did not live with us anymore.
    Oh, so did your parents--
    My father at one point--
    I can't quite remember--
    got a job somewhere else.
    That must have been when the Russians came
    or maybe even before that.
    But he moved out into an adjoining town
    and had a job there.
    And he would come and visit us.
    But my mother was basically in charge of the family
    and pretty much probably of family finances.
    So he did go in [LITHUANIAN] my understanding was.
    It sounds like a separation.
    Yeah, kind of.
    And then as far as the town goes, there were no cars.
    Everybody would come in winter with sleighs, horses
    and sleighs.
    And we kids would love to run after the sleighs,
    get hold of the back of the sleigh,
    and go for the ride, which was very dangerous because you
    could fall down and be trampled by other horses.
    So you were not allowed to do it.
    You had to sneak out to do it.
    And was very safe.
    I was never afraid that somebody will steal something from me
    or beat me up or what.
    Did people talk about political things?
    Did they talk about what was--
    I am sure that some of them did.
    Nobody talked in my family much about political things.
    What was your father's job when he was border police?
    What did that involve?
    That involved, as all borders have,
    patrols, at least at that time.
    I'm sure they do now.
    And he was in charge of a stretch of a border,
    in charge of the patrols.
    I guess he would ride out.
    He had a beautiful horse.
    I remember that.
    Lila was her name.
    And he would ride out there and check on the patrols, I suppose.
    I think now and down, maybe every six months or once a year,
    some kind of a superiors would arrive,
    and he had prison documents.
    I remember it because my mother would fill these documents out
    for him at the last minute so everything looked OK.
    That's what I understood.
    OK.
    But he didn't have to be out there anywhere every day,
    all day, or what.
    Did he have an office?
    No.
    He didn't have any office.
    OK, so there was no place--
    there wasn't a place he had to go to every day to go to work.
    No, no.
    OK.
    No.
    So before he found a job in another town,
    he hung around the house?
    Mm-hmm.
    Or he was away inspecting the borders.
    OK.
    Did you ever join him doing that?
    No.
    But I remembered him bringing--
    in spring bringing a packet made of birch
    bark full with first wild strawberries.
    Oh, that must have been nice.
    Tiny little strawberries.
    They are [? framboise. ?]
    Mm-hmm.
    How do you say that in Lithuanian?
    [LITHUANIAN]
    I've had them myself.
    They're quite delicious.
    They're quite delicious.
    [LITHUANIAN]
    Yeah.
    When you used to visit your grandmother,
    how did you get there?
    Horses.
    Someone from the farm would come and pick us up.
    Mm-hmm.
    And then bring you there.
    That's the way they picked us up.
    When my mother--
    I mean, my father came to Zeimelis,
    showed up in Zeimelis-- because from what I hear,
    there were rumors that he's ran away,
    and he was afraid that they will--
    family will be punished.
    So he showed up.
    And then there were rumors going on that things are not
    going to be good.
    Something's going to happen.
    So--
    You're talking now at what point?
    Still--
    '38.
    '38 or '39?
    '38.
    Really?
    So when he was living far away--
    not far away, in the adjoining town, but separately--
    Yeah.
    --there were rumors going on that things were not
    going to be good?
    The Russians were there.
    Oh, so that's already when the Russians were there.
    Yeah.
    The Russians were-- the communist regime
    was already there.
    I can tell you about what I know about them.
    OK, let's break just for a second.
    OK.
    So let's-- you started to talk about the Soviet occupation.
    And before we get into what happened during it,
    I'd like to step back just before and ask
    about, when did things change and how did things change?
    That is, here you live in independent Lithuania.
    By 1938, you were already a nine-year-old girl.
    And August 7, if you were born in 1938, you'd be nine.
    And August 7, 1939, you'd be 10.
    And in late August of '39 is when Hitler and Stalin signed
    the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
    Right, right.
    Right.
    And I'm sure that nobody--
    but I'm leading you here.
    Maybe it's true that people did know about it.
    But from what I have heard, most people
    didn't know about this pact that they had signed.
    I have no idea because, as I say, we did not discuss family--
    in my family politics.
    Or I think in--
    I am sure that some people who followed knew about it.
    But we did not listen to the radio.
    We had no information, and I never heard about anything.
    I just knew that the Russians took over Lithuania
    and that our President Smetona ran away.
    And there was some kind of--
    some gossip going around.
    No fight, nothing.
    He just left, which was a disgrace.
    OK.
    So--
    There were even some little song snaps made
    about Smetona running away.
    Do you remember any of them?
    No, I don't remember that.
    I remember another one, but I don't remember that one.
    I remember about both German and Russian.
    Tell me.
    [SPEAKING LITHUANIAN]
    [LAUGHS] One--
    [SPEAKING LITHUANIAN]
    One is yet black as the devil.
    One is red like a dog.
    I don't need any Berlin.
    I don't need Moscow.
    Is that right?
    Yes.
    Yeah.
    So that was something that was--
    That was already when the Germans came in.
    I see.
    OK.
    But first, we have to deal with the Russians.
    So what I heard about Russian occupation, I had not--
    in Zeimelis, I haven't seen any police
    or, I mean, soldiers coming in or anything.
    The library was running like it did before.
    No change.
    What about school?
    Huh?
    What about school?
    Schools were running.
    However, they brought in an organization
    called [INAUDIBLE] pioneers.
    OK.
    So did your teachers change?
    Did new teachers come in?
    No, the same teachers.
    And I think there could have been classes about communism
    and how the common man was--
    there were probably some people in town
    who liked the idea that it was everybody's going
    to be equal type of a thing.
    But I don't know.
    I do know that the farmers were very, very concerned
    because they were required by the government now
    to deliver so much food, grains of all kinds, maybe even
    animals to the government, for which they got paid but very
    little.
    So slowly, depending how much land you had,
    it looked like slowly you will have to sell it,
    to leave it because you will not be
    able to have enough to deliver to the government.
    And after that, they would start building koljoses.
    Koljoses is a farm that the land belongs to the state,
    and everybody works there for the state.
    So that was going along.
    But as far as my life or, I would say,
    my mother's life did not change.
    She still worked in the library.
    I still went to school.
    Your father still did his job?
    My father just was nowhere to be seen.
    I don't even know if he had a job of any sort.
    He just wasn't there.
    He wasn't there.
    I do remember that once he showed up just
    to make sure that everybody saw him, that he was still alive,
    and then disappear again.
    And then just before that huge deportation was staged,
    he came home.
    And I have a feeling that the people knew or sensed or heard
    something that something is going to happen.
    So my father or my mother--
    I'm not sure who--
    got in touch with my uncles, and they came,
    and they picked us three up.
    The children.
    All the children.
    All three of us.
    And took us out into the farms.
    OK, before we get there, though, before we get there,
    when the occupation happens, it comes in stages.
    August '39, right after your birthday,
    is when the pact is signed.
    Later on in the fall, the first Soviet troops
    are stationed in Lithuania.
    That may be going in different places, not in Zeimelis.
    That's going on somewhere.
    But it's just never--
    as far as I'm concerned, a child in that small town,
    I did not hear people talking much
    about it or the change from one to another.
    It seemed to me that people just--
    I just knew-- what I knew of it was that Smetona, the president,
    left and that now it's the Russian government.
    The communists--
    Government.
    --are here.
    OK.
    But different things happened.
    And I want to find out--
    as I'm saying these things, I'm wanting
    to find out if any of this triggers anything for Zeimelis.
    And that is--
    No.
    --after the army has its soldiers based,
    then you talked about the requisitioning and the taxes
    that the farmers had to pay.
    I don't even remember seeing any army.
    OK.
    In Zeimelis.
    Was there a change in the police chief, a change in the mayor?
    There must have been.
    Was there anybody who lost their business,
    let's say a little store, or that it no longer--
    Not that I knew of.
    OK.
    Not that I knew of.
    I don't think they had market days anymore.
    OK.
    I think these were stopped.
    I also-- I remember my mother talking
    that it was getting more and more difficult to,
    let say, get meat.
    OK.
    Or other shortages--
    Started to--
    --I heard about in the stores.
    Do you remember the following summer?
    Not even a year had gone by.
    But I think it was June or July.
    The new communist government voted
    to be included in the Soviet Union.
    No.
    So none of that was something that affected you in Zeimelis.
    If something happened, it happened.
    But it was just--
    OK.
    I think there must have been newspapers around.
    But I certainly was way too small to read any of them.
    And nobody in my family read any of them.
    And there were no changes in town as such.
    OK.
    So for us, no matter who sat there, it did not--
    Make a difference.
    Yes.
    There was a patriotic feeling that they wanted--
    But that was straight from the beginning, I think.
    It was right from the beginning, as soon as Smetona left.
    What was the patriotic feeling?
    Want independence.
    Do not want the Russians here, or anybody.
    Want to be independent.
    And people felt sad there was--
    it was as-- what I have heard talking and what my mother
    talked about--
    were unhappy that Lithuania was no longer independent.
    OK.
    And was part of Russia.
    OK.
    Actually, the communists, there must
    have been some communists in town
    as there were communists everywhere
    at that time in Lithuania.
    And they probably were happy.
    But there were no flag raising or big parades
    or, hurray, we are now part of Soviet Union or not.
    None of them happened.
    None of it.
    So here you are, just over a year and a half later, August--
    I mean, excuse me, September--
    the fall of '39 is when the troops are staged.
    July of 1940 is when there's the annexation into the Soviet
    Union.
    And almost a full year before this time that you're
    talking about of people feeling like something's going to happen
    and your uncles come--
    I'm just putting a date to this--
    your uncle come and take you--
    It was just before the deportations started.
    OK.
    That's when-- I mean, I personally,
    nobody told me anything about it and did not discuss anything
    or talked in front of me about it.
    But I was told later on that my family felt something is going
    to happen, that something--
    and that other people knew that something is going to happen.
    So my mother decided to send us out.
    Got it.
    So then--
    And she did not want to go herself
    because she did not want to leave the apartment
    and whatever we had because there would have been no--
    though she did not sleep at home anymore.
    Really?
    And why would she be frightened that she couldn't sleep at home?
    Because people were afraid of the Soviets.
    OK, so even though life really hadn't changed much--
    No.
    Yeah.
    --and things went on, there was a sense of insecurity.
    Now, because they also felt that the war would be coming.
    There were rumors about a war coming.
    I believe there were also rumors that--
    I mean, the Russians or the Soviets
    started demanding more and more from the farmers.
    They probably demanded something from the stores, store owners,
    or other people.
    It just-- obviously that the population
    was feeling uneasy and uncertain of what was going to happen.
    Do you--
    But definitely, definitely did not like the Russians.
    Hated the idea of them coming.
    Do you remember leaving Zeimelis then with your uncle?
    Yeah.
    What do you remember from that?
    Leaving?
    They came from their farm with a horse and buggy and a cart
    and just said, you are going--
    my mother said, you are going to go to the farms, which was not
    so unusual for us because we went every summer, practically
    every summer there anyway.
    So we did.
    Yeah, so this was like in late May, early June, something--
    June.
    It was in June.
    Because it was-- schools were closed.
    So it was June 1941, yes?
    '38.
    I think the deportations--
    '38 Lithuania was still independent.
    Well, when did the war start with Germany?
    June 1941.
    You mean the Russian-German war started--
    In June 1941.
    1949.
    So the Germans did not come to Lithuania until '49?
    No, until '41.
    So that's when it started.
    Yeah.
    The Russian-German war started in June 1941.
    And the deportations happened the same month.
    So when did deportations start?
    June 14, 1941.
    And a week later--
    Oh, yeah, '41.
    Yes, yes.
    '41.
    A week later, the war started.
    Yes, yes.
    Yes, I remember now.
    Yes.
    The week later, the war started.
    Yes.
    So we were taken out to the farms.
    So I think the population felt that some--
    there were rumors.
    There were probably spies.
    There were some kind of information floating around
    that the Soviets will be pushed out,
    and the Germans will come and push the Soviets out,
    and everybody felt--
    I think most people probably felt, oh, well, that's good.
    Let's get rid of the Soviets.
    At least the Germans are religious.
    So that was it.
    So when they took us to the farm,
    I did not think anything of it.
    Now, I tell, though, one thing.
    Once we got there, after staying with my uncles for about a week,
    we were taken away from my uncles.
    Our uncles distributed the three of us to different farmers
    around.
    Family members or not?
    No, not even family members.
    I don't know where my brother was or my sister.
    I know that I was with some people who I could have met,
    but they were not family members.
    And I just stayed there, and I did not know why.
    I thought maybe because the war was coming.
    Because at one point, the family had even a kind
    of earth tunnel built or something
    that you could go in if the bombs start falling,
    if they start shooting around.
    Do you remember anything about this family that you were with?
    No, don't remember.
    I don't even remember their name.
    OK.
    But they were kind to me.
    They were good to me.
    They did not-- they did not tell me what was going on.
    They just said my brother was somewhere else.
    I wanted to be with my brother and sister, mainly my brother.
    Yeah.
    And I just didn't.
    So that was the one unusual thing.
    It was not unusual that you would go with your uncles
    to the farms, but it was unusual that you'd be split up.
    That we were taken from my uncles to the different farms.
    And then at one point, when the Germans came,
    we were taken to another farm, another uncle.
    And finally, we were--
    all three of us got together again.
    Do you remember about how long a time span that was?
    No.
    I mean, the same summer.
    The same summer.
    Yeah, in a few weeks probably.
    Or at the most, a month.
    OK.
    That's all we-- that's all we really need
    to understand what's going on.
    So, and what goes on with your mother and your father?
    What happened with them?
    Wherever my father was, from what I understand,
    he had joined the Lithuanian partisans
    and fought the Russians leaving Lithuania, chased them,
    helped them chased them out.
    My mother was deported.
    That's why we were--
    that's why they thought that something
    was going on, going to happen.
    And that's why we were sent to the farms.
    And after she was deported, we were sent to different farmers.
    And then after Russians left and the Germans came,
    they found my--
    my uncles found out that my mother was deported.
    And how I found out--
    Tell me.
    --my aunt and my godmother, my father's older sister, Ona,
    we were going to some adjacent farm where I had left something
    there or some--
    for some reason, we were walking.
    We were walking little paths through the farmland,
    and someone was working on the land.
    I don't know.
    My aunt knew him.
    And they start to talk.
    And they start to talk, and the man said,
    I hear that Puronaiene was taken away.
    And my aunt said, shh, don't say anything,
    because I did not know.
    And then when we walked away, I asked her, I said,
    what happened?
    And then she told me that my mother was deported.
    Did she know the circumstances of your mother--
    She knew-- the only thing I was told, that the Russians took
    my mother.
    Deported.
    That's all I knew.
    I never went back to Zeimelis.
    Ever?
    No.
    I have gone to Zeimelis-- did I go to Zeimelis?
    I don't think so.
    My sister had gone back, had gone back to find
    the same apartment, the last apartment that we stayed in.
    She said the brick stove that we used was still there.
    So this must have been decades later.
    Oh, yeah.
    A long time later.
    Now, from United States.
    Did you see your mother again?
    Hmm?
    Did you ever see your mother again?
    Yes.
    When?
    I saw her-- she came to United States.
    We got her out.
    She came 49 years ago.
    So that means it would have been 1965?
    Somehow, we found out that she was back in Lithuania.
    Somehow, there were some relatives or people
    from the same village here in United States.
    And they have seen my father and us
    because we were in New Jersey for a little while.
    And they have written to their friends,
    their family in Lithuania, telling them,
    well, we saw Puronas and his family here in--
    United States.
    --in United States.
    And they told my mother.
    That's how she found out that we were alive.
    Because when she came to Lithuania,
    they did not know if we were alive or dead.
    And then she managed through--
    because my aunt was writing letters to Lithuania,
    through family members, she found our addresses
    in United States.
    And I was living then in Chicago.
    Were you already married yourself?
    I was married.
    I had my third child.
    So this must have been the mid-1960s.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    So it would have been at least 25 years later.
    When she came to the United--
    She came to United States, yes.
    And did she stay in the United States?
    She died in United States, yeah.
    She stayed.
    She stayed first with my sister in Chicago.
    And Stanley and I and our children--
    no, David was not born yet.
    I saw her for the first time again in--
    49 years ago.
    But we first heard from her, I had two children.
    I did not have David.
    So she wrote to us, and I wrote to her.
    And then Gerda and I kept sending presents to her.
    She lived in-- where did she live?
    Plunge.
    Maybe that's how we know of Plunge.
    Yeah.
    She lived in Plunge.
    Yes.
    She lived in Plunge.
    And Gerda and I kept sending--
    we were-- at the beginning was very difficult to send anything.
    You had to send through some kind of organization that
    was connected with the Soviet regime that
    would allow the stuff to go in.
    We send basically yard goods of all kinds
    so she could trade them for food.
    She had acquired a tiny house in that town
    that belonged actually to my aunt,
    to Ona, my father's sister.
    She acquired that house.
    And she would request all kinds of very fancy goods.
    So we would send it to her, and she would exchange them.
    She worked also in a parish, I think, there
    as a head cook or something.
    I don't know.
    In Plunge?
    Yeah.
    But she basically lived off what we sent her.
    And she started bribing the authorities,
    trying to apply for a visa to get out and go to United States.
    Your parents never divorced.
    No.
    No.
    When she came to the United States,
    did she ever tell you the details of how she got deported?
    How she lived in the--
    when she was deported?
    Everything from the last time you had seen her to when--
    Some.
    Some.
    She arrived in Chicago.
    I then lived in Columbia, Missouri.
    And I came to Chicago with my three children and stayed
    at my sister's.
    My brother came in.
    He lived then in Kansas, I think in Kansas already, and his wife.
    And we all went to the airport to meet her.
    I remember it was--
    must have been close to Christmas.
    I stayed there for a while, and then I went to the apartment
    because my baby was sick, and I couldn't stay out there.
    I had to go to the apartment.
    So this is what my sisters told me.
    She said, when she got out of the plane, we somehow--
    all of us recognized her.
    But we also knew that once she was able to fly out of Russia
    and fly to Switzerland, that once she got to Switzerland,
    we knew she was safe.
    So what she told about the camps,
    she said actually, first, she was kept in prison
    and was interrogated and was badly beaten up.
    And they wanted to get names of other partisans, partisans
    that were involved.
    And she said she didn't tell them anything.
    So she then ended in camps way out the Altai mountains.
    And it was very difficult. She had had at one point
    some training as a nurse.
    So for a while, she actually helped out in one camp
    as a nurse, and she caught TB.
    She almost died.
    And then they worked in the fields,
    and she said sometimes that peasants from the area
    would leave packages of food in the fields for them,
    for the prisoners, because they knew they were starving.
    She said by that time, a cat appeared in the camp.
    We knew that we lived much better
    because nobody ate the cat.
    I can't imagine what that must have been like for you, for her.
    Hmm?
    I said, I can't imagine what that must have been like--
    Yeah.
    --for any of you.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    And of course, she did not get anything-- didn't hear anything
    from us about her family.
    And then she served 15 years, as she was required apparently.
    Her punishment was to serve 15 years.
    So she did.
    And then they said, that authorities told her
    that she can stay if she wants to and work as a nurse,
    and they will pay her.
    But she said no, she wanted to go back home.
    And so she went back to Lithuania.
    So if she was there for 15 years,
    that means it would have been 1956
    that she would have been released from her servitude--
    Yeah.
    --and went back to Lithuania in the mid-'50s or right after
    that.
    Right after that.
    She went directly to Lithuania and stayed in Plunge
    because her sister--
    one of her sisters lived there or close by.
    And anyway, she was given housing.
    By your father's sister.
    By her own sister.
    OK, by her own sister.
    Yeah.
    By her own sister.
    So her own sister took her in.
    And when she came to the United States, who did she live with?
    She lives with my sister.
    Gerda.
    With Gerda, yes, in Chicago.
    And to describe my mother, she was very thin, somewhat gray.
    And I mean, she was emaciated.
    She was very thin.
    Gerda took her to the doctors, and they said, well,
    if we did not know that she's living with you,
    we would think that she was being starved.
    But she was not happy.
    I think what she missed, she missed having her own place.
    She did not like living with Gerda.
    She did not like living with me.
    Did she ever live with your father again?
    She lived at the end with my father, and she died in--
    with my father and my brother.
    My brother had both of them.
    And she went there because she lived in Chicago with my sister.
    And my sister, they had bought a house
    in Park Ridge, the same house that they are in now.
    And she had broken her hip, and she could not climb the stairs.
    And there was no way for her to sleep downstairs.
    So my brother took her because they had a one floor house, sort
    of little shack in Kansas.
    Did you recognize anything of the mother
    that you knew as a child?
    No.
    Nothing.
    So was it like getting a stranger--
    A complete stranger.
    Mm-hmm.
    And very unhappy woman.
    Very unhappy woman.
    No matter what you did for her and how it went,
    nothing really pleased her.
    Do you recognize any of that from growing up?
    Or was the mother you knew, as hard as she was, not like that?
    No, no, I don't remember that.
    I don't remember her.
    I knew that she was not a happy woman when I was growing up.
    But partly was sort of that she and father did not get along.
    But, no.
    I really don't remember my mother laughing, smile,
    or really meeting anybody with great joy.
    There was something in her character that--
    of course, the deportation and the arrests and all
    that were difficult. But some of that inner sadness
    was always there.
    And I don't know what for.
    Now my father was very different.
    I don't know what--
    So she died in Kansas.
    My brother called me.
    It was right at New Year's.
    I don't remember how many years ago.
    But he called me, and he said that Mother
    had to go into the hospital.
    And I called her and talked with her in the hospital.
    And she said, oh, I'm feeling--
    I don't feel bad.
    She said, I'm OK.
    There is somebody here who can speak--
    her English was not good, not very good.
    But she said, somebody here can speak Polish.
    And she knew Polish, and of course, she knew Russian.
    And so she said was very good.
    And she died next day.
    How many years did she eventually live here
    in the United States?
    Maybe 10, I think.
    She was 80 when she died.
    I know that.
    Do you remember her birth date?
    No.
    No.
    I flew out to Kansas for the burial.
    And now my father is dead, and my mother is dead.
    They are both-- and my brother is dead.
    And all three of them are buried in Kansas on this sweeping hill.
    And you can see as far as your eye goes.
    Is it a good resting place?
    Hmm?
    Is it a good resting place?
    Very good resting place.
    Very quiet.
    Very good resting place.
    Yeah.
    Well, it sounds like when you went away
    in that wagon with your uncles in 1941
    was when you actually lost your mother.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Thank you for sharing this.
    I think we'll take a break now.
    Yep.
    All right.
    So before the break, we were talking
    about what had happened with your mother, what
    her destiny was.
    And one thing that I wanted to see
    if we could bring some clarity to would have been,
    what was the reason for her deportation?
    Why would she have been taken?
    Can you supply any explanation for that?
    I do not have any specific informations.
    What I heard people talking about,
    that there were more people--
    she was not the only one from the town that was taken.
    There were more people taken from that town,
    I think the mayor of the town and his family.
    And it's strange coincidence.
    One of the daughters, small daughter of that family,
    was staying with her grandparents in the village,
    and she was left.
    I see.
    So everybody was taken in the family but her.
    And she grew up and actually came to United States.
    And from the people, there was a feeling
    that they were trying to pick up better educated people
    and probably people that might have been a problem.
    I had never heard anything said that my mother would have been
    picked up because of my father.
    I haven't heard that at all.
    Why would she then have been picked up.
    If not because of your father, what would be the reason?
    But the thing is nobody was given any reason.
    They just showed up and said, you are going, period.
    That is my understanding.
    There were all these people taken from this town.
    And it was a massive deportation all across the country.
    People were taken from other cities,
    too, and shipped straight out to Soviet Union.
    And much later on, one of my uncles and his family
    were deported.
    That was during the '40s.
    After the war?
    Yes.
    OK.
    Yes.
    When the Russians stayed in Lithuania.
    OK.
    So there was no--
    your mother had a feeling.
    There was no specific charge.
    It was not like somebody showed up and said,
    OK, you've wrote this pamphlet or you belong to this group,
    and that's why you will have to go.
    OK.
    What happened to my mother probably happened
    to very many people.
    Very often, I heard those stories
    that they separated small children from their parents,
    and some of these very tiny children
    were given away to Russian families to raise.
    Oh, really?
    I don't know if that is true.
    I really don't know.
    And as far as I was concerned, the way I found out--
    I told you how I found out about it--
    nobody ever explained to me why she was taken.
    It just that there were many other people taken.
    Do you remember missing her?
    I miss her terribly.
    Everybody-- I mean, my sister was tiny still.
    She was seven years--
    she's seven years younger.
    So my sister, she said that--
    she told me much later, now actually, that for a long time,
    she thought maybe she did something.
    That's why was Mother was gone.
    And it's just one of these things that happened.
    And in a strange way, though now, of course,
    I would question it--
    if anything like that would happen or similar,
    I would be questioning everywhere.
    But at that time, I was small.
    The war was going on.
    And nobody never asked any questions.
    I never asked any questions.
    And nobody explained to me.
    So even up until the time your mother was taken,
    you had never seen any Soviet soldiers.
    No.
    No.
    But soon after that, there was a German attack, a Nazi attack
    on the Soviet Union, and now Lithuania
    was a part of the Soviet Union.
    How did that-- how did you-- do you remember that happening?
    I was then not staying with any of my family.
    We were separated, the three children.
    And I was staying with some some people,
    and then eventually heard that the Russians left
    and the Germans came.
    And as far as I was concerned-- and the people around me
    were glad to see Germans because the Russians were beginning
    to confiscate the farms and impose all kinds of restrictions
    like that.
    And the times in the country became more difficult.
    So they thought, well, occupation--
    at least some of them would say, well, at least
    they believe in God.
    I see.
    I see.
    You remember hearing that?
    Yes.
    I remember hearing that.
    However, did I tell you the little ditty
    that was passed around?
    Tell me again.
    If it's the same one, we'll find out.
    Yeah, yeah, yeah.
    OK.
    [SPEAKING LITHUANIAN]
    OK.
    It starts out with-- and it's a variation
    of what you told me before, which was neither Berlin
    nor Moscow is dear to me.
    For me, one is black as the devil.
    The other one is as brown as a dog.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    So you eventually do get reunited with your brother
    and your sister?
    Eventually, we were all brought together, first on the farms.
    OK.
    On my uncle's farm, we all came together.
    Was this your uncle Danielius or another uncle?
    Oh, Danielius.
    OK.
    On my uncle Danielius' farm.
    And from there, my father showed up there, too.
    OK.
    He was there.
    Then I saw soldiers.
    I saw soldiers, I believe, in Skapiskis.
    I see.
    German soldiers?
    German soldiers, yes.
    So these are the first foreign soldiers that you see.
    Yes.
    OK.
    Yes.
    And how is it that your father didn't get deported?
    He wasn't home.
    How was it that we were not picked up?
    We were not home.
    I see.
    Otherwise, we all would have been picked up.
    I see.
    But your mother had also been sleeping somewhere else.
    My mother was sleeping somewhere else
    because she also felt that something is going to happen.
    But she came home in early morning before going to work,
    I think to feed the chickens.
    We had chickens.
    And they picked her up.
    How did you find out about this, this detail?
    Huh?
    When did you find out about this detail?
    My mother told us.
    So that's 25 years later.
    Yes.
    I see.
    I see.
    Yeah.
    OK, let's go back now when you see the first soldiers,
    German soldiers in Skapiskis.
    What happened then?
    Your father shows up?
    You three children are together.
    Continue.
    What happens after that?
    After that would happen, the summer was coming to the end.
    My father told us that we will move to Svencionys.
    OK.
    What is Svencionys?
    It's a city, a town.
    OK.
    And I did not know where it was or what it was, but--
    and that he will be the head of the security.
    I had no idea what the head of the security is.
    So I asked him.
    I still remember.
    I asked him.
    I said, well, will you be a bigger boss
    than a chief of police?
    And he smiled.
    He said yes.
    I see.
    And that's all I knew about it.
    So in Lithuanian, would this have been-- he would have been--
    what was his title in Lithuanian?
    If it's head of security in English,
    how did he put it in Lithuanian?
    In Lithuanian?
    Mm-hmm.
    [SPEAKING LITHUANIAN]
    And you asked him whether or not that was a high--
    A bigger-- yeah.
    A bigger job than [LITHUANIAN].
    Yes.
    Uh-huh.
    And he smiled and said yes.
    Yes.
    Mm-hmm.
    OK.
    Did he have a uniform?
    No.
    Oh, he never wore a uniform?
    No.
    He was always in plainclothes.
    Yes.
    He wore a uniform when he was working for the Lithuanian
    government on the border police.
    OK.
    Then he wore a uniform.
    OK.
    But after he left Zeimelis and worked somewhere else,
    did not live with us, he did not wear a uniform.
    I also remember feeling very strange
    seeing him in civilian clothes.
    Really?
    Yes, because I was so used to seeing him in a uniform.
    OK.
    So tell me about your first impressions of Svencionys.
    Where was this place?
    What did it look like?
    I have no idea where it was.
    I probably could--
    I knew that it was not too far from Vilnius.
    OK, not from far the capital.
    OK.
    Yes.
    I knew that.
    And we arrived.
    We moved into this apartment there.
    There was furniture.
    I did not know anybody.
    I went to school, which was not too far from the apartment
    where we lived.
    And [LITHUANIAN], that's my--
    Godmother.
    --godmother.
    And my father's older sister, who
    was not married and had no children,
    came to live with us because my mother was gone.
    OK.
    And sometimes my [LITHUANIAN],, my grandmother would come, too.
    My aunt was very religious person.
    And so she went to church a lot, and she
    took us Sundays to church.
    I did not have many friends.
    I did not know anything about the town.
    I did not know anybody, but met a few people in school
    in my class.
    One of my classmates sometimes would come and play with me
    in our house.
    Was your house better than it had been in Zeimelis
    where you lived?
    Yes.
    In what way?
    It had more room.
    And it was better furnished.
    We had a garden and a flower garden.
    Did you rent it from somebody?
    I assume so.
    OK.
    I don't think we owned it.
    Now, Rita tells me that she had gone
    back there looking for the house, but it was burned down.
    You're saying now your daughter Rita went back to Svencionys
    to look for it.
    For the house, but it was burned.
    But it was burned down.
    It wasn't there any longer.
    OK.
    Did your father ever explain or just describe
    how he got this job from Zeimelis to Svencionys?
    No, no.
    Because it's quite distance.
    I mean, it's quite far across the country.
    Yes, yes.
    And he was not working at--
    well, in my mind, I assumed that we have
    a Lithuanian government now.
    Mm-hmm.
    That was your assumption at the time.
    Yes.
    That the Russians have left.
    And so the Germans were there in the country,
    but they were there to kind of protect us from Russians.
    And I don't remember quite, but I
    do think there was some quasi-Lithuanian government.
    How real, how unreal, or am I imagining it, I don't remember.
    OK.
    I remember my school that I liked.
    The children were friendly.
    I also remember that there was a Polish population in town.
    Uh-huh.
    And was this something new for you?
    That was something new to me.
    OK.
    But there was a Polish population in school also.
    And at one point, I think there were classes in school
    were given in Polish.
    Did you ever go to any of those classes?
    No.
    No.
    They were discontinued.
    Everything was in Lithuanian.
    If you know Lithuanian history, that part of Lithuania, Vilnius
    and all around there, at one point was in Polish hands.
    After 1918, the Poles, they were there,
    and the Lithuanians could not get the land back.
    So only when the--
    first, the Russians, the communists came to Lithuania.
    They brought this country, these parts of Lithuania,
    back to the Lithuanian Republic then.
    And the Germans also had it all in the Lithuanian Republic.
    Actually, when my father was working in Svencionys,
    we have gone to Vilnius--
    excuse me-- to visit with some priests that my aunt knew.
    Mm-hmm.
    Was that the first time you were in Vilnius ever?
    Yes.
    And do you remember any impressions from that visit?
    Churches, basically.
    There are a lot of churches there.
    Yes.
    And knowing my aunt, yes.
    We went to churches.
    OK.
    So within a number of months, actually
    one could say rather quickly, your life
    really turns upside down but then gets resettled halfway
    across the country.
    Again, if I think about it now, it's very unsettling.
    However, I was small.
    I was still very young.
    And I wasn't the only one who was being resettled everywhere
    up and down.
    The whole country was being resettled up and down.
    It was not unusual to have to move and start somewhere else.
    And I really didn't have a place, some [INAUDIBLE]..
    My mother was taken.
    So in Zeimelis, there was nothing for me, anybody else.
    And, well, the farms--
    my uncles' farms were OK.
    But I had to go to school.
    So I will not have stayed in the village anyway.
    And I had never been there in winter.
    So moving to another city, another town,
    and another apartment wasn't something that was dramatic.
    The hurtful thing was that my mother wasn't there.
    You missed her.
    That was difficult.
    Yeah.
    And though I liked my aunt, I never--
    somehow, in my silly, little mind,
    I felt that my mother was more worldly, more sophisticated.
    Was she, in actuality?
    Yes, yes.
    Yes.
    And my aunt was this very religious country woman,
    though she was kind enough.
    She was a good woman.
    Yes, but she wasn't your mother.
    Yeah.
    Somehow, I had warmer memories of my grandmother.
    We really liked my--
    were very close to my grandmother.
    Yeah.
    Your father, did he have an office that he went to?
    No.
    Yes, he had an office.
    He had an office.
    Did you ever visit him there?
    No.
    I never been there.
    I never went there.
    I never saw any Germans around, soldiers.
    We knew very few people in town.
    Actually, when I think of it, I don't remember see anybody
    that we knew, except people through [LITHUANIAN],,
    from my aunt at a church.
    And I remember that the priest, the parish priest,
    would give huge, very elaborate Easter breakfasts at that parish
    and invite some people.
    OK.
    And I went to church a great deal
    and was invited with the church ceremonies.
    Did you get communion, first communion?
    Oh, that was before already.
    Did you get confirmed?
    Yes, in Vilnius.
    In Vilnius.
    You got confirmation in Vilnius.
    Mm-hmm.
    OK.
    Now, in some ways, what you're describing to me sounds not
    unusual because up until those changes in 1939 to 1941,
    this was Poland.
    This was not Lithuania.
    So it was new territory for a Lithuanian administration.
    Were there other Lithuanians in Svencionys,
    or were they a minority?
    Everybody spoke Lithuanian.
    If you went to the store or if you
    went to a restaurant, which we sometimes did,
    everybody spoke Lithuanian.
    OK.
    And whoever-- in school, whoever was in school with me
    spoke Lithuanian.
    Now, you said, though, that you did
    know that there were Polish children in your school,
    and for a little while, there were classes in Polish.
    Not after we came.
    Oh, I see.
    Before.
    Before.
    Before we came, they spoke--
    they had Polish.
    But when we came there, when the Lithuanians had
    hold of these parts, the school was only Lithuanian.
    Did Polish children, however, attend it?
    I don't know if they were Polish or not.
    They all spoke Lithuanian.
    I see.
    I did not meet anybody in school that spoke Polish.
    I see.
    One of the reasons I ask is because in Poland itself,
    during German occupation, education
    was severely restricted for Poles, severely,
    in some ways, outright forbidden,
    and some places only up until certain grades.
    So maybe children went to school who were--
    Polish children went to school and were
    able to continue school but only if they did it in Lithuanian.
    Probably, because the-- from what I know,
    our education was not restricted in any way.
    But then, again, there was this--
    Germans, from talks around, had something against the Slavs.
    And Poles were Slavs, and the Lithuanians were not.
    So I think we might have gotten some preferential treatment.
    I see.
    It's possible.
    Again, I just heard it as gossips
    sometimes among some adults.
    OK.
    But when we came there, didn't know anybody.
    OK.
    Now--
    And we just moved into the apartment.
    I was taking piano lessons.
    From whom?
    And I do know that as time went on,
    things became more difficult. For example, food became scarce.
    Mm-hmm.
    You could not get meat, or you got very little meat.
    But we had rabbits.
    We kept rabbits and hens and I think even geese.
    And I don't remember ever going to the store to shop.
    Whatever was bought, my aunt probably went and shopped.
    So in some ways, it sounds like you were quite
    sheltered as children.
    Yeah.
    Would that be true, that you were kind of sheltered
    from the chores of everyday--
    Yes.
    I never was asked to do anything.
    I did not have to make beds.
    I did not have to help in the kitchen.
    And you were the oldest.
    And I was the oldest, yes.
    No.
    Was your father still as easygoing as he had been before?
    There were times where he would disappear for a couple days
    or so.
    There were times that he would be drunk.
    Oh, really?
    Had you ever seen him drunk before?
    No.
    There were times-- well, if he was drunk, he was loud.
    He talked loud.
    He never talked politics of any sort.
    Did his manner change to you or to the others?
    Towards us?
    No.
    No.
    Did he--
    He was always very gentle with us.
    And in some ways, I felt he was unusually proud of me
    because he thought I was very smart.
    And he thought that till the very end of his life, which
    is interesting.
    It's important for a child.
    Yeah, yeah.
    It's very important for a child to feel that from their parent.
    So Rita, my sister--
    Gerda, my sister, was considered very pretty.
    I was definitely the smart one.
    I see.
    And there wasn't much shopping of any kind.
    I think whatever clothes we had, they were made over, changed.
    Did you make any new friends in Svencionys?
    I did.
    I had especially one girl who lived out of town.
    And she would sometimes after school come to my house
    and stay with me, and we would play.
    And she was somebody you had met from school?
    Yes.
    Do you remember her name?
    I don't remember her name.
    OK.
    That was also just for a short while.
    When I think of it now, and knowing the history of my father
    there, I can see that some people probably
    were avoiding us.
    I mean, that's what I read into it now.
    At that time, I had no idea.
    We were in a place where I was not familiar.
    I did not know the place.
    I did not know the people.
    I was in a new school.
    I did pretty well in school.
    Well, you mention knowing now about such things.
    When did you find out?
    And what did you find out?
    Rita's book.
    So your daughter recently wrote a book
    that was published less than three months ago in September
    2015.
    Yeah.
    Yes.
    And before then, what had you known about your father's work?
    We'll talk about what you learned.
    But I want to find out what you knew.
    Yeah, what I knew about him.
    OK, there-- let's see.
    How long a time was it that the Germans were there
    and then the Russians came back?
    I think it was from '41 to '44.
    Three years.
    At least.
    Mm-hmm.
    Around three years.
    OK.
    So at one point, I remember that my father was--
    let's see.
    Yes.
    We left Svencionys and moved to Kupishkis
    because my father was arrested.
    I was on the farms.
    I and my brother were on the farms with our uncles.
    And my grandmother was in the apartment in Svencionys.
    And my uncles went and picked her up.
    I think also in that period, that summer, at one point,
    before our uncles, before I went to our farms,
    we were taken out of town.
    Now, who took us, I don't remember.
    And we were placed somewhere in a very wooded place, somewhere
    in the woods by some family for a few weeks or a month or so.
    I'm not sure how long.
    But then we all came together.
    I'm talking children.
    And we all left for my uncles' farms.
    And then while there, at the end of the summer,
    time came to go to school.
    And my uncles rented an apartment for my aunt
    and the three of us in Kupishkis so that we could go to school.
    So it was another new school.
    It was another new school.
    And I haven't lived in Kupishkis before.
    I didn't even--
    I was not familiar.
    So I went to school there.
    And then when we were in Kupishkis,
    we heard that my father was in prison.
    No, before we came to Kupishkis.
    We were still at my uncles' farms.
    We heard that my father was arrested.
    he was in prison in Vilnius.
    And so my uncles found out about it.
    How, I don't know.
    I remember thinking that it was so unfair.
    The Russians took my mother, and the Germans
    put my father in jail.
    And the school started.
    We moved to Kupishkis.
    And there was an break in the fall.
    There was some kind of a holiday.
    And my aunt was ready to go to Vilnius, visit our father,
    and I was going to go with her.
    And just before we left, we received information
    that he was released.
    I see.
    So he was released, he came to Kupishkis to see us,
    and then went to Panevezys where he was employed again.
    So he never went back to Svencionys?
    No.
    I see.
    Never went back to Svencionys.
    Do you remember what month or what time,
    what year it was that he was arrested?
    The only way--
    I think after two--
    I must have spent two years in a school in Svencionys.
    OK.
    And it would have happened in the summer after that.
    So it would be the summer of '43.
    Probably, yeah.
    OK.
    Now, when you moved to Svencionys,
    you mentioned that there was--
    first of all, it was part of Poland.
    There were many Polish people.
    I did not really even know that.
    I know.
    I know.
    Yeah.
    I just knew that there were Poles living there.
    Did you see--
    And I know from the history.
    By then, I knew, because I learned some history
    and geography, that Vilnius and the part
    around Vilnius, after 1918 was left for the Poles.
    But as soon as the first communist occupation took place,
    that part of Lithuania was put back to Lithuania.
    So some could say that was something that was advantageous.
    Yes.
    Well, advantageous.
    Yes, everybody-- Lithuanians felt good.
    We have our land back.
    Mm-hmm.
    I see.
    Now, from what I understand about Svencionys,
    it had not only a Polish population but also
    a Jewish population before the war.
    When you went there, when you lived there,
    do you remember any Jewish shops?
    Do you remember any Jewish people?
    Do you remember seeing anything on the streets, anybody
    on the streets?
    No.
    And if-- I mean, unless they were dressed differently or went
    to--
    I don't remember seeing a synagogue.
    I did not remember hearing any Jews in the stores.
    Just didn't see any Jews.
    No Jews ever came to our house.
    And I don't remember seeing any Jewish children in school.
    But then that's not surprising because when
    I was in Svencioneliai, I did not
    know if there were any Jewish children in my school.
    OK.
    They would not necessarily would have announced themselves
    as Jewish or try to stand out.
    Did you, as children, know what was happening
    to the Jews of the country?
    No.
    No.
    I don't know.
    It might have been discussed among my family
    like my uncles and my grandmother
    or even my aunt who lived with us.
    But they never tried to tell us anything
    about the fate of the Jews or did we ask.
    Now, why didn't we ask?
    Perhaps we were scared.
    Why would you be scared?
    If people are being arrested, you are scared, if you are small
    and people are being arrested, especially if they were people
    that you knew, though I didn't know any Jews.
    I knew Jews in Zeimelis as store owners.
    But in Svencionys, when we moved into Svencionys,
    I did not meet any Jews.
    And I mean, I know what happened.
    But when we arrived there, I would now
    think that by then, the Jews must have been rounded up
    and moved out of town.
    OK.
    Because I know that Germans required
    that they wore a yellow star.
    Now, where did I find that out?
    Was it there or much later?
    Probably still in Lithuania.
    But I never saw anybody wearing it.
    Did you ever see somebody wearing ribbons?
    A what?
    Ribbons of some kind.
    No.
    No.
    No.
    That would mark them as Jewish.
    No.
    No.
    OK.
    I really don't think I met any Jews there or knew
    what was happening to the Jews.
    Would you have ever thought at that time
    that your father might have had something to do with it?
    No.
    This sounds very stupid, but I had no--
    not only knew what my father's job involved.
    That's not stupid.
    You were a child.
    Yeah, well, it was security police.
    So there were plenty of reasons to want to be secure.
    I do remember an incident because it was so talked
    about very much at that time.
    There was an incident where a German--
    two Germans were in a car driving somewhere not too far
    from Svencionys somewhere.
    And they had a translator, a woman.
    I assumed she was a Lithuania woman.
    And she was connected with the partisans.
    I knew there were partisans in the woods.
    And she asks the Germans to stop the car
    because she needed to go to woods to relieve herself.
    They stopped the car, and the partisan shot them.
    And then she was arrested.
    The Germans picked her up.
    And I remembered that there were some German--
    Wehrmacht with the brown shirts had
    appeared in town, even were in our house talking to my father.
    And I remember my father making a remark to somebody
    that she would be better off dead.
    And I remember then hearing something
    that people were shocked because of this.
    I remember that they picked maybe that incident
    or some other incident.
    The Germans picked up a couple men--
    they were not Jews.
    I think they were Poles, maybe Lithuanians--
    and shot them.
    They took them to Jewish cemetery
    and shot them there, though they were not Jewish.
    And I remember I was very--
    I was afraid.
    But then I don't know where they were buried or not buried
    or what they were shot for.
    But I was afraid.
    And then the Germans kind of disappeared again.
    There was not--
    I did not feel a strong German presence in Svencionys.
    Because if you walk to school, if you walk to town,
    you didn't see them.
    Now, did you feel safe?
    Huh?
    Did you feel safe?
    Given what you're describing to me,
    that doesn't sound like an easy thing to answer.
    No.
    You didn't.
    When things go like that, you don't feel safe.
    You don't feel safe anywhere.
    So there were times in my very young life where I was--
    I mean, just the fact that my father was then arrested.
    Did you ever find out what for?
    No.
    One did not ask.
    I mean, these things were--
    people were arrested.
    So the government, whoever they are at that point,
    has something against you.
    So they arrested you.
    Why?
    Who knows?
    The whole system of justice was non-existent.
    It was on the whim of the government that
    was at that time in power.
    That's it.
    They did not have to give any excuses or explanations.
    You could have been picked up walking down the street
    and hauled off.
    Mm-hmm.
    So--
    Because it happened.
    Look, when my mother was taken away,
    there were thousands of people taken away.
    So it wouldn't have occurred to ask why.
    Is that what you're saying?
    No.
    Didn't even occur to ask me why.
    OK.
    Well, now--
    You know what?
    And also then, whatever was happening to the Jews
    at that time, had I even known about it,
    that they were being arrested and hauled off,
    it would be just another thing happening.
    Another crazy thing happening.
    Scary.
    It's a very hard life, very difficult time.
    It's interesting when I think about it.
    Heck, here I am.
    Wonder of wonders.
    I don't even lock my door.
    I did for a long time in my life.
    I did not feel safe.
    And then we live in DP camps.
    We'll talk about this.
    Yeah.
    But I want to still stay with--
    Stay with this period in our life.
    Yeah.
    Now, at this point, I'll interject
    how it even is that we come to speak with you today.
    And that's by mentioning the book that your daughter wrote.
    Your daughter Rita Gabis wrote a book that was published two,
    three months ago called Guest at the Shooter's Banquet.
    And in it, she describes her journey
    to find out more about what your father's role had been
    during World War II in a way to find out who he was,
    more of who he was.
    And I've read the book.
    And in it, I also read that you did not want
    to know until it was finished.
    You were going to read it, but not until it was finished,
    as to what her progress was.
    Am I accurate in saying that?
    Or were you involved in her research work?
    About what, the book?
    About the book, about what she was doing, about--
    No, I was not at all involved.
    OK.
    No.
    She came here once with her husband, and my sister was here.
    And we had one conversation where
    I think she was in the process of getting her book going
    about our life in Svencionys and what
    do we remember of the war and that period.
    And she did not feel that we gave her
    a very satisfactory answers, that we knew enough about it.
    And it's true.
    When you think of this, if something like that
    started happening here, you would be up in arms.
    But I was this young child.
    The country was up and down, first one invasion, then
    the other invasion.
    There was no stable government of any sort.
    Nobody even taught us about any government, stable or otherwise.
    So you just kind of stay with your family
    and mind your business, and you don't need to ask any questions.
    The rest was not up to us.
    The only thing I can say, it's what you hear,
    what you overheard.
    Mm-hmm.
    Now since then, you've read the book.
    Is that correct?
    Yes.
    What is it that you learned that you didn't know before?
    I thought she did a very good job writing the book.
    I thought not only she wrote a beautiful book--
    she's a very good writer--
    but also she did as much research as was needed.
    And she wrote about things that I truly believe happened.
    Mm-hmm.
    And these things involve some very bitter and very tough
    and one could say brutal events.
    And I can--
    I expect her--
    I won't say interpretation because it's not interpretation.
    It's a fact that was going on.
    And now, knowing my father as a grown person, though I always
    have been his favorite child, and I love him dearly,
    I know that he was a vain man.
    I don't think he was a mean man or a cruel man.
    But I think he was vain.
    And I think he could have easily fallen
    into a place where he will do things to promote himself.
    Now, how far he would go with that, as the book says,
    he went pretty far, just about as far as you can go.
    But then, none of that was ever discussed at the household.
    Never.
    And I had no--
    I really had no idea what a social--
    what a chief of security would do because I never
    heard of that title.
    Never met anybody who was a chief of police--
    of security police.
    But as Rita writes, it did involve sending out orders
    to round up Jews.
    It did involve making sure they were brought to certain places.
    And if I had stayed, let's say, in Zeimelis
    where I knew the Jews lived there
    and where they lived, now had I stayed there and known
    that they disappeared, I would have been more curious.
    Then I would have known that something is happening
    and what is happening.
    Someone was there, and now they're gone.
    Yeah, yeah, that they were arrested or taken away.
    The talk would be right there about it.
    I was in a city and town that was larger.
    I had never been there.
    I never knew there were any Jews there.
    And the only thing you see from your father
    is that sometimes he gets drunk, that he didn't before.
    Yeah, but then that's also-- my father
    liked to drink now and then.
    He never was a man who would sit down and get drunk by himself.
    But he would love--
    he loved company.
    And he would go-- they would go out,
    and they would drink at somebody's house usually,
    very seldom in taverns or some such thing.
    Somebody's house, usually.
    Our house, too.
    When you read-- when you read what Rita discovered,
    what she wrote--
    she interviewed some of the Jewish survivors
    from Svencionys.
    She interviewed some of the relatives of the Poles
    who were shot as a reprisal for the killing of these two
    Germans.
    Did she present to you a man who was a stranger to you
    as a father?
    Or was it someone you knew, but you didn't
    know these things about him?
    I obviously did not know what's going on.
    I did not know what was going on with the Jews.
    And I did not know what my father's part was in it.
    After everything was over and I was learning history later on
    and I was learning what happened and thinking
    of my father and his place there,
    I can easily understand that that could have happened.
    It did not take me by, oh, no, my daddy
    would never do something like that.
    No.
    OK.
    OK.
    No.
    We'll talk about DP life.
    But at this point, I want to jump ahead
    because there's another unusual wrinkle to this story is
    that after you come to the United States,
    you meet and you marry somebody who is Jewish.
    Yeah.
    Can you tell me about that, how you met, how you married?
    I was his student.
    Oh, really?
    Yeah.
    Easy.
    Easy.
    What did he teach?
    Government.
    I couldn't have cared anything about the United States
    government.
    Never knew about any government, cared less.
    [LAUGHS] Stanley would tell me what will be on the test.
    Sort of him, you should study this and this.
    I would go there and think.
    I got Cs--
    He gave you Cs?
    --and a husband.
    [LAUGHTER]
    It wasn't bad deal.
    What was the name of your husband?
    Stanley.
    Stanley.
    Uh-huh.
    Stanley was his first name.
    Yeah.
    Last name Gabis?
    Yeah, Gabis.
    Gabis.
    They were-- his grandparents came from--
    somewhere from Russia or Belarus, from somewhere there.
    And we were married in Chicago in a little Lutheran
    chapel on the University of Chicago grounds
    because Stanley knew the minister.
    And I wanted to be married in church.
    I did not want to go just to the town hall and sign papers.
    I wanted to wear a white dress and things
    like that, the whole works.
    So he said OK.
    So this minister said he will marry us.
    And they were married and--
    [PHONE RINGING]
    Let's cut.
    Where did I put--
    OK?
    Yeah.
    I think my father was a bit--
    he would have loved to have me marry a Lithuanian.
    I mean, that was his choice.
    If it was not Lithuanian, I don't think he cared.
    And Stanley had no religious traditions.
    His mother had no religious traditions.
    And I did not have any Christian traditions beside--
    I did have a Christmas tree up.
    But that was about it.
    And so it did not even occur to me
    that there is something strange that I marry a Jew.
    Did you ever have any disagreements
    with your father because of it?
    No.
    No.
    OK.
    He was very-- as I say, he would have preferred me that I married
    a Lithuanian--
    the language, the history, the traditions.
    That he was a Jew and he was not a Lithuanian.
    He was so American that I knew more about Jewish customs
    than he did, really.
    So there was never any--
    neither at his mother's house or that Stanley
    ever had any food restrictions or nothing.
    But did you share with you what had happened,
    at least as far as you knew during the war, with him
    and what had--
    He never asked me.
    I mean, I told him as much as he wanted to know
    and as much as I thought I should talk.
    I was living by myself in Chicago.
    My sister moved to Chicago also.
    I had some Lithuanian friends.
    I was going to a university there.
    And I was, for a while, very friendly with an Arab.
    I almost married him.
    Oh my goodness.
    [LAUGHTER]
    So it just didn't--
    It didn't come up.
    No.
    Is that what you're saying?
    OK.
    Well, there are a lot of people who
    have told me that after the war was over,
    they just didn't talk about what they had gone through.
    These are people who are also Jewish--
    Well, you don't really--
    it's not a happy time in your life.
    It's such a confusion.
    And it's such an unsettled time.
    In my case, my mother was gone.
    My very religious aunt was raising me, which
    I wasn't so enthralled about.
    We were in Svencionys.
    We had to leave there and hide.
    Then my father was arrested.
    I mean, it just one thing after another.
    And you somehow plow through it all.
    Then we left Lithuania in a hurry, hiding.
    OK, let's go back to that.
    Because as I said, I jumped ahead.
    Yeah.
    And I do want to go back to what life
    was like after Svencionys when your father is released
    and you all move to Panevezys.
    That's 1943, '44.
    We're coming to-- certainly, as far
    as the large picture is concerned,
    Germany is now losing the war.
    The Battle of Stalingrad has happened.
    They have lost that battle.
    They're pulling back.
    You're in Panevezys.
    What did your father do?
    What was his job there?
    He was in Panevezys.
    I was not there.
    Oh, I see.
    OK, you were still in--
    I was in Kupishkis.
    All the three children and my aunt
    were in Kupishkis in an apartment
    there, going to school in Kupishkis.
    And so what was your father doing in Panevezys?
    My father had a job.
    I was never quite sure what kind of a job.
    I know he had an office somewhere, and he had--
    he did not wear any uniforms.
    And he had a small apartment in Panevezys.
    And I remember going over and spending a day or two there.
    I had taken a train from Kupishkis to Panevezys and back.
    But he never told me what he was doing.
    He was working for something.
    But you don't know whether it was
    for the government, whether it had anything
    with police or anything?
    No, I wasn't sure.
    I knew he was not working in a store selling something.
    I knew it had to do something most likely
    with maybe the police, maybe the army or government maybe.
    Did not know.
    And meanwhile, in Kupishkis, things
    were going on a very even keel.
    Nothing important was happening.
    It was difficult. There were shortages.
    And I remember for some crazy reason,
    I wanted to get a little goat.
    [LAUGHS]
    I set my heart on getting a little goat.
    So guess what?
    My grandmother or my aunt were able to get a pound of bacon.
    And for that pound of bacon, I got myself a goat.
    Oh my goodness.
    I did.
    I would walk around the town with a goat.
    [LAUGHS]
    Did you name the goat?
    No, I didn't.
    And I would sometimes let her come into the house.
    Oh my goodness.
    She'd slide on the floors.
    And if I left her outside, sometimes if she was loose,
    she would climb up the sand hill, sand pile in front
    of a kitchen window and stand there and go
    [IMITATES GOAT BLEATING].
    [INAUDIBLE]
    She knew she was your goat.
    She was my goat, yes.
    And when we left, I left my goat.
    Why did you leave?
    Well, we ran away.
    And how did that happen?
    Why did that happen?
    Russians were coming.
    Your father was there or he was--
    My father was in Panevezys, but we got word that we will leave.
    And so my aunt, the three of us--
    how did we leave Kupishkis?
    I guess we took a train to Panevezys.
    OK.
    Where did my father go?
    Maybe he was with us.
    Anyway, we ended up somewhere in the west of Lithuania,
    not too far from the Baltic.
    So near Klaipeda?
    Palanga?
    No, no.
    It was farther south.
    Uh-huh.
    Some little-- actually, some farmers had a farm
    and had a house and had a place way in the woods.
    And my father was there.
    And we stayed there for several months, I think.
    And I remember my father would go hunting to get a deer.
    And my brother and I would go in the woods with him,
    and they would--
    woods are separated in squares, I think.
    Anyway, there is a path in between.
    And my brother would go in the woods
    and would go making a lot of noise
    to chase the deer out towards my father.
    And one day when we were out there,
    we found this package dropped, like a fairly large thing,
    lying in the woods--
    A package wrapped?
    --which looked like it had a parachute on it.
    So we called my father.
    We picked this thing up, brought it to the farm.
    And my father opened it up with the farmer.
    There was a lot of money there, deutschmarks.
    And apparently what it was, probably it
    was a drop for Russian partisans that must
    have been hiding in the woods.
    I was scared.
    I really was scared then, in that place.
    But shortly after that, divided the money,
    and we all loaded up a cart and left for Germany.
    So was this close to the Prussian border?
    Yes.
    We could go-- not too far.
    And was it from the--
    like, the Baltic Sea side, from that point,
    like Silale, Shiluto, or some place?
    No?
    Could it have--
    We were farther away from the sea.
    Was it Kybartai?
    We crossed into Prussia.
    We crossed-- we crossed Nemunas--
    River.
    --in the evening.
    I still remember.
    My sister remembers me saying, oh,
    what a beautiful sunset over the river, that I wish it
    were not war.
    And the Russians really were right on our tails.
    Were there many people on the roads?
    There were-- after we crossed, there
    were a lot of people going.
    Actually, we had a bit of a problem crossing the bridge.
    Because by then, we called them the brown shirts
    who are crossing and were pushing people away.
    But we somehow happened to get--
    we were able to get across.
    After us-- when we crossed, they already
    had put explosives under the bridge,
    and they blew the bridge up soon after we went across
    to slow down the Russians.
    And also--
    So that was my life.
    I don't want to think about it.
    [LAUGHS]
    I know.
    Are you wondering why people don't
    want to sit and remember the glorious days of my childhood?
    No, thank you.
    I will be thinking of my glorious old age
    and my little dog.
    A sweet dog.
    A sweet one.
    But I need to ask you a few more--
    Sure.
    --a few more details about this because I'd like to find out
    about your journey westwards and--
    About what?
    --your journey after that.
    I take it you cross the bridge with a horse-driven cart.
    Yes?
    Yeah.
    And I'd like to learn more of how this journey took place.
    Continued.
    Continued.
    I'll continue.
    Thank you.
    [LAUGHS]
    We crossed.
    And I remember one night, we were sleeping somewhere
    in the barn, in the hay.
    And my father wakes us up.
    He says, we have to move.
    They are shooting too close.
    So we got into our cart, and off we went.
    Was your aunt with you, [LITHUANIAN]??
    Yeah.
    So she--
    Yeah, Ona was with us.
    Yeah.
    So Ona, your father, and the three children.
    Yes.
    OK.
    So off you went.
    Off we went.
    And by then--
    I remember that day.
    We would see German soldiers leaving for the front.
    And then later on, we will see bloody German soldiers
    going back.
    And we had-- then we finally reached some town.
    I forget-- it was not Konigsberg.
    It was farther--
    West?
    No, farther east.
    And we got somewhere.
    There was a railroad station.
    Oh, we were in Gorlitz.
    Somehow we got there.
    OK.
    How, I don't know.
    Anyway, we got on a train.
    We put all our packages to be sent.
    And my father had decided that we will go as far south as we
    can so that the Russians--
    when the Russians-- when the war is over, which he was certain
    it will be over very soon, that we would not
    be in the Soviet zone but then the American zone.
    So we did.
    We went all the way to Bavaria.
    I see.
    So for the southernmost part of Germany.
    Mm-hmm.
    And you went by train then, from Gorlitz by train--
    By train, yes.
    We went by train.
    And did the train journey take a long time?
    I don't remember.
    It must have taken some time.
    I think we-- did we sleep somewhere?
    We had money, remember, but nobody wanted any money by then.
    No Reichsmarks.
    They didn't help?
    No.
    It was not worth anything.
    So my father arranged--
    he got a job working on a farm in Bavaria,
    in Bad Brunn, little village in Bavaria
    on top of one of the hill knolls.
    Beautiful.
    I lived in-- the word slips me--
    in the parish house.
    OK.
    There was a Lithuanian priest there because the German priest
    was ill, and he was in a cemetery.
    And his sister was a housekeeper.
    She was a good woman.
    I even slept with her in a huge, huge feather bed.
    The food was scarce.
    There really wasn't that much.
    None of us were fat.
    And we stayed there till my father worked on the farm.
    You couldn't see any men.
    There were only very old men or little boys.
    All other men were out at the front.
    This was Bad Brunn, you said?
    Bad Brunn.
    Bad Brunn.
    OK.
    It's not far from Ingolstadt.
    Ingolstadt.
    OK.
    Yes.
    And Ingolstadt is not all that far from Munich.
    We would hear in daytime American planes
    flying, lining up on top of our hill
    because our church was a tall church.
    And they would line up there and go and drop bombs on Munich.
    So we stayed there till the end of the war.
    And the way the end of the world came for me, it was like this.
    I was in the garden looking for the first flowers,
    and I saw a Jeep driving out of-- soup kitchen there.
    We had our choir where we sang.
    We put up plays.
    We live a good life.
    These were all refugee kids from Lithuania?
    All-- they tried--
    when they organized the DP camps, very cleverly,
    they tried to put the same nationalities together.
    So in that camp, there was just Lithuanians.
    OK.
    Was there any talk in those camps of people
    saying, we should go back, we should go back?
    No, we didn't want to go back because the Russians were there.
    We didn't want to go back.
    Was there any pressure to go back from anybody?
    There was.
    The Russians send some kind of a delegation where
    they interviewed every single one of us,
    asking why did we stay here and what brought us here.
    And we said our teachers told us,
    just tell them your parents came and so you went.
    You don't have any idea why, which we did.
    And they all went away.
    They didn't take any-- they couldn't take anybody.
    I see.
    I see.
    So there was some effort made to--
    Under Soviet-- yeah, they would have loved to get us back,
    I think.
    But they couldn't.
    So how long did you stay at this gymnasium then in Eichstadt?
    Eichstadt?
    I stayed there four years.
    And the rest of my family was in Ingolstadt.
    My aunt was the first one to emigrate to United States.
    How did that happen?
    So her connections with the church.
    The Catholic church provided--
    you had to get some kind of an affidavit.
    Truman's-- Truman helped to take the refugees into United States,
    Truman Doctrine there.
    But you had to have assurances that you
    will have a job when you come.
    And my aunt, through that church,
    managed to come to United States,
    and she ended up in Jamesburg, New Jersey.
    And from there, there were various possibilities.
    Some of us went to Canada.
    Some of us went to Australia.
    I wanted to go to Australia because it was a long ride,
    and I thought that would be interesting.
    [LAUGHS]
    But where to go.
    But I ended up in United States, came on General Hershey's boat.
    Oh, really?
    Ship.
    Yes.
    Army ship.
    Do you remember the date?
    Do you remember when?
    In March.
    Probably March 1950.
    Oh, so quite a while.
    So you lived in Germany after the war for a good five years.
    Yeah.
    And was that because it took so long
    to be able to get permission?
    I think it was--
    I don't know.
    Maybe my father was--
    I mean, I wasn't even 21.
    So it wasn't up to me.
    But my father had to get permission
    and had to have some kind of a job guarantee also
    and a permission to emigrate.
    And as far as I was concerned, I was in no hurry to go anywhere.
    Did you finish gymnasium?
    I finish gymnasium.
    I moved into Ingolstadt, and I lived in a camp there.
    When you left for the United States,
    did you go with your whole family?
    First, yeah, we all--
    my aunt was already in United States.
    The three of us and my father, they stopped us in Bremerhaven.
    We stayed in a camp there for a while, for a little while.
    And then they put us on General Hershey,
    and we all came to United States.
    Through New York Harbor?
    Hmm?
    Through New York Harbor?
    Yes.
    I remember I did not know English.
    But I remember the cook on the boat.
    He was telling us, oh, you will see.
    You will see.
    When you come close to United States,
    you'll see this lady standing there,
    and she will say, welcome, welcome.
    [LAUGHS]
    Did you see her?
    No.
    You didn't pass the Statue of Liberty?
    No, I don't remember passing her.
    Oh.
    But we ended up in New York.
    And we waited, and we waited, and we
    waited with all our belongings, which were nothing.
    And then my aunt had asked the son of the family
    that she worked for-- it was actually a tavern there
    that she worked for, for that family in the kitchen.
    And she had a room there.
    She asked the son to come to New York and meet us.
    So he finally found us there and decided that we must be it.
    So she picked my father and the three of us up
    and brought us to New Jersey, to Jamesburg.
    And here we are.
    Did you think of your mother at any of those moments
    when you came over?
    Did you think of your mother at any of that time
    as you were coming over?
    By then, not really all that much because so many
    things were going on.
    She was not there with us.
    Haven't heard from her or about her for all these years by now.
    So you didn't know if she was alive or not.
    Didn't know if she was alive or not.
    She did not know if we were alive or not either.
    And how did you end up in the Midwest?
    Because when we spoke earlier, you mentioned being--
    Oh, because I travel on my own.
    Uh-huh.
    I worked there.
    My first job was to work as a live-in maid
    in New Brunswick for a nice little Jewish family.
    They had one son, Alan, who was six.
    And she was pregnant again, and she keep having miscarriages.
    So she was advised by her doctors
    that she should not do anything.
    If she gets pregnant, she practically go to bed
    and stay there.
    Yeah.
    So they decided they have to hire somebody
    to live there and do work.
    They hired me.
    This young man who picked us up drove me there,
    and I do not know English.
    And when they asked him what my name was, he said Gloria.
    [LAUGHS]
    So I was Gloria.
    Oh, boy.
    Oh, boy.
    Yeah.
    When did you go-- did you ever go back to Lithuania afterwards?
    I went back to Lithuania when I was married already.
    Yeah?
    My son was 19.
    So that would have been in the 1980s or so, the 1970s?
    '70s, yeah.
    Yeah?
    Yeah, Gerda and I, we both went back.
    It was still under Gorbachev.
    Oh, so it was the 1980s.
    Yes.
    Uh-huh.
    The first time.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Did your father, when you were an adult, ever tell you anything
    more about his life, about his role, about what
    World War II was all about?
    You mean when I was--
    When you were-- when you were grown up, when you were already
    married or so.
    No.
    Nobody told me anything.
    OK.
    I didn't ask anything either.
    OK.
    Did your children ask much about war, about what was going on?
    I mean, Rita eventually does because she writes the book.
    But before that--
    No.
    --as they were growing up.
    No?
    No.
    I mean, I knew what happened to the Jews
    in Lithuania, like what happened to the Jews
    everywhere in Germany and in France, everywhere the Germans
    went.
    I knew that.
    What my father's role was in this, I had no clue.
    I did not think he was working for the Germans, [LITHUANIAN],,
    security police.
    Well, I did not know that was a German position.
    I hardly ever saw Germans around.
    Yeah.
    I didn't even see many Germans around in town.
    Very few.
    And when we got to Germany--
    oh, I tell you one thing that probably will be interesting.
    When we first moved to Germany and got to Germany in the south
    and we were there in this--
    first, we were in--
    was it Mulba?
    We stayed in some little hotel.
    And we had these [NON-ENGLISH] cards,
    and we could buy food in the restaurant there.
    But all they served, there was just watery soup basically.
    That's it.
    And so my brother and I, we'd take our marks
    and would march out into the villages outside.
    And we learned-- we wanted to buy bread.
    We would say [LITHUANIAN].
    It was late fall, and I remember the ground would
    be covered with beautiful pears that just dropped off the trees.
    And the farmers would come out and bring big half loaves
    of this beautiful bread and sometimes even some smoked meat.
    And we could take as many pears as we wanted.
    And we would want to pay with our stupid marks.
    And they all said, no, no.
    They wouldn't take any money from us.
    But that was something that I learned, being in Germany.
    Why do you think that was?
    Why do you think they didn't want to take money from you?
    I think they just saw two bedraggled--
    Children.
    Yeah.
    Asking for bread.
    They did not know if we had deutschemarks or did not have
    and how much it was, what were they worth, if anything,
    by then.
    Mrs. Danga, we've talked a lot today.
    Yeah.
    We've covered a lot of territory.
    Yeah.
    Is there anything else you'd like to add to what you've said?
    That I would like to say?
    Can we stop?
    I need the battery.
    I'm sorry.
    I was asking, is there anything you would like to add?
    Well--
    [PHONE RINGS]
    Yep.
    It sounds-- when I tell you that, it sounds--
    it's such a remarkable, big story.
    Actually, very ordinary.
    In the time that I lived, it's nothing unusual.
    In the places that I lived.
    In the places that I came from and the times that I lived.
    There are hundreds of stories like mine.
    I don't know how it all ended up for them.
    But I think most of us ended up somewhere in the west
    and had good lives.
    And for myself, then I think, I had a very good life.
    I mean, I had some hardships and so on.
    When you are young, things are easy.
    Fortunately, I did not have any serious illnesses.
    And we were never wealthy, but we were never poor-poor.
    And the fact that I cannot see that much now, but I live here,
    and I have a great deal of help.
    And has this early--
    all these early years that are not filled with happy things
    and that why would one want to remember and recall them,
    did they influence the rest of your life in any way?
    Perhaps.
    I think all our past influence our presents, to some extent.
    I don't think of it.
    Now and then if I am--
    my brother is dead now.
    But then my brother was alive, we would remember.
    And now and then, when I'm with my sister,
    we sometimes talk about things.
    But then again, there is a seven year difference.
    But now and then, we can speak about our time in Germany
    and how it was or how it was when we first
    came here to United States.
    That was an interesting thing, too.
    I mean, came here and no language.
    Gloria.
    [LAUGHS]
    Gloria, yeah.
    [LAUGHS]
    And my sister went to high school here.
    She finished high school here.
    But I don't think of my life as something extraordinary
    or something greatly difficult or tragic in any sense.
    It just what it was.
    I consider myself very lucky that I am here--
    the heat is coming--
    that I have this house, that I am
    able to take care of this house, and that I
    know good people around me, and that Lithuania is free.
    I know that they probably are fighting about their government
    all the time.
    But--
    Your children-- your children are half Jewish, as well as
    half Lithuanian.
    Mm-hmm.
    What would you want them to carry away?
    It's their choice.
    Vovere is great friends now with a Jewish man,
    and I think they will marry this spring, coming year.
    She changed her name to Rachel.
    And I kind of think of her as Rachel.
    She used to be dark.
    She had dark, curly hair, and now it's
    blonde and straight, fairly fashionable.
    She is nowhere as curious or interested
    or searching as Rita is.
    David is doing OK.
    He works from Boston University.
    He's saving his money so he could retire and come
    live on the island.
    It's a nice thought.
    Yeah.
    And I really-- in many things that happened to me,
    I could have ended up God knows where.
    But there was a great deal of luck.
    I was able-- we were able to get out
    of Lithuania when we got out.
    And we were lucky enough to come to this country when we did.
    I had a good marriage.
    And ending up on this island, in this house is not bad.
    Not bad at all.
    Not bad at all.
    Well, Mrs. Danga, Poina, Danguole Gabis,
    thank you very much for sharing your story with us today.
    Oh, you're most welcome.
    I hope the talk will be of some use to somebody.
    I am sure that it will, and we very much appreciate it.
    And with that, I will say this concludes the United States
    Holocaust Memorial Museum interview with Mrs. Danguole
    Gabis on December 10, 2015 in West Tisbury, Massachusetts,
    on Martha's Vineyard.
    Thank you.
    [LAUGHS]
    OK.
    So Mrs. Danga, please tell me, who is in this photograph?
    [LITHUANIAN]
    In English, please.
    I am here, the oldest one, and there's my brother, Romualdas.
    OK, Romualdas.
    Romualdas.
    We called him Romutus.
    OK.
    And my little baby sister, Gerda.
    Got it.
    And this was taken in which year?
    1938.
    '37 I think it was.
    1937, Zeimelis.
    OK, thank you.
    In Zeimelis.
    So Mrs. Danga, tell me, what is this?
    It is a picture of my father.
    But I really don't remember him in this uniform.
    The only thing that I could say, it's
    probably when he was very young in Lithuania army.
    He wore this uniform.
    OK, and the title is A Guest--
    A Guest at the--
    Shooter's.
    --at the Shooter's Banquet.
    And it's written by your daughter.
    And it is written by my daughter, Rita.
    OK.
    Take right.
    Mm-hmm.
    OK.
    There.
    This goes.
    Good.
    Dabar, wait a second.
    [LITHUANIAN]
    All right.
    Can you tell me what is this photograph of in the book?
    This is a photograph of my mother.
    It was taken somewhere in Lithuania and sent to us--
    to United States.
    OK, after--
    That was after she came back from Siberia--
    OK.
    --to Lithuania.
    And we were able to get in touch with her.
    She sent us this picture.
    And my sister has--
    and my daughter has it.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    OK, Mrs. Danga, do you know who this is a photograph of?
    I don't remember that picture.
    You don't remember.
    But it is of your father?
    Yes.
    OK.
    Thank you.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Danguole Gabis (née Puronas), born on August 7, 1929 in Kaunas, Lithuania, describes her father, who worked for the Lithuania border police; growing up in Žeimelis; her younger brother and sister; visiting her grandmother during the summers; reading books in the library where her mother worked; her family’s traditions on Lithuanian Independence Day; her father, who lived in another town; leaving Jaymalys when the Russians came; how she and her siblings were first placed on separate farms and then brought back together on her uncle’s farm; the deportation of her mother and her return from Siberia 15 years later, at which point her family was in Chicago, IL (she was able to move there in 1965); a poem from that time, which the interviewee recites; moving with her father and siblings to Švenčionys, Lithuania, where her father was chief of security; the arrest of her father for his partisan actions during the summer of 1943 and his imprisonment in Vilnius; moving to Perniwiges soon after his arrest; staying in Kupiškis, Lithuania along with her siblings and attending school; life in Kupiškis with her religious aunt who took them to church on Sundays; her father’s release from prison; escaping from Lithuania by train to live in Bavaria, Germany; living in a hotel and then with a Lithuanian priest; entering a displaced persons camp after the war; immigrating to the United States; working as a mother’s helper and then attending college where she met her future husband, Stanley Gabis, who was Jewish American; her three children; her daughter, Rita, who published a book on the war experiences of Danguole’s father (“Guest at the Shooter’s Banquet”); and her life on Martha’s Vineyard.
    Interviewee
    Ms. Danguole Gabis
    Interviewer
    Navazelskis, Ina
    Date
    interview:  2015 December 10

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    1 digital file : MPEG-4.

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Personal Name
    Gabis, Danguole, 1929-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Ina Navazelskis, on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch, conducted the oral history interview with Danguole Gabis on December 10, 2015 in West Tisbury, MA.
    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 08:05:12
    This page:
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    Oral history interview with Agnes Vogel

    Oral History

    Agnes Vogel, born on January 1, 1924 in Debrecen, Hungary, describes her childhood; attending a special school in a Catholic Convent in 1939; being rounded up in June 1944 and put on a transport to Auschwitz; ending up in Strasshof, a transit camp in Austria; starting on a transport toward Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Germany, but turning back to Strasshof because of an air raid that destroyed part of the railroad; her liberation by Soviet troops in 1945; and immigrating to the United States after the war.

    Oral history interview with Dora Goldstein Roth

    Oral history interview with Dora Goldstein Roth

    Oral History

    Dora Goldstein Roth, born on February 1, 1932 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses her family and early childhood; her father’s participation in the Zionist movement; being forced to live inside the Vilnius ghetto; her deportation to the Kaiserwald-Riga, Dinenwerke, and Stutthof camps with her sister and mother; seeing her mother die from hunger; her sister's death in the camp; difficult memories including mass rape of camp inmates, forced labor, and struggling to survive from day to day; deciding while she was still in the camps that she wanted to immigrate to Palestine after the war because she wanted to be surrounded by Jewish people; her liberation by Russian forces; staying in a Jewish hospital for three years to recover from injuries and disease; immigrating to Israel in 1952; getting married and having children; her identity as a mother and Holocaust survivor; and working for the United Jewish Appeal.

    Oral history interview with Yocheved Arie

    Oral history interview with Yocheved Arie

    Oral History

    Yocheved Arie, born in Vilnius, Lithuania on February 15, 1928, discusses the German occupation of Lithuania; how her father and brother were taken away while she and her mother had to go to the ghetto; poor sanitation in the ghetto; aktions in the ghetto carried out by the Germans; the deportation of her mother to Estonia; reuniting with her mother in Estonia; being transported to Stutthof; going to Gdansk where she was forced to make railroad tracks; being liberated along with her mother and several others on the second day of a death march shortly before the end of the war; her postwar return to Vilnius where she and her mother found no survivors from their family; trying to immigrate to Palestine, but remaining in a displaced persons camp in Germany for three years; immigrating to Jerusalem; living with her mother for 40 years until her mother’s death; and her deep understanding about the heroism of Jewish mothers during the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Leo Hanin

    Oral history interview with Leo Hanin

    Oral History

    Leo Hanin, born in 1913 in Vilnius, Lithuania, describes his family; his parents’ decision to escape increasing persecution in Europe and move to Harbin, China, where they had a relative, in 1916; the lively Jewish community but not having many relations with the native Chinese; attending a Russian school in Harbin until 1929; moving with his brother to Shanghai around 1934 to attend a British school; getting married in 1936 and moving to Kōbe-shi, Japan to do work for a textile firm; assisting the Joint Distribution Committee in New York to arrange for funds to be sent to Japan to support refugees coming over from Europe; his participation in a Zionist organization and moving to Israel in 1948; staying in Israel for two years and then moving back to Japan; his experiences with helping people adjust to life in Kōbe-shi and immigrate to the United States; and dealing with the rumors that the Jewish leadership of Kōbe-shi stole money donated to them to help refugees.

    Oral history interview with Walter Schnell

    Oral history interview with Walter Schnell

    Oral History

    Walter Schnell, born on April 16, 1904 in Strehlen, Germany (Strzelin, Poland), describes his family and childhood; going to study crystal and porcelain in Berlin, Germany in the early 1920s; having to sell his family’s porcelain and glass business in 1937 because anti-Jewish business laws were becoming too strict; moving to Wrocław after the business sold with his sister and parents; working for a family friend in a wholesale business in Wrocław; his arrest during Kristallnacht and being sent by train through Weimar and on to Buchenwald; being forced to watch the hangings of those prisoners who had escaped from the camp and been caught; being called into the camp’s main office on the second day of Hanukkah and told that his parents had booked him a passage for Panama; finally securing a passage on a ship from Wrocław to Genoa, Italy after jumping through much red tape with Gestapo officials in Wrocław; staying in Genoa for a short time until he traveled on a boat to Shanghai because he did not need official papers to get in; settling in Hongkou, the Jewish suburb of Shanghai; Allied planes accidentally bombing the Jewish quarter of Shanghai; the creation of a Jewish community with its own traditions in Shanghai, including establishing nine hundred yeshivas, keeping kosher, and maintaining a synagogue; discovering that his mother and two cousins had made it to New York; and joining his family in New York after the war.

    Oral history interview with Erna Tebel Stern

    Oral history interview with Erna Tebel Stern

    Oral History

    Erna Tebel Stern, born on October 28, 1901 in Krotoszyn, Poland, describes her childhood; her father’s experiences when he served in the German Army against Russia during World War I; moving to Wroclaw, Poland after the war; not experiencing much official discrimination when Hitler first came to power because her father had served in the German Army; her family’s decision to flee from their home in 1938 when they discovered that prison camps existed; her parents’ capture and deportation; managing to escape to Brussels, Belgium, where she, her first husband, and her brother boarded the S.S. St. Louis and fled for Cuba; her brother’s and first husband’s deportation to an internment camp in Gurs, France after the St. Louis had to return to Brussels; going into hiding from 1940 to 1942 in Brussels, where she met her second husband; attempting to flee in 1942 to Switzerland, where they were imprisoned for a short time and then released to the Salvation Army; moving to Bern, Switzerland, where she worked as a housemaid until the end of the War; returning to Belgium in 1945 with her second husband and opening a blouse manufactory; and marrying her second husband in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Gerda Blachmann Wilchfort

    Oral history interview with Gerda Blachmann Wilchfort

    Oral History

    Gerda Blachmann Wilchfort, born on April 24, 1923 in Wrocław, Poland, describes her family and childhood; experiencing antisemitism and losing friends after Hitler came to power; her memories of the destruction of Kristallnacht; a cousin in Cuba attaining visas for her and her parents to immigrate to Havana, Cuba; booking a passage on the St. Louis and being forced to return to Europe after Cuba and the United States would not accept the ship; arriving in Antwerp, Belgium and signing papers that said they would not work and would accept their status as a refugee; living off a small budget from the United Jewish Appeal; crossing the Belgium border into France by foot but not finding a much better living situation; discovering a castle in the French countryside in which to stay for a few nights; returning to Belgium and moving back into their old apartment building, where they stayed for a couple of years; becoming a seamstress to make some money for her family; joining an underground group with her mother and crossing into France and then Switzerland; finding an apartment building in which to live; discovering that Hitler had died and that the war was coming to an end; and immigrating to the United States to create a new life for herself and her family.

    Oral history interview with Gidon Arye

    Oral history interview with Gidon Arye

    Oral History

    Gidon Arye, born in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1928, describes growing up in an upper middle class family; moving into the Vilnius ghetto in 1941 and being separated from his family; living in the Vilnius ghetto throughout the war and sometimes hiding or working illegally; avoiding the early deportations; escaping roundups and going to the Kailis work camp; smuggling his way into the same work camp that his father; reuniting with his father at the Heeres-Kraftfahr-Park work camp, where they worked for an elderly German fixing automobile machinery; surviving in the camp for some time and avoiding Nazi Aktions and a transfer of inmates to Kaunas, Lithuania; Nazi soldiers retreating from the Allies throughout July 1944; going into hiding with a local carpenter who was an acquaintance of his father from before the war; leaving Vilnius through Poland, Germany, and then France in 1945 with his father and fiancée; and immigrating to Israel in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Carl Knuemann

    Oral history interview with Carl Knuemann

    Oral History

    Carl Knuemann, born on November 15, 1922 in Bydgoszcz, Poland, describes his family and childhood; moving to Germany in 1932 because his father had German citizenship and was a businessman; his father not finding a job and contracting tuberculosis, which allowed him to get a pension from the government since he was a veteran of World War I; his father’s work with Doctor Goerdeler and Albert Einstein in plotting against Hitler; working as a courier in the underground movement; his memories of Kristallnacht; escaping to Hungary after the war broke out and then returning to Berlin once the Nazis invaded Hungary; meeting a Dane in a restaurant and joining the Danish resistance movement by running guns between locations; being drafted and sent to Denmark; his father being too ill to participate in the July 20 plot against Hitler; working in the German armament industry in 1943 and sneaking information out to Allied contacts; and his considerations on his participation in the resistance movement during the war.

    Oral history interview with Michael Vogel

    Oral history interview with Michael Vogel

    Oral History

    Michael Vogel, born on November 29, 1923 in Jacovce, Czechoslovakia, describes moving to and growing up in Topol'čany, Czechoslovakia; the takeover of Topol'čany by the Hlinka Guard in 1939; his deportation to the Slovak-run Novaky prison camp in 1942; his deportation to Auschwitz in late 1942; working in forced labor in camps around Auschwitz, first in the Buna works and then in the Birkenau "Kanada" detachment, where he unloaded incoming trains; his transfer by cattle car to Sachsenhausen and then to Dachau as the Allies neared in late 1944; his final transfer to the Landsberg sub-camp of Dachau; escaping during a death march from Landsberg by hiding in the woods; his liberation by United States forces two weeks after escaping; following the 74th Tank Battalion on their tour through Germany and Czechoslovakia; swearing himself into the United States Army at a G.I. Camp Home Run in Le Havre, France in November 1945 and receiving American citizenship; taking a position doing laundry at Camp Home Run; and eventually immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Nina Schuster Merrick

    Oral history interview with Nina Schuster Merrick

    Oral History

    Nina Schuster Merrick, born in Rokitno, Poland in 1929, describes growing up in a religious family; attending Hebrew school as a child; hiding with her family in the woods during the 1939 bombing raids; her family’s forced move into a ghetto in Berezdiv, Ukraine when the Germans invaded Poland; forced labor, including peeling potatoes for German soldiers; the SS raid of her home in August 1942 and jumping out a window to avoid getting caught; hiding in the woods and eventually being taken in by a sympathetic Ukrainian general, who was involved with a partisan group; learning to be a nurse and working in the partisan group; the General sending her to Moscow, Russia on February 18, 1943, so she could attend technical school; working in a Moscow factory, where she remained until after the war; going to a Jewish collective farm in Germany; an aunt from Washington, DC contacting her in February 1947; and immigrating to the United States to live with her aunt in late 1947.

    Oral history interview with Eva Rozencwajig Stock

    Oral history interview with Eva Rozencwajig Stock

    Oral History

    Eva Rozencwajig Stock, born on January 15, 1919 in Kozienice, Poland, describes her family; the establishment of the Kozienice ghetto in 1939 and moving into it; bribing officials to have her family taken together to Skarżysko-Kamienna, a forced labor camp in Poland, during the liquidation of the ghetto; managing to move her family to Szydlowiec and then to Pionki, Poland, where they worked in an ammunition factory; the deportation of her father and brother to Mauthausen, where they both died; being deported to Auschwitz with her mother and sisters; their transfer to Bergen-Belsen and then to Elsnig, a sub-camp of Buchenwald in Germany; returning to Poland at the end of the war and then leaving in 1949 for Israel; and immigrating to the United States in 1959.

    Oral history interview with Ivo Herzer

    Oral history interview with Ivo Herzer

    Oral History

    Ivo Herzer, born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (Croatia) on February 5, 1925, describes his early childhood; the introduction of anti-Jewish, Serb, and Romani legislation in 1941 by the Croatian Ustaša government; his arrest at sixteen years of age by a Croatian official and going to a transit camp in the outskirts of Zagreb for a short period until an Ustaša officer told him to return home; escaping with his family in July 1941 to the Italian-Croatian border and ending up in Gospić, Yugoslavia (Croatia); being put onto a military train, returning them to Croatia; escaping the train with the help of smugglers; moving to Susak, Croatia, where they hid for one month; Italian authorities sending his family and about sixty other Jewish refugees to Crikvenica, Croatia, where they lived under Italian protection in the Italian zone in Yugoslavia; the Italian authorities placing the Jewish refugees in a camp in 1942 until 1943, when the Italians brought them and two thousand other Jewish refugees into one camp on the island of Arbe, Dalmatia (Croatia); the Italian surrender to the Germans in 1943 and fleeing to southern Italy to the Allied occupied part of Italy; traveling with his family to the Croatian island of Vis and getting picked up by a British military ship and taken to Bari, Italy; the British directing his family to Taranto, Italy, where they were placed in a camp under British control; leaving the British camp and traveling to Bari; working as a translator and typist for the British Army in Bari after he was liberated; moving to Rome, Italy to work for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee from 1946 to 1948; and immigrating to the United States in 1955.

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Brodecki

    Oral History

    Boleslaw Brodecki, born in March 1921 in Warsaw, Poland, describes his family; the German invasion in September 1939; boarding a train with his sister and escaping to Rostov, Russia while she went to Prużana, Poland; rejoining his sister in Prużana after the German invasion of Soviet territories in June 1941; entering the Prużana ghetto and staying there until he was deported to Birkenau in the winter of 1941 or 1942; being marched to Auschwitz I and then to Swietochlowice, Poland, where he worked in a machine factory making parts for airplanes; being sent on a forced march as the Russian army approached; arriving in Mauthausen and working in a nearby factory; being marched to various camps including Gräditz-Bareza, Flossenbürg, and Theresienstadt; his liberation in Theresienstadt by Soviet forces in 1945; going to a displaced persons camp in Landsberg am Lech, Germany in 1945 and getting a job as a policeman; meeting and marrying his wife, Sonia Brodecki, in the camp in December 1945; having a son and then immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Irene Weber

    Oral history interview with Irene Weber

    Oral History

    Irene Weber, born in Sosnowiec, Poland, describes her family; attending a Polish school until she was about 10 years old, when the war began; the immediate effects of the war on her family, including the closing of her father’s business and the German raids on her home; her father and brother secretly educating her at home; receiving a work card and having to cut thread at a factory; being taken from the factory and sent to the Gliwice labor camp; discovering that her father had died of a heart attack shortly before her deportation; staying in Gliwice from March 1943 to May 1945, when she and others were evacuated from the camp because the Russians neared; being taken care of by some of the older female prisoners; her liberation by the International Red Cross in May 1945; being taken to a hospital to recuperate; having no desire to return to her hometown and see the destruction there; staying on a farm instead of going into a displaced persons camp; going to school in Munich, Germany with the help of the UNRRA; and meeting her husband and deciding to immigrate to the United States with him.

    Oral history interview with Josef

    Oral history interview with Josef

    Oral History

    Josef, born on June 25, 1915 in Vienna, Austria, describes his family; moving to Przemyśl, Poland when he was a child; fleeing to Lwów, Poland after the war broke out in 1939; returning to Przemyśl, which came under Russian occupation when Poland was divided between the Russians and the Germans; the German invasion on June 22, 1941; German troops issuing decrees restricting the rights and opportunities of the town’s Jewish population; moving into a designated Jewish ghetto in Przemyśl; meeting his future wife Stefania Podgófrska, who helped his family by smuggling food and other supplies to them in the ghetto; losing both of his parents during a ghetto Aktion; his deportation from the ghetto on November 18, 1942; using pliers he had in his pocket to cut through the wires covering the small window in the train car and jumping out of the train; getting slightly injured but being able to walk to Lipowice, Poland, where a friend provided him with shelter for a night and smuggled him back into Przemyśl the next morning; immediately going to Stefania, who hid him in her apartment for several days until he could smuggle himself back into the ghetto to be with one of his brothers; Stefania obtaining false papers for him and a few of his friends in the ghetto and finding a small cottage where they could hide; leaving the ghetto to meet with Stefania and her younger sister and to construct hiding places; hiding in the cottage with thirteen people for almost two years; his liberation by Russian troops and marrying Stefania; moving to Kraków and then to Wrocław, Poland, where he graduated from dental school; and immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Stanislaw Soszynski

    Oral history interview with Stanislaw Soszynski

    Oral History

    Stanislaw Soszynski, born on February 24, 1931 in Warsaw, Poland, describes his neighborhood in Warsaw on Swietojerska Street; the destruction of Warsaw and the Germans opening the Warsaw Ghetto; living in an apartment where the front part was on the Aryan side, and the back part was on the ghetto side, which helped smuggling operations later in the war; going out of the ghetto area to get milk and sell it to support his family; his memories of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; the massive destruction of the ghetto after the uprising; and the uprising in 1944.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Lewent

    Oral history interview with Abraham Lewent

    Oral History

    Abraham Lewent, born in July 1924 in Warsaw, Poland, describes his family; entering the Warsaw ghetto after the German occupation; hiding in a crawl space during a 1942 German raid and witnessing the capture of his mother and sisters; being deployed for forced labor nearby but escaping to return to his father in the ghetto; remaining in the ghetto until the uprising; his and his father’s deportation in 1943 to Majdanek, where his father died; his transfers to Skarzysko-Kamienna, Buchenwald, Schlieben, Bisingen, and finally to Dachau; and his liberation by American troops.

    Oral history interview with Miriam Storch Lewent

    Oral history interview with Miriam Storch Lewent

    Oral History

    Miriam Storch Lewent, born on June 26, 1926 in Zamość, Poland, describes her family and childhood; fleeing her home when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939; her family’s internment by Soviet forces and being deported to Siberia; cutting down trees to earn food rations near Tomsk, Russia; the Soviets releasing her and her family when the Soviet Union went to war with Germany in June 1941; her two brothers registering with the Russian Army and the rest of her family settling in Kazakhstan, where they lived for the rest of the war; her father teaching Hebrew to Jewish children in their new home; attempting to return to Poland after the war but encountering too much antisemitism; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

    Oral History

    Liane Reif-Lehrer, born in Vienna, Austria in November 1934, describes growing up in a middle-class family; obtaining a passport in 1938 to immigrate to the United States but not being able to go when her father, a dentist, killed himself because he had to close his practice; traveling with her brother and mother to Hamburg, Germany in 1939 to board the St. Louis, which was bound for Cuba; arriving in Cuba and having to return to Europe, where they ended up in France; getting a visa to immigrate to the United States after staying in France for two-and-a-half years; traveling through Spain and leaving Europe from Lisbon, Portugal on the S.S. Exeter and arriving in the United States on November 10, 1941; living with the sister of Liane's father and her children in New York; earning her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley and working for many years as an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School; and now working as a consultant and a writer.

    Oral history interview with Preben Munch-Nielsen

    Oral history interview with Preben Munch-Nielsen

    Oral History

    Preben Munch-Nielsen, born in 1926 in Snekkersten, Denmark, describes growing up in a Protestant family; attending school in Copenhagen; the German invasion of Denmark in 1940; becoming a courier in the resistance and being one of the youngest resistance fighters; helping to hide refugees in houses near the shore and to get them on boats to Sweden once the Gestapo began hunting down Jews in Denmark in October 1943; taking refuge in Sweden in November 1943 and joining the Danish Brigade, in which he fought as a soldier for eighteen months; helping to smuggle arms into Denmark for resistance fighters; and settling in Denmark in May 1945 after the war.

    Oral history interview with Anny Rubinstein Kast

    Oral history interview with Anny Rubinstein Kast

    Oral History

    Anny Rubinstein Kast, born in Poland in 1926, describes moving to Belgium when she was two months old; her family and her childhood in Belgium; attending school in Antwerp before the war; the German invasion of Belgium on May 10, 1940; someone reporting to the Germans that her family was the only Jewish one left in their neighborhood and then being picked up a few days later; living with the aunt of a friend during her family’s deportation and taking on a false identity; studying German, English, and mathematics lessons during the war; her liberation in 1944 when the English troops entered her town; her uncle finding her and opening up a fur store in Antwerp to support her and other surviving family members; immigrating to Israel after the war; and getting married in 1967.

    Oral history interview with Helen Waterford

    Oral history interview with Helen Waterford

    Oral History

    Helen Waterford, born in Germany in April 14, 1909, discusses her 1933 marriage; her move to Amsterdam in 1934; working for many years to help Jews from Germany relocate to the Netherlands; going into hiding in October 1942 with her husband but without her daughter; the Germans discovering them on August 26, 1944 and interrogating them for two days about the network of people who assisted them in hiding; her deportation to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau; her husband’s death in Auschwitz; remaining in Birkenau until October 1944, when she was forced to work in the Kratzau factory in Czechoslovakia; going into a prisoner of war camp, where she remained until her liberation; traveling to a displaced persons camp at Plzen, Czechoslovakia; returning to the Netherlands, where she reunited with her daughter; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Thomas Ward

    Oral history interview with Thomas Ward

    Oral History

    Thomas Ward, born on August 10, 1921 in St. Louis, MO, describes joining the army when he was twenty years old; serving in General Patton's Third Army; working as a part of a three-person reconnaissance team in the Third Cavalry division; liberating 18,000 prisoners from the Ebensee concentration camp on May 5th, 1945; liberating a neighboring camp for women several days later; taking photographs in the camps (which he sent to the Supreme Allied Command); and his views on Holocaust denial.

    Oral history interview with Fred R. Wohl

    Oral history interview with Fred R. Wohl

    Oral History

    Fred R. Wohl, born in 1914 in Baden-Baden, Germany, describes growing up in Germany after World War I; leaving to work on a farm in Switzerland in 1932 for four months; working in Athens, Greece in 1935 and trying to get a Greek passport for fear of what the Germans were planning; moving to Nicosia, Cyprus in March 1939 with the help of the British Ambassador to Athens; the German invasion of Greece and being interned with refugees in a camp next to the Nicosia prison; being sent to a hotel-camp in the mountains with his father but soon being released; the Nazi invasion of Crete in 1941 and preparing for evacuation; traveling to Tel Aviv, Israel and then to Mwanza, Tanzania; working in a gold mine and contracting black water fever in Tanganyika, Tanzania; and immigrating to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral History

    Norbert Yasharoff, born in 1930 in Sofia, Bulgaria, describes the anti-Jewish measures enforced by the Nazis when World War II began; Bulgaria joining the Axis Alliance in March 1941, allowing German troops to pass through Sofia; the expulsion of some Jewish families to Poland in March 1943 and a bloody protest soon after; leaving with his family to Pleven, Bulgaria in May 1943 and staying with family members; attending a Gentile school while in Pleven, where his teacher did not force him to perform the Nazi salute; his liberation on September 9, 1944 and returning to Sofia with his family; immigrating to Israel in December 1948; joining the volunteer air force, where he trained as a radar technician; graduating with a degree from Tel Aviv University in Political Science and residing in Israel for twenty years; and working in an American Embassy for nine years until he immigrated to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral History

    Frank Meissner, born in Třešt̕, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) in 1923, describes his family; joining a Zionist youth group and traveling to Prague, Czech Republic to live with other members of the group in 1937; the group’s fear of anti-Jewish Nazi policies and subsequently leaving Czechoslovakia to settle in Denmark; attending agricultural school at the University of Copenhagen; receiving a call in 1943 from his landlady, who warned him to not return home because the Gestapo had been looking for him; being smuggled onto a fishing boat to Sweden, where he finished his education; traveling to England in September 1944 and starting to contact his family but learning that they had all been taken to Theresienstadt (Terezin) and eventually to Auschwitz, where they perished; returning briefly to Prague and then going to Denmark in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral History

    Mina Perlberger, born on December 25, 1918 in Tyczyn, Poland, describes growing up in a strict Hasidic Jewish family; the German invasion of Poland while her family was in the process of moving to Kraków in 1939; her family’s assignment to do forced labor outside of Tyczyn; working as a black market trader until 1942, when her family's home was seized by the Gestapo; being forced into the ghetto in Rzeszów, Poland; the deportation of her parents to Auschwitz in late 1942; escaping the ghetto with her younger sister and hiding with a Polish farmer in exchange for a payment; hiding with the farmer for 21 months until the Soviet Army liberated them in 1944; meeting her future husband, a Soviet Jew, in Blażowa, Poland; marrying her husband and moving to Austria after the war with the help of a Jewish organization; and immigrating to the United States soon after arriving in Austria.

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral History

    David Klebanow, born in 1907 in Barysaŭ, Russia (now Belarus), describes his family and childhood; fleeing to Kiev, Ukraine in 1917 after the Russian Revolution and then to Białystok, Poland; becoming a doctor in 1937 and then being drafted into the Polish Army in 1939; returning to Białystok when he was released from the army and then marrying his wife; being taken to Kaunas, Lithuania and then to Riga, Latvia with his wife; performing abortions to save the lives of pregnant women and staying in Riga for two years; his deportation to Stutthof and then to Danzig, from where they were liberated on March 10, 1945; his wife dying of tuberculosis; working at the Munich University Hospital as an obstetrician after the war; noticing genital abnormalities, sterility problems, and a higher rate of miscarriages among women who had survived concentration camps; and immigrating in 1951 to the United States, where he joined the obstetrics department at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral History

    Franz Wohlfahrt, born in 1920 in Velden am Wörthersee, Austria, describes growing up in a family of Jehovah's Witnesses; the arrest of his father in 1936 for peddling in the street as part of his activities as a Jehovah’s Witness; the German annexation of Austria in 1938; refusing to go to a Hitler Youth meetings and say the “Heil Hitler” greeting, which resulted in German troops monitoring his activities; the execution of his father on December 7, 1939 and his brother soon after because they refused to participate in the war and fight for the German state; the general persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses during World War II since they would not worship Hitler; agreeing to do work for the German state but not participate in military exercises, which resulted in his imprisonment in a dungeon for thirty-three days in 1940; being transferred to the Gestapo office in Graz for further questioning; his deportation to a work camp at Allweiter Rodgau, in the Hessen-Nassau province, because he would not fight for the German state; being saved by a camp commandant’s wife because he painted wall paper for her; his liberation by Allied troops while he was still in the camp; and returning home to find that few people he knew had survived.

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral History

    Tove Schöbaum Bamberger, born on October 8, 1934 in Copenhagen, Denmark, describes growing up in a wealthy family; her father’s ownership of a men’s clothing business; attending first and second grade at a Jewish school before her family fled from Denmark on October 2, 1940; taking a train to the seaport in Snekkersten, Denmark and then traveling on a fishing boat until a Swedish ship intercepted them at sea and took them to Sweden, where they settled in Malmö; her father working in a chocolate factory and selling artificial teeth; her mother selling lingerie; attending school with her sister; returning to Copenhagen on May 28, 1945 to find her family home and store undisturbed; and immigrating to the United States with her husband in 1956.

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral History

    Morris Gordon, born in Latvia, describes immigrating with his father to the United States; growing up in New York, NY; attending City College and Columbia University; being ordained as a rabbi in 1940; volunteering for the military in 1942; his participation in The Flying Tigers; going to India briefly then Burma; traveling through the jungles of Burma to get to different camps and getting lost three times; taking his Torah with him everywhere he went; arriving in Shanghai as a Jewish chaplain and being greeted by a large Jewish community; conducting a Bar Mitzvah with a boy; his memories of the Shanghai Jewish ghetto and its schools; and receiving a chalice from a Catholic chaplain during the war to help him perform his services.

    Oral history interview with Raya Markon

    Oral History

    Raya Markon, born in 1911 in Vilnius, Lithuania, discusses her childhood; going to college for one year in Toulouse, France; getting married in Paris, France in 1936; her husband's mobilization into the French Army in 1938; her escape from Paris two days before the German invasion in 1940; returning to Toulouse to take refuge with friends and the birth of her son; getting a visa to the United States and difficulties in obtaining an exit visa from France; and her and her family's immigration to the United States in November 1942.

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral History

    Ernest G. Heppner, born in 1921 in Germany, describes his experiences with antisemitism in his youth; participating in a Jewish youth organization; his father’s positive experiences running a factory in the mid-1930s; being kicked out of school and learning how to weld; losing any sense of hope for German Jews after his experiences on Kristallnacht; his family being forced to sell their house and considering immigration; he and his mother getting a place on a steamship to Shanghai, China by giving the captain of the ship some of their Impressionist paintings; arriving in Shanghai in March 1939; his mother finding a job with a youth committee; communicating through letters with his father and sister back home a few times before never hearing from them again; participating in the British Boy Scout Association in Shanghai; seeing the Imperial Japanese Naval Landing Party come into Shanghai after Pearl Harbor and acting as a British spy; the Jews of Shanghai being forced into a ghetto-like area of the city in February 1943; finding a job in a bakery and meeting his future wife in the ghetto; getting married shortly before the end of the war and going to work for the American occupying forces; his memories of life in the ghetto; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral History

    Emanuel Mandel, born in 1936 in Riga, Latvia, describes his family moving to Budapest, Hungary when he was three months old; his family; his father’s work as a cantor that led him to travel around and work in several synagogues in Europe; not understanding that he could not have or do certain things because he was Jewish; the German invasion of Budapest in early 1944; his deportation by cattle car in June 1944 to Bergen-Belsen with his mother; developing pneumonia and not having access to much food while in the camp; developing a sense of comic relief, like by calling a German troop “Popeye,” to survive; participating in a Red Cross inspection of Bergen-Belsen; in January 1945 being taken by German soldiers on a train towards the German-Swiss border and being released in Switzerland, where they were cleaned and fed; traveling to Saint Gallen and then to Caux, Switzerland to stay in a displaced persons center; reuniting with his father after the war; his mother’s decision to go to Heiden after the war to run a one-room school house for six- to fourteen-years olds to learn Hungarian; immigrating to Palestine by a British troop carrier in September 1945 and living in a kibbutz, where his mother took charge of the day shift cooking; and immigrating to the United States in March 1949.

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral History

    Leo Bretholz, born on March 6, 1921 in Vienna, Austria, describes his childhood; his father passing away in 1930 and becoming a father figure for his two younger sisters; long-standing antisemitic attitudes transforming into excessive violence after the Anschluss in 1938; the arrest of his friends and his mother encouraging him to flee to Luxembourg, where he had an aunt; being arrested three days after he arrived in Luxembourg, questioned for several hours, and released to a train station; returning to Luxembourg and staying with relatives until he had the opportunity to cross the border into Belgium on November 9, 1938 and go to Antwerp, where he found distant relatives and stayed until May of 1940; receiving an affidavit and visa from an aunt in Baltimore, MD to immigrate to the United States but being unable to leave because Pearl Harbor was bombed the day he was scheduled to go; obtaining the necessary documents to cross into Switzerland in October 1942, but getting arrested and taken to Rivesaltes; his deportation to Drancy, another French detention camp, where he stayed for a short time before he and other prisoners were loaded onto cattle cars for transport; escaping deportation by bending the bars covering one of the train’s windows and squeezing through and jumping out of the train; making his way to Paris, where he obtained a false identification card; his arrest in December and then being sent to prison for nine months until he went to a forced labor camp in Septfonds, France; escaping from the camp and contacting a friend who got him in touch with an underground resistance group in Saint-Vallier, France, which he joined in November 1943; helping children cross the border into Switzerland, making false ID cards, and relaying messages between various resistance organizations; working with the resistance after D-Day and helping the Allied forces; and receiving an affidavit from his aunt in Baltimore that allowed him to immigrate to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral History

    Paul Matasovski, born in Bacău, Moldavia (now Romania) in December 1933, describes his family and early childhood; his family getting a radio in 1933 to find out what Hitler was doing in Europe; the political situation with the Iron Guard and General Antonescu; the Jews having their radios taken from their homes but receiving news by passing around sheets of paper; attending a Jewish high school until the end of 1942, when he was sent to work in a textile factory; participating in sabotage activities until he was arrested in the spring of 1944; remaining in a prison near the Carpathian Mountains until Russian forces liberated him; his knowledge of transports and concentration camps during the war; the composition of the people in his underground group and their activities; and returning to his hometown to help clean up the mess after the war.

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral History

    Zelda Piekarska Brodecki (Americanized name, Sonia Brodecki), born on July 27, 1928 in Sosnowiec, Poland, describes her family; the German occupation of her town and her family having to close their business; entering the Sosnowiec ghetto and being forced to work in a factory; her deportation from the ghetto to a forced labor camp near Wrocław, Poland; her transfer in 1943 to another labor camp in Klettendorf, Germany (Klecina, Wrocław, Poland); Russian troops liberating her at an ammunition factory in Ludwigsdorf, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen in Germany; returning to Sosnowiec after the war and meeting her cousin there; moving to the Landsberg am Lech displaced persons camp, where she met her husband, Boleslaw Brodecki; and living in Germany until 1949 when she and her husband immigrated to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral History

    Stefania Podgórska Burzminski, born in Lipa, Poland, describes her family and childhood; helping her parents run a farm until she decided to move with her sister to Przemyśl and work in a bakery; the Russian invasion and not noticing much of a change in life until the Germans ousted the Russians; living in an apartment near the ghetto and witnessing people being deported from it; developing a relationship with a young man named Josef, who was Jewish and lived in the ghetto; having to explain what a Jew was to her little sister; helping to smuggle food into the ghetto for Josef and his family; moving into a large apartment and taking Josef and twelve other Jews in with her; having an SS man insist upon taking a room in her apartment and always living in fear that he would kill the Jews living there; and her liberation by Russian forces.

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral History

    Rose Galek Brunswic, born in Sochocin, Poland in 1920, describes her family; learning Hebrew and participating in a Zionist organization in her youth; moving to Warsaw in the mid-1930s; being forced into the Warsaw ghetto and living with twelve other people; her parents being shot during a roundup; going into hiding with the underground in March 1941; leaving her hiding place and finding another one in the city with an old work friend of her father; being caught by the Germans during a raid and sent by cattle car to Berlin; using her false papers to get a job on a farm; pretending to be a Seventh Day Adventist and playing the organ for the church; getting in trouble for not having the proper identification and having to do translations for a judge as penance; her liberation by American soldiers in 1945 when she was still working on the farm; meeting a Jewish soldier and marrying him; staying in a displaced persons camp after the war until she immigrated to the United States to live with her uncle; and settling in Buffalo, New York, where she attended school.

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral History

    Renée Schwalb Fritz, born in 1937 in Vienna, Austria, describes her family; her father leaving for the United States in 1939 and fleeing with her mother to Belgium; the German occupation of Belgium in 1940 and going into hiding in a convent, where she remained for two years until the Germans became suspicious; the underground taking Renee to a Protestant family's farm and then to an orphanage; reuniting with her mother after the war and discovering that she had survived Auschwitz; joining her father in the United States five years later; going through high school in the US with much difficulty; attending Boston University; and marrying an American man soon after she graduated from college.

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral History

    Martin Spett, born on December 2, 1928 in Tarnów, Poland, describes his childhood; the German occupation of Tarnów in 1939; his family losing their apartment in 1940; hiding in an attic when the first massacre of Jews occurred; having to finally register as a Jew in May 1943 and go to Bergen-Belsen, where he was allegedly to be part of an exchange for German prisoners of war; being liberated on April 13, 1945 by Allied troops during his transport to Theresienstadt; spending some time in Belgium after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral History

    Niels Bamberger, born on October 21, 1928 in Würzburg, Germany, describes growing up in a religious family; fleeing from Germany to his mother's hometown of Copenhagen, Denmark in 1932; his family being warned of imminent danger on Rosh Hashanah of 1943; their local grocer helping them to escape to the port town of Snekkersten, Denmark (the closest point between Denmark and Sweden); receiving help from the local resistance forces and hiding in houses until their group of over two hundred could be transported in row boats; a Swedish military boat intercepting his family at sea and taking them to Sweden; attending school in Lund, Sweden while his parents opened a small restaurant; his family’s return to Denmark on May 28, 1945 to find their old home undisturbed; and getting back on his feet after the war.

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral History

    Ray Buch, born on September 18, 1920 in New York City, NY, describes his parents and their emigration from Ukraine; joining the US Army in November 1942 and going into training in Louisiana and Texas for a year; being shipped to England in September 1944; fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and encountering fighting and violence; finding out about the concentration camps and death camps; his unit’s attempts to bury people who had died alongside the roads; arriving in Mauthausen on May 10, 1945 and the scenes of people and depravation he witnessed; forcing the German citizens to bury the dead; spending about thirty days in Mauthausen and then moving around to other camps, like Dachau and Ebensee; and the sacrifices his unit made for the sake of the freedom of Europe and the United States.

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral History

    Nina Kaleska, born on April 11, 1929 in Grodno, Poland (now Hrodna, Belarus), describes having a pleasant childhood; her family not being perceived of as Jewish because of their Aryan looks; experiencing antisemitism among her childhood friends in 1938; joining the Young Pioneers after the Russians invaded in 1939; her father’s imprisonment for three to four months for political reasons; the German invasion in 1941 and the formation of two ghettos in Grodno; the Germans selecting one of her cousins, who was considered an electronics genius, for forced labor but then killing him; peasant families offering to hide her and her sister but rejecting because she did not want to be separated from her family; being deported with her sister to Auschwitz in 1941; the death of her sister three months after they arrived; becoming sick in the camp several times and only being saved because of the help she received from a woman named Martha who worked there; being asked by Dr. Mengele if she was Jewish because she did not look Jewish; having to stand guard while the head of her lager had sex with some of the most beautiful women in the lager; going on a death march and being liberated by Allied forces on May 5, 1945; and her immigration to England and then to the United States with the help of the American Joint Distribution Committee.

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral History

    Judith Meisel, born on February 7, 1929 in Josvainiai, Lithuania, discusses her childhood; moving to Kaunas, Lithuania shortly after her father’s death; being forced into the Kaunas ghetto in 1941; her family’s deportation in 1944 to Stutthof, where her mother was killed; escaping with her sister from a death march out of Stutthof by hiding in a coal bin; receiving shelter in a Catholic nunnery; developing typhus and posing as a Christian in a hospital in Danzig, Poland to receive treatment; finding work on a farm with her sister; moving to Copenhagen, Denmark, where she was sent to school; her liberation on May 5, 1945; living with a Jewish family in Denmark for some time after the war; immigrating to Canada in 1948; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral History

    Thomas Buergenthal, born in 1934 in Czechoslovakia, describes his family; moving with his family to Žilina, Czechoslovakia in 1938 and facing persecution from the Hlinka Guard; moving to Katowice, Poland and registering with the British Consul; leaving for England on September 1, 1939 but being stopped near the Russian border when their train was bombed by Germans; having to march with a group of refugees to Kielce, Poland and go into its ghetto; the deportation of his grandparents and twenty thousand other ghetto inhabitants in August 1942 to Treblinka while he and his parents were sent to a forced labor camp in Kielce; surviving a massacre of Jewish children and then being transported with his parents to a factory where they made wooden carts for the Eastern Front; his deportation in August 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he worked in the laundry as an errand boy; getting separated from his father and never seeing him again; being forced on a death march to Gliwice, Poland and then to Heinkel concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany in January 1945; his transfer to a sub-camp of Sachsenhausen; his liberation on April 27, 1945 by Russian soldiers; marching with the First Polish Division into Berlin, Germany and Siedlce, Poland and then being placed in a Jewish orphanage in Otwock, Poland; his mother finding him in 1946 and smuggling him into the British zone of Germany; living in Göttingen, Germany and attending high school there; immigrating by himself to the United States in 1951 to live with his uncle; his mother remarrying and staying in Europe; attending Harvard Law School and becoming a professor of International Law at the George Washington University Law School; and serving on the United Nations Human Rights Committee and the United States Holocaust Memorial Council’s Committee on Conscience.

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral History

    Leif Donde, born in 1937 in Copenhagen, Denmark, describes his upbringing in a religious but not Orthodox Jewish family; the German occupation of Denmark in April 1940; seeing the German police begin to arrest Jews in early October 1943 and fleeing with his family by train to the Danish city of Nykøbing Falster, south of Sjælland island; being smuggled by a fishing boat to safety in Sweden; arriving in Trelleborg, Sweden after an eleven-hour nighttime boat ride in October 1943, during which they passed through a German mine field; attending school in Sweden while his parents worked in a garment factory in Uddevalla, Sweden; his family returning to Denmark after the end of the war; and settling in Denmark, where he serves as the Consul General.

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral History

    Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig, born in Vienna, Austria on March 7, 1924, describes her family and childhood; enjoying the rich cultural life Vienna had to offer before the war; her father’s placement on the Nazi blacklist for being a liberal writer and journalist; attempting to leave Austria and go to France but getting arrested and sent to prison; escaping to Cologne, where her mother managed to attain three visas by giving up some of her jewelry; moving to Paris, where her father found a job as a reporter; attending art school in Paris and meeting her future husband; the deportation of her father and brother to concentration camps when Germany declared war on France; her father’s return home for a short period until he had to join the French Army; running away from Paris and going through several cities until she arrived in Blois, France and began to search for her father; getting separated from her family and asking about their whereabouts wherever she went; reuniting with her mother in Barcus, France; finding a teaching job in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France through a family friend who lived there; her family receiving special visas to move to the United States on December 7, 1941 because her father was an intellectual; attending college in the United States; and marrying Ernest, the man she had earlier met in Paris.

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral History

    Max Amichai Heppner, born on October 15, 1933 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, describes growing up as an only child; his parents’ escape from Berlin, Germany in 1933; the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands and missing a boat to escape to Sweden; losing several of his family’s possessions to the Nazis; his mother getting captured during a street raid but then being released by a Nazi commander in August 1942; escaping into the countryside with his parents and finding various hiding places with another family; going into hiding with underground forces and then with a farming family; dealing with frequent Nazi raids; meeting several downed Allied pilots while in hiding; his liberation by Scottish soldiers on September 24, 1944; his mother’s attempts to shield him from much of the devastation of the war; and immigrating to the United States to live with his mother’s family.

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral History

    Charles Bruml, born in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes his family and the Prague Jewish community; being about 28 years old and working in an import-export firm in 1938 when German troops marched into Prague; his family’s deportation to Theresienstadt and finding a job in the camp’s Technical Department; making paintings during his internment that are displayed at the camps today; his deportation to Auschwitz on January 11, 1942 and getting tattooed; being transferred to Buna (Monowitz), where he worked as a painter for the SS men until January 18, 1945; being forced to walk to Gleiwitz, because the Russians neared, and then to Bergen-Belsen, where the Red Cross liberated him; and meeting his wife in Prague as they both tried to sort out the fates of their families.

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral History

    David Pollack, born in Prince Albert, Saskatechewan, Canada in 1922, describes growing up in a mildly Jewish family; enlisting in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1942 but not being accepted as a pilot because of his poor eyesight; being trained as a radar technician and stationed first in the Queen Charlotte Islands and then in England in 1943; joining a mobile radar unit outside of Weimar, Germany in 1945 and visiting Buchenwald, where he was shocked by the horrors of the camp; speaking, with the aid of a translator, to many prisoners, taking the names and the addresses of their relatives who were in other countries, and contacting these relatives to inform them that the prisoners would soon be arriving in displaced persons camps and contacting them for help; returning to Canada after the war; and keeping up correspondence with some of the survivors he had helped to reunite with their families.

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral History

    Rabbi Eugene Lipman, born in Pittsburgh, PA on October 13, 1919, describes his family; graduating from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio; being sent overseas as an army chaplain in April 1945; after the war helping Jewish survivors at Buchenwald and Dachau before being sent to Plzen, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); joining the Haganah, a group that cared for Jewish survivors and refugees as well as secretly transporting Jews to Palestine; continuing his work with the Haganah in Regensburg, Germany; going home to the United States for a short time in April 1946 but returning in late 1946 with his wife to continue to aid Jews by providing many with false identity papers for them to leave Europe; and returning to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral History

    Hetty d’Ancona de Leeuwe, born on May 1, 1930 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, describes her family and early childhood; her father losing his business after the German invasion; the deportation of several of her friends and family in 1942; her father’s participation in the Dutch underground newspaper; leaving Amsterdam in October 1943 and separating from her parents to live with a Dutch Gentile family for two years; her liberation by American and British forces and staying with her foster family for a few months until she reunited with her father; and marrying a Jewish man and immigrating to the United States with him after the war.

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral History

    Marty Glickman, born in 1917 in the Bronx, NY, describes growing up with parents who were immigrants from Romania; attending Syracuse University, where he was a track athlete chosen to compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics in Germany; being one of two Jews on the United States Olympic track team; arriving in the Olympic Village and being told that he and Sam Stoller, the other Jewish runner, were to be replaced in the 400 meter relay by Ralph Metcalf and Jessie Owens; hearing from the head coach of the Olympic track team that the substitutions were made because the Germans were said to be hiding their best sprinters but believing that he was really replaced because Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, did not want to further embarrass the Nazis by having Jews run and win a race; serving in the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific during World War II; going to the Marshall Islands; and his friendship with Jesse Owens.

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral History

    Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz, born in 1931 in Schlüchtern, Germany, describes her family; moving to Dinxperlo, a village located close to the German border in the Netherlands in 1933; the German invasion of the Netherlands on May 10, 1940; Jews no longer being allowed to own businesses or to attend schools; going into hiding when they heard that the Jews would be rounded up for deportation in 1943; living with her mother in a barn attic that was barely big enough for them to both lie flat; beginning to write a cookbook-diary in 1944 to pass her time; becoming extremely ill because of a lack of ventilation in her living quarters; recovering from her illness but remaining weak; having to leave her hiding place toward the end of the war because of increased Nazi raids; her liberation on April 1, 1945 by Canadian troops; returning to their former village with food and money supplied to them by the farmers who had hidden them; returning to school as her family tried to re-build their lives; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral History

    Hessy Levinsons Taft, born on May 17, 1934 in Berlin, Germany, describes her family and childhood; her parents having her photo taken in 1934 and the photo ending up in a Nazi magazine labeled as a beautiful Berliner baby; her family’s decision to run away to Paris, France, where they were when it fell to the Germans; moving to the French coast near Bordeaux with her mother and sister while her father remained in Paris trying to find a way for the family to leave; her father securing visas for the family to travel to Cuba, where she and her sister began to attend a British school; immigrating to the United States in 1948 and settling in New York, NY; and eventually getting married and starting a family.

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral History

    Bella Jakubowicz Tovey, born on September 18, 1926, in Sosnowiec, Poland, describes growing up in a Jewish family; the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and losing her father’s factory and their family furniture; being forced to move into the Sosnowiec ghetto and to work in a factory there in 1941; her family’s deportation to the Bedzin ghetto in 1942; her deportation to the Graeben sub-camp of Gross-Rosen in Germany in 1943 and then to Bergen-Belsen in 1944; her liberation in April 1945; and immigrating to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral History

    Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz, born June 23, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, describes her childhood; facing intensifying antisemitic measures that resulted in the loss of her father's business and the closing of her school in the late 1930s; her family’s deportation in 1943 to Auschwitz, where her father was killed; her selection for forced labor and being assigned to work on road repairs; working in the "Kanada" unit sorting possessions brought into the camp; her transfer to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany in November 1944; being sent to Malchow, where she worked in a munitions factory making bullets; her liberation by American soldiers in May 1945 during a death march from the Malchow camp in Germany; traveling to Frankfurt with her mother in August 1945 with hopes of finding the rest of their family; and immigrating with her mother to the United States in early 1947.

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral History

    Peretz Milbauer, born in Brooklyn, New York in October 1915, discusses his life up to World War II; teaching history before he was drafted into the United States Army; being sent overseas in July 1944 and arriving to his station in Remse, Germany on December 5, 1944; liberating prisoners from a death march in Wałbrzych, Poland in December 1944; gathering a list of names of survivors from the death march and sending the list to American newspapers and magazines in an effort to help survivors contact their relatives; and also liberating prisoners at Ebensee, a sub-camp of Mauthausen in Austria, in May 1945.

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral History

    Judah Nadich, born in 1912 in Baltimore, Maryland, describes his life until World War II and training to be a rabbi; enlisting in the army as a chaplain after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; serving as the senior Jewish chaplain with the United States Army in the United Kingdom and then in France during the war; having his first contact with survivors of Nazi oppression in France; helping Parisian Jews re-build their community; being ordered to Frankfurt, Germany as the Jewish affairs adviser to General Dwight D. Eisenhower and reporting on conditions in displaced persons camps; and returning to the United States in late 1945.

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral History

    Hana Bruml, born on May 30, 1922 in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes her family and childhood; attending a Zionist elementary school; meeting Rudolph Schiff and marrying him on November 14, 1939; the German invasion of Prague and her father losing his business, receiving ration tickets marked with a “J,” and only being allowed to do certain things at specific times; the deportation of her parents in July 1942 to Theresienstadt followed three weeks later by her and her husband’s deportation to the camp; working in the camp hospital as a nurse; the death of her husband and the development of a romance with Bruno, who worked as an internist in the camp; the special treatment of Danish Jews and a few prominent Austrian and German Jews in Theresienstadt; seeing doctors perform several abortions in the camp to save women; her transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944 and seeing Dr. Mengele; and remaining in Auschwitz until May 5, 1945, when she was liberated.

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral History

    Benjamin Meed, born on February 19, 1922 in Warsaw, Poland, describes his family; traveling with a friend in 1939 to Russian territory to escape Nazi persecution; returning to Warsaw because they could not support themselves; joining an underground movement that provided a library and schooling for children; smuggling people to the Aryan side of Warsaw when the ghetto was established; helping his family escape to Praga Południe, Poland, where they hid in a cemetery; beginning to work with a woman named Vladka who was also involved in underground activities; posing as a Christian with Vladka during the war in order to facilitate their work in the underground; moving his hiding place to a bunker which he had built after the Warsaw uprising; jumping onto a Red Cross truck after his liberation to escape persecution by Germans and Poles after the war; reuniting with his parents after the war; and marrying Vladka in Warsaw ten days after liberation.

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral History

    Johanna Neumann, born on December 12, 1930 in Hamburg, Germany, describes her early childhood; her memories of Kristallnacht on November 10, 1938; her family’s decision to leave Germany as anti-Jewish measures intensified; obtaining visas for Albania and leaving Germany without many of her possessions; crossing into Italy and setting sail for Albania on March 1, 1939; remaining in Albania during the Italian and German occupations for a total of six and a half years; finally being liberated after a battle between the Germans and the Albanian partisans in December 1944; spending some time in an Italian displaced persons camp at the port of Tricase in the Lecce province of Apulia in southern Italy; immigrating to the United States in September 1946; and living briefly in Israel for three years from 1969 until 1971.

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral History

    Alice Lang Rosen, born in 1934 in Lambsheim, Germany, describes her early childhood; the deportation of her family to the Gurs camp in France and then to Rivesaltes when she was six years old; the French Red Cross taking her out of the camp and hiding her from the Germans by placing her in a children's home, then in a convent, and then with various Catholic families; being sent to a children's home near Paris after her liberation; having her name put on a list of Jewish children from all over France, which was being compiled by a Polish rabbi; her father tracing her from this list and reuniting with her in Germany in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral History

    Jay Ipson, born June 5, 1935, in Slobodka (Vilijampolė), Lithuania, describes growing up in religious, well-off family; his father's attempts to move his family to Russia but being turned back at the border; losing their home in the move and moving in with his grandmother, whose house was in the Kaunas ghetto; witnessing the deportations from the ghetto; escaping the ghetto with his mother and father in November 1943; hiding in a farmer's hay wagon and then in one room under the care of a poor, religious Polish Catholic family; his father's construction of a hiding place under the Polish family's potato patch; hiding with all of his extended family in the underground bunker; being liberated by the Russian army; moving back to Kaunas with his parents; attending Jewish school; being forced to run away from Kaunas after his father was declared an enemy of the Soviet Republic; changing his last name to Butremovitch and getting false papers; hiding with a Jewish family in White Russia; leaving Warsaw, Poland and traveling to Germany; receiving help from a German man to cross the border to the American occupied-zone of Germany; living with a German family in Prinz Regenten Strasse in Munich for nine months; immigrating to the United States to live with his aunt in Richmond, VA in June 1947; and joining the US military during the Korean War and becoming a colonel in command of an aviation unit.

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral History

    Margaret Jastrow Klug, born on June 8, 1923 in Rogoźno, Poland, describes her family and childhood; her brother’s immigration to Scotland before the war; the beginning of the war and being arrested because someone had given them her name; jumping from a window of the jail to avoid deportation to Auschwitz but instead being injured and staying in a hospital for two months; being deported to Auschwitz, where she worked in a factory; getting married and having a daughter after the war; immigrating to Israel in 1949; returning to Germany soon after because the climate in Israel was too uncomfortable for her; and immigrating to the United States in the mid-1950s and settling in Atlanta, Georgia.

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral History

    Solomon Klug, born on July 9, 1923 in Krzepice, Poland, describes growing up in a religious family with one sister and three brothers; seeing his mother and brother shot in his backyard; his deportation in 1940 to Annaberg, Germany, where he worked building the Autobahn; being transferred in 1943 to Markstadt, Germany, where he built bridges, and then to Fuenfteichen, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen, in March 23, 1944 to work in an ammunitions factory; his transport to Wolfsberg, another sub-camp of Gross-Rosen; being sent to Politz, Czechoslovakia, Bergen-Belsen, and finally to Barth-an-der-Ostee, a sub-camp of Ravensbrück; going on a three-day death march after his evacuation from Barth-an-der-Ostee; his liberation on April 30, 1945; going to Berlin, Germany after liberation and meeting his wife Margaret; immigrating to Israel, where they lived for four years, and then returning to Nuremberg to spend a year in a displaced persons camp; and immigrating to the United States in 1955 and settling in Atlanta, Georgia.

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral History

    Helene Baraf, born July 24, 1927 in Antwerp, Belgium, discusses her family and her childhood in Antwerp before World War II; her family's move to the United States in 1937; her return to Belgium with her mother and brother in 1940; traveling to France with her family by train and on foot after the Germans entered Belgium; her family's life in Lille, France; her brother's arrest by the Gestapo and eventual deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau for failing to properly display his Star of David on his coat; her and her mother's arrest by the Gestapo and their escape during a round up; their rescue from a small hiding place by the members of the underground resistance; her time spent hiding in a convent with other Jewish children in Lille; her attempts to conceal her identity with an assumed name and falsified identification documents; her move from the convent to a "Protestant community" in Roubaix, France, where she attended high school and remained with her mother until after World War II; her friendship with a girl from Roubaix whose family sheltered her and her mother for period of time during the war; the divorce of her parents shortly after the war; and her life in the United States after 1969.

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral History

    Morris Kornberg, born in Przedbórz, Poland on January 6, 1918, describes growing up as the youngest of seven children in a strict Orthodox family; the 1939 German invasion and being forced to work in a factory in the ghetto; his imprisonment in Końskie, a prison in Poland, and then in Radom, Poland and Jawischowitz, a sub-camp of Auschwitz; working in a coal mine and receiving special treatment by SS men because of his memory for numbers; his transfer to Troeglitz, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, in January 1945; the evacuation of Troeglitz on April 9, 1945 and escaping on a train with two others; getting caught and forced on a death march to Leitmeritz, a sub-camp of Flossenbürg, and then to Theresienstadt, where he was liberated; staying in a sanitarium outside of Stuttgart, where he met his wife; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral History

    Michael Diamond, born on July 10, 1919 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), describes his family; his draft into the Czech Army in 1939 but being forced to work in army camps clearing snow off roads and highways when the Slovak State was created; his transfer to Liptovský Mikuláš, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), where he repaired weapons and became a Slovak-German language interpreter; being moved to Vrútky, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), where he had to clean old uniforms; working as an electrician in eastern Slovakia; escaping into hiding in the forest but soon getting captured by the Gestapo; his transport to Sered, a "Sommerlager" in Slovakia; attempting to escape from a transport train and then being sent to Sachsenhausen, Heinkelwerke, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Neuengamme, and Mauthausen; working as an engineer and repairing railroad engines; ending up in Wurttemberg, Germany, where he was marched deeper into Germany as the Allied forces approached; and hiding in a peasant's empty house in Germany until he was liberated by Soviet soldiers.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral History

    Abraham Malach, born on May 12, 1935 in Zwoleń, Poland, describes his family; entering the ghetto in Radom, Poland in 1940 and remaining there until 1942; spending 1942 through 1943 at work camps in Poland, where he worked as a messenger boy; his deportation to Auschwitz in 1944; being removed from the group headed to the gas chambers at his first selection by a female Kapo, who molested him and bribed him to keep silent by giving him food for his family; running away to a monastery when Auschwitz was liberated; eventually being taken by nuns to a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency camp; reuniting with his parents in 1946 in Krakow, Poland; his parents sending him to Israel to finish his high school education; and immigrating to New York, NY after high school when he was admitted to Columbia University.

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral History

    Michael Bernath, born on February 14, 1923 in Szikszó, Hungary, describes growing up in a family with eleven older siblings; working in Budapest, Hungary as a furrier in 1943 and always getting harassed; joining the underground movement in Budapest and working for American and British intelligence services; the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944 and Hungarian gendarmes rounding up five thousand Jewish people from his town and transporting them to Kassa, Czechoslovakia; being forced into a slave labor camp with about 35,000 other men; his deportation to the Schachendorf concentration camp in Austria in the winter of 1944 and being forced to dig trenches and train tracks in the Austrian Alps; Russian forces liberating him and returning to Budapest to live with his aunt and uncle; and his immigration to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral History

    Kate Bernath, born in August 27, 1927 in Szikszó, Hungary, describes her family and childhood; living a decent life until March 1944 when the Germans occupied Hungary; dating a man to keep herself amused before the occupation; being rounded up and sent to a ghetto in Kassa (Košice, Slovakia); her deportation to Auschwitz in May 1944; her transfer to a factory in Augsburg, Germany to work in a Messerschmitt factory; hearing Allied bombings every night toward the end of the war; her transfer to Mühldorf, where she had to clean up debris from bombings; the guards disappearing one day and escaping to a farmhouse, where they were caught by an SS soldier; her liberation on May 1, 1946 and going to the Feldafing displaced persons camp; returning to Amsterdam and reuniting with her pre-war boyfriend; and getting married in Leipheim, Germany and then immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral History

    Paul Kovak, born on December 6, 1938 in Trenčín, Slovakia, describes being born a Jew but converting to Roman Catholicism with his parents; his father’s work as a professor at a small agricultural college; not having to wear the yellow star because of his father’s indispensable position at the school; going into hiding in the second home of a farming family in the mountains in late August 1944 at the time of the Slovak National Uprising; staying in hiding until April 1945, when they were liberated by Russian and Romanian troops; living in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia until 1981; and immigrating to the United States in 1981.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral History

    Abraham Kolski, born in 1917 in Izbica Lubelska, Poland, describes his family; the German occupation of Poland and going into the Czestochowa ghetto, where he did forced labor at a metal factory; his deportation on October 2, 1942 to Treblinka, Poland, where he performed forced labor searching for valuables in the clothing of gas chamber victims; participating in the Treblinka uprising on August 2, 1943 and escaping the concentration camp with nine other friends; hiding in a cellar of a home near Treblinka for the remainder of the war; eventually being liberated by the Russian Army; remaining in Poland until 1948, when he married and left for France; immigrating to the United States in 1954; and testifying as a witness to the events at Treblinka in the war crimes trials at Düsseldorf.

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral History

    Sylvia Kolski, born on September 15, 1925 in Tarczyn, Poland, describes her family and childhood; moving with her aunt, uncle, cousins, and parents into the Warsaw ghetto; working for a tailor in the ghetto; hearing rumors that the Jews would be killed on July 22, 1942; hiding money in her clothing, so she could bribe people to save herself; seeing several major deportations from the ghetto; escaping from the ghetto and staying with a family in the countryside; her liberation on January 16, 1945 and returning to Tarczyn; moving to Łódź, Poland, where she met her husband, and then to Paris, France in 1947; and immigrating to the United States when the Vietnam War began.

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral History

    Steven Springfield, born in 1923 in Riga, Latvia, describes his experiences as a child; the German occupation of Riga in 1941 and having to go into the ghetto; the massacre of about 28,000 Jews from the ghetto in late 1941 at the Rumbula forest; being transferred with his brother to a small ghetto for able-bodied men; his deportation to a labor camp near Kaiserwald in 1943; being moved to Stutthof in 1944 and forced to work in a shipbuilding firm; surviving a death march in 1945 with his brother and being liberated by Soviet forces; accepting a position as an interpreter for the Russian Army; his incarceration by the Russians for allegedly supporting the Nazis but being released when the charges were disproven; locating his pre-war girlfriend and marrying her; moving to Berlin, Germany with his wife and brother; and applying for a visa and immigrating to the United States on March 10, 1947.

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral History

    Liny Pajgin Yollick, born in 1924 in Hague, Netherlands, describes growing up in a wealthy family; the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940; her mother’s plans to escape after her father died; spending six months with her mother and sister trying to escape through southern France by pretending to be Protestant, obtaining visas to travel through Spain and Portugal, and going on one of the last trains to cross into Spain after the Germans took over southern France; boarding a Portuguese ship bound for Dutch Guiana and being placed into a refugee camp; the exiled Dutch government’s arrangement for her to finish her education; and immigrating to the United States, where she worked for some time in the Dutch embassy in Washington, DC before settling in Texas.

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral History

    Fred Bachner was born on September 28, 1925 in Berlin, Germany and describes his family; his brother’s and father’s deportation to the Polish border after Kristallnacht; moving to Poland in 1939 to join the rest of his family; his brother being taken to a work camp in Poland in 1940; his deportation to Markstädt, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen, and then to Groeditz and Faulbrueck before he was sent to Auschwitz; loading and unloading coal and cement for I.G. Farben, a German industrial company; going on a death march out of Auschwitz to a camp near Dachau, where he found his brother; being placed on another train that was ambushed by British fighter planes; jumping off the train with his brother and hiding in the surrounding area until they located the American soldiers; staying at the Feldafing displaced persons camp after the war; reuniting with his father and immigrating to the United States with his father and brother on January 3, 1947; and being drafted into the United States Army during the Korean War.

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral History

    Murray Pantirer was born on June 15, 1925 in Kraków, Poland and discusses his childhood; the German occupation of Kraków in 1939; separating from his family on several occasions in an attempt to find food and other necessities; finally being confined to the Kraków ghetto; his and his brother’s deportation to Płaszów, Poland to do forced labor; his transport to Auschwitz in May 1944, then to Gross-Rosen, and finally to Brünnlitz, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen, to work for German industrialist Oskar Schindler; his liberation on May 10, 1945 and discovering that he was only one of nine family members to survive; returning to Poland after liberation but deciding to leave because of the lingering presence of antisemitism; moving to a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria, where he met and married his wife; arranging to immigrate to America through the American consul in Salzburg, Austria; and immigrating to the United States on the S.S. Marine Fletcher in January 1949.

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral History

    Barbara Marton Farkas, born on May 4, 1920 in Beliu, Romania, describes her family and childhood; living in Beliu until 1937, when her family sold their house and store and moved to Oradea, Romania; being refused entrance into the university in 1940 because of the anti-Jewish laws implemented by the Hungarian government, which then controlled the northern Transylvania area; training in a hospital laboratory and working there until the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944; leaving the hospital, which was occupied by the SS, and starting work at a photo company; first wearing the Star of David on April 1, 1944 and going into the Oradea ghetto in May 1944; her family’s deportation to Auschwitz, where she lost her parents; her transfer to Weisswasser, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen in Germany, where she worked in a chemistry lab and then in the Cathode Workshop; staying there from October 1944 through February 1945; her transport through several camps after March 1945 to avoid the approaching Soviet army; ending up on the German-Danish border at Padberg, Germany; the Red Cross assisting the survivors with food and shelter; being taken to Malmö, Sweden the next day and then spending some time in a hospital in Landskrona, Sweden; returning to Romania to study in Cluj from 1946 to 1951; graduating as an industrial pharmacist; immigrating to Israel in 1961; and immigrating to the United States in 1968.

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral History

    William Farkas, born in 1916 in Arad, Romania, describes growing up as an only child in a middle class family; attending the Arad Jewish school and studying business administration after high school; joining the Romanian Army after school; not experiencing antisemitism until 1940 when he was expelled from the army because he was Jewish; the Iron Guard coming to power in September 1940; being ordered to report for deportation to labor camps in July 1941 and going to a work camp in Sighişoara, Romania, where he worked as a miner demolishing mountains for a new railway line; being sent home until 1942, when he was transported to Valea Homorod, Romania and then to Kinapist, Romania to do railway work; claiming he was an electrician in 1943 and going to a camp with three friends in Timişoara, Romania, where they worked as auto mechanics in a military garage for one year; his transport in 1944 to Doaga, a labor camp in Romania, where inmates built cement fortresses; hearing that Soviet soldiers were approaching Doaga and being liberated on August 25, 1944; returning home via Bucharest and reuniting with his parents in Arad; finding a wife and immigrating to Israel with her in 1954; and immigrating to the United States in 1961.

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral History

    Sheila Etons Bernard (née Sala Perec), born on February 18, 1936 in Chełm, Poland, describes her family and early childhood; her father’s deportation to a labor camp after the war began and never seeing him again; hiding in the shack of a Polish policeman for almost two years with her mother; her mother dying because of a blood clot in her leg; going to a children’s home in Germany for two years; immigrating to Palestine to live with one of her uncles; joining the military, where she met her husband; immigrating to the United States in 1963 because her husband had family in the US; and her thoughts on how the war has affected her life.

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral History

    Frima, born in 1936 in Volochys'k, Russia (now Ukraine), describes her family; trying to escape to White Russia with her family after the Nazi invasion but being forced back to live with some distant cousins; her father’s capture by the Germans to serve as an interpreter for them; her sister and mother being forced to work at labor camps during the days; entering the Volochys'k ghetto; getting caught by Germans and claiming that they were not Jewish, which resulted in them going to jail; escaping with her mother and sister to hide in the attic of a barn, where they were almost discovered but managed to escape; the intensifying pogroms against the Jews by Russian and Ukrainian collaborators; pretending to be Christian and going into hiding with an old family friend; eventually reuniting with her mother with the help of several generous Gentiles and staying with her until the end of the war; going into displaced persons camps in Bavaria; going to school in Germany for two and a half years and then moving to France; immigrating to the United States in the 1950s and meeting her husband there; and her considerations on how the war has affected her life.

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral History

    Esther Terner Raab, born on June 11, 1922 in Chelm, Poland, describes growing up as one of two children; the Soviet occupation of her town in 1939; the German invasion of Chelm in 1941 and her family being forced into a ghetto; moving to Siedliszcze, Poland and eventually moving into the ghetto in Siedliszcze; her transport to the labor camp at Staw Noakowski, Poland for a short time before she and her brother were sent to Sobibór in December 1942; arriving at Sobibór three days before Christmas in 1942 and being forced to work in a knitting factory in the camp, knitting woolen socks; witnessing the gassing of Jews at Camp III of the Sobibór compound; participating in the camp uprising of October 14, 1943 but getting wounded during the escape; fleeing to the countryside and getting sheltered by a former customer of her father; reuniting with her brother, who had escaped during a previous transfer; remaining hidden until 1944, when the region in which she hid was freed by the Soviet Red Army; following the Red Army to Berlin, Germany and settling there for a short time after the war; marrying a man in Berlin and then immigrating to the United States shortly after the end of the war; and serving as a witness at the trials of Nazi criminals in the 1965-66 trials in Hagen, Germany.

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral History

    Guy Stern, born on January 14, 1922 in Hildesheim, Germany, describes growing up in a Jewish family; attending a German school, where he had many non-Jewish friends; losing several of his friends after 1933 when they joined the Hitler Youth; his family’s decision to move to the United States after they began to experience increased levels of antisemitism; leaving Germany with a group of children in November 1937 and arriving in New York, NY; moving to St. Louis, Missouri to live with distant relatives; graduating high school in June 1939 and trying to help his family immigrate to the United States; discovering that his parents had perished in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland; attempting to enlist in the US Army in 1941 but being turned away because of his German heritage; receiving a draft notice in 1942 and being trained in military intelligence because of his familiarity with the German language; training at Camp Ritchie in Maryland; working as an interrogator and uncovering the deeds of several war criminals; going to Buchenwald the day after it was liberated and seeing the horrible conditions there; returning to the United States after the war, attending Hofstra College, and then earning his Ph.D. from Columbia University in German Literature and Culture; and helping other survivors write about their Holocaust experiences.

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral History

    Toby Stern, born on July 15, 1920 in Vișeu de Mijloc, Romania, describes growing up as the youngest of six children; marrying when she was seventeen or eighteen; going into hiding with her family shortly after the war began; having one child and miscarrying another while in hiding; her deportation to Auschwitz with her mother and her three-year-old son; giving her child to her mother to carry, since both were guaranteed to be killed, which allowed her to survive; having to do forced labor making uniforms in the camp's tailor shop; going on a death march in early 1945 from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück and then to Malchow, where Russian forces liberated her; going to the New Bromberg displaced persons camp and then returning to Vișeu de Mijloc in search of her husband and family; finding all of her brothers but not her husband, who was rumored to have died in Russia; immigrating to Germany after the war and remarrying while there; and immigrating to the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral History

    Ion Butnaru, born in 1918 in Huși, Moldavia (Romania), describes his family; working for a small newspaper before the war until he was drafted into the Romanian Army in November, 1939; being transferred to the military zone in northern Moldavia in the spring of 1940; his expulsion from the army in August 1940 because he was Jewish; being ordered to return to his regiment to work with the battalions in the Carpathian Mountains on September 1, 1940; being sent back to Huși to clean streets in the summer of 1941; his deportation to a concentration camp in Tîrgu Jiu, Romania, where he remained for four months; returning to Huși, where he was placed in a local camp in the courtyard of the Jewish community and had to wear yellow badges; witnessing the Iron Guard Rebellion in January 1941, during which many Jews were killed; his father being falsely accused of being a communist and getting badly beaten; being forced to clear the streets of snow until the summer of 1942, when he was sent to Bolgrad, Ukraine and then to several other villages in Bessarabia in a forced labor battalion; getting moved to another camp near Bîrlad, Romania in 1943; the Romanian Army surrendering to Soviet forces in August 1944; and immigrating to the United States in 1976.

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral History

    Jeanine Gutman Butnaru, born on June 25, 1925 in Bacău, Romania, describes her childhood and family; moving to Bucharest, Romania in 1938; her involvement in the underground resistance movement in Bucharest; working as a volunteer in Jewish hospitals; witnessing the Iron Guard Rebellion of January 21-23, 1941, when Legionaries killed Jews and burned downed their houses and stores; the 1944 American bombing of the railroads that cut the Germans off from Ploiești, Romania, which was rich with oil; hiding in her family’s cellar during the heavy bombardments because Ploiești was near Bucharest; Soviet troops entering Romania at the end of the war; meeting her husband in the Writer's Union; and immigrating to the United States in 1976.

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral History

    Cecilie Klein-Pollack, born on April 13, 1925 in Yasinya, Ukraine, describes growing up as the youngest of six children in a Jewish family; the death of her father when she was nine years old; her expulsion from high school after the Hungarians annexed Ruthenia; being threatened with deportation and subsequently going into hiding in Budapest, Hungary after her mother and sister were briefly imprisoned there; fleeing to Horinc, Ukraine, where they stayed for a year until her brother was taken for forced labor; moving with her mother to Nyíregyháza, Hungary, where arrangements had been made for her to apprentice in a dental laboratory; traveling to Budapest when she heard that her oldest sister had been arrested and finding out that she had been sent to a labor camp in Bačka Topola, Yugoslavia; traveling to Bačka Topola to arrange for her sister’s release and then returning to Budapest, where she became engaged to her future husband Joe Klein; the German invasion of Budapest in March 1944 and joining up with her and Joe’s families in Chust, Ukraine; being forced into a ghetto and then transported to Auschwitz; arriving in Auschwitz and being sent to Birkenau with her sister; being sheltered by the Blockältester who liked her because she was a talented poet; her and her sister’s transport to Nuremberg and Holleischen; their liberation from Holleischen by Russian troops and returning to Czechoslovakia, where she reunited with her fiancé and married him in Budapest on August 21, 1945; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral History

    Fred Schwartz, born on October 30, 1928 in Kotaj, Hungary, describes his childhood; his father’s deportation to a labor camp in 1940; taking over his father’s job delivering seltzer water with his brother; knowing very little of what was happening in Europe from 1940 to 1944; the German invasion of Hungary; the organization of Jews into their town synagogues as the Germans prepared them for deportation; his deportation to Birkenau with his father, mother, and brother; discovering later after the war that his mother had died in Bergen-Belsen; his transfer to a work camp in Wolfsberg where he had to dig tunnels through mountains; being forced on a death march as the Russian forces neared; arriving in Mauthausen where he was liberated by American forces; staying a displaced persons camp for two years until he relocated to Paris, France; waiting to receive an American visa; going to the United States without legal papers and almost being sent back; and reconciling with his past.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral History

    Abraham Malnik, born on January 31, 1927 in Kaunas, Lithuania, describes his childhood and family; the Russian invasion of Lithuania in 1940 and losing most of his family’s belongings; the brutal treatment of Jews by Lithuanians; the establishment of a ghetto in Kaunas that held about thirty thousand people; the Lithuanians beheading the local rabbis; being saved during a selection because his father knew the chief of police; his father’s work in the ghetto fire department; being forced to do several jobs like make toys for German children and clean dirty clothes from the front; the Germans and Lithuanians intensifying their battle against the Jews after the loss of the battle at Stalingrad; being on the last transport from the ghetto to Dachau, where he had to help build a factory for Messerschmitt and pick up dead bodies; his transfers with his father to Flossenbürg and then another camp; getting a German officer in trouble because he attempted to sexually abuse him; his transfer to Theresienstadt, where he was liberated by Russian troops on May 8, 1945; immigrating to the United States without knowing anyone or speaking English; and settling in Washington, DC with his wife, who was a Belgian Holocaust survivor.

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral History

    Lilly Appelbaum Malnik, born in Belgium in 1928, describes her family and childhood; her father's move to the United States; waking up one morning in 1940 and discovering that the Germans had invaded; her sister who was taken into hiding by a farmer who later turned her in to the Germans because she would not have sexual relations with him; living with her aunt in the countryside after having her tonsils out; returning to find that her mother and brother had been deported; hiding her Jewish identity and doing odd jobs for the Germans; going into hiding with a Belgian girl with whom she had worked; being caught and deported on the second-to-last transport before the liberation of Belgium; arriving in Birkenau and receiving her identification number and work assignment to the kitchens in Auschwitz; a death march to Bergen-Belsen; the arrival of Allied soldiers at Bergen-Belsen; being taken away by the Red Cross to recover from typhus and physical injuries; returning to Belgium and reuniting with her aunt; and immigrating to United States to be with her father.

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral History

    Masha Loen, born in July 1930 in Kaunas, Lithuania, describes growing up in a religious family with three sisters; her father hiding her family and other Kaunas Jews under the wooden floor planks in his home; being separated from her family in 1941 and taken to the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland; performing forced labor in Stutthof until 1945, when she was taken on a death march as Russian troops approached the camp; making it to a Russian hospital after the German soldiers abandoned the death march; traveling to Łódź, where she found her father who had been liberated from Dachau; taking a transport to Austria; and immigrating to New Orleans, LA in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral History

    Madeline Deutsch, born on April 29, 1930 in Berehove, Czechoslovakia (now in Ukraine), describes her childhood; Hungary taking over her town on November 9, 1938; living under the Hungarians until March 1944 when the Germans invaded; living in a ghetto for two weeks until her transport to Auschwitz, where she and her mother stayed in for one week; being moved near Wrocław, Poland to work at an ammunition factory; her and her mother’s liberation by Russian soldiers on May 8, 1945; discovering that both her father and brother had died; staying with her mother in a displaced persons camp for four years until March 9, 1949 when the two immigrated to the United States; and marrying and having two sons in America.

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral History

    Amalie Petranker Salsitz, born in 1922 in Munich, Germany, describes growing up in a Zionist family; moving to Stanislav, Poland (now Ivano-Frankivs'k, Ukraine) when she was a young child; the Russian occupation of Poland in 1939 and the loss of her father’s business; seeing her sister move to Palestine with her new husband; her family’s arrest by the Gestapo in October 1941; moving into the ghetto until her father was deported in 1942; escaping to Kraków, Poland, where she passed as Aryan; working as a chambermaid and finally obtaining employment at a construction firm in Kraków, where she remained until January 1945; traveling to Munich and Palestine after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral History

    Norman Salsitz, born in 1920 in Kolbuszowa, Poland, describes growing up in a Zionist Hasidic family; making a failed attempt to immigrate to Palestine in 1938; unsuccessfully trying to join the Polish Army in September 1939; the occupation and destruction of his town; escaping to Russian-occupied Poland for a short period until he returned to Kolbuszowa; going into the Lipie labor camp in 1940; running away from the camp; working for the Germans, building garages for the Wehrmacht; his deportation to the Pustków concentration camp in late 1940; being beaten; escaping from Pustków and moving to the Czechowice ghetto; escaping from the ghetto in November 1942 and helping to establish a partisan unit in the forest near Kolbuszowa; obtaining false documentation with which he joined the Armia Krajowa; fleeing to Germany after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral History

    Frederic Bernard, born on August 7, 1912 in Chernivtsi, Romania (Chernivtsi, Ukraine), describes his family; studying medicine at Karls University in Prague, Czechoslovakia; attempting to enter Hungary in 1941 but being turned away by the Hungarian gendarmerie and placed in a ghetto in Oleyëvo-Korolëvka, Ukraine with over 1,500 Jewish people; hiding during an Aktion in 1942 that exterminated most of the ghetto and then later escaping with his wife Gusti; finding a hiding place with a Polish man in a barn in the woods; the Polish man encouraging him to join a Polish resistance group; finding a new hiding place with Gusti in 1943 and joining a Russian resistance group; becoming a courier for the resistance because of his Romanian language ability; joining the Polish Army, where he practiced as a doctor; and immigrating to the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral History

    Isaac Bitton, born on March 31, 1926 in Lisbon, Portugal, describes his family and childhood; the small Lisbon Jewish community in which he grew up that hosted thousands of Jewish refugees before and during the war; his family’s work running a soup kitchen to help the Jewish refugees; immigrating to Palestine with his brother aboard the ship Nisassa; being forced into an internment camp when he arrived in Haifa; joining the Palestine Police Railroad Division and then the Jewish Brigade; spending some time in Antwerp, Belgium for the Jewish Brigade but soon returning to Palestine to work for the British military; participating in a movement to encourage the illegal entry of European refugees into Palestine; working with the underground forces of the Haganah, a movement dedicated to preparing for Israeli independence; and his immigration to the United States in 1959.

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral History

    Max Haber, born on December 31, 1904 in Essen, Germany, describes his family; attending an Orthodox Jewish school in Germany; moving to Hamburg, Germany and working as a businessman there until 1933, when he moved to Kolomyia, Poland to live with his brother and sister; moving to Katowice, Poland, where he was able to find work; joining the Revisionist party in 1939 and trying to immigrate to Palestine on an illegal transport through Romania; the British Ambassador to Romania telling the Romanians to withdraw his visa since the British were restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine; returning to Kolomyia and staying there until the Soviets invaded in 1939; trying to escape to Romania with his brother-in-law but getting caught and imprisoned; being moved to Kiev, Ukraine in March 1940; receiving a five-year prison sentence and getting transported to Yartsevo, Russia; his transfer to the Mostowits labor camp in Russia, where he was forced to cut trees; his liberation in March 1944 and taking a train to Kotel’nich, Russia with other prisoners; staying with several Russian Jewish families until he found a Ukrainian family who housed him for a short time in exchange for German lessons; traveling to the English zone in Germany; and reuniting with his brother in 1951 in Israel.

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral History

    Major General William P. Levine, born in Duluth, Minnesota on July 1, 1915, describes growing up as the oldest of four brothers; his draft into the United States Army in 1942 and completing Officer Training School in 1943; entering the Intelligence Unit as an Artillery Officer in 1944; being sent to England and later traveling with a unit that began in the Netherlands and worked its way south towards Dachau; moving into Dachau on April 29, 1945 and helping to give out food and medical care to the former prisoners at Dachau; and returning to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral History

    Leo Schneiderman, born on August 18, 1921 in Łódź, Poland, describes his family and childhood; the large Jewish population that had comfortably developed within Łódź before Hitler came to power; Poland preparing for war by drafting young men into the army and by digging trenches; the German invasion and fall of the Polish Army in September 1939; being tricked by the German government to head towards Warsaw with his younger brother and father; returning to Łódź and being forced into the ghetto with his whole family; the closing of the Łódź ghetto in 1940 and the realization that the community needed to organize its own services and methods of self-support; each of his family members taking a job in the ghetto, including his work as a tailor; illegally teaching Yiddish in the ghetto; not understanding why there had to be deportations from the ghetto without realizing the severity of the camps; his deportation to Auschwitz in August 1944; his transport to Kaltwasser, a labor camp in Silesia, to do construction work for a short period until he was transferred to Lärche and then to Wolfsberg, where he worked in a hospital; being forced onto an open cattle car for a deportation and being thrown food while passing through Stará Paka, Czechoslovakia; his liberation by Allied Forces; and speaking for the prosecution against Herr Krison in a 1978 trial in Bochum, West Germany.

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral History

    Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf, both born in 1914 in Warsaw, Poland, describe their childhoods and families; Pela’s decision to study at a Warsaw law school before the war; getting married in 1936 and having a daughter in 1941; entering the Warsaw ghetto in 1940; escaping from the ghetto in 1942 by drugging their daughter, so she seemed to be dead; pretending to go to the Jewish cemetery outside of the ghetto to bury their daughter but never returning; their daughter getting tuberculosis and her six week treatment in a hospital; being helped by non-Jews; hiding on the Aryan side as Catholics; their daughter’s discovery that she was Jewish after the war; immigrating to the United States in 1947 on a United States Navy transport; Adam taking various jobs until he opened sporting goods factory; and getting involved in the Penny Project, which began in 1989.

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral History

    Carla Heijmans Lessing, born in 1929 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, describes her family and childhood; the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 and experiencing harsh antisemitic measures; going into hiding with her mother and brother in August 1942 with the assistance of a Catholic priest who helped Jews find hiding places; leaving their first hiding place after three months but, with the priest’s help, finding a new shelter in Delft, in which they hid for thirty months; and her liberation in May 1945.

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral History

    Edward Lessing, born in the Hague, Netherlands on May 8, 1926, describes moving to the United States in 1929; returning to Delft, Netherlands in 1932 because of the economic depression in the US; entering trade school in 1942 to become a tool maker but having to leave because Jews could no longer attend public school after the German invasion; splitting up from his family after the invasion in October 1942 and finding a place to hide with a farmer, who employed him as a farm hand; relocating to hide in a convent in the Hague with his mother; the German raid of the convent in December 1943, during which he escaped, but his mother was taken to Bergen-Belsen; reuniting with his father and brothers in their hiding place in an abandoned cottage; remaining in this cottage through May 1945 when they returned to Delft; his mother’s liberation from Bergen-Belsen in late 1945; and immigrating with his family to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral History

    Werner Goldsmith, born in Erfurt, Germany on November 13, 1928, describes his family; the expulsion of Jewish children from German schools in 1938; the death of his father in 1938 and moving with his mother to Berlin, Germany; his mother placing him in the Auerbach Orphanage while she lived with another Jewish woman in West Berlin; his mother arranging for him to be placed in a transport to France while she traveled to England; living in the home of a French count until the invasion of France in 1940; the count being taken prisoner in Germany in 1940 and going into the care of the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants; unsuccessfully attempting to flee to southern France and getting separated from the other children when he was placed in the Rothschild orphanage, where he remained for nine months; moving to Marseilles, France in the spring of 1941; receiving an emergency visa in September 1941 to immigrate to the United States because he had relatives there; getting on a transport from Marseilles to Portugal and then embarking on a Portuguese freighter and sailing to the United States; and living in Jewish foster homes until he reunited with his mother in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral History

    Beatrice Pappenheimer, born in October 1932 in Lauterbach, Germany, describes her family and childhood; her parents having to register with the local police; moving to Karlsruhe, Germany after her father had to give up his business in 1936; starting school in Karlsruhe but experiencing much antisemitism; being forced to leave school in November 1938 because of a law forbidding Jews from public schools; the Gestapo forcing her and her family from their house and onto a train in 1939; arriving in the Gurs camp and contracting dysentery; her transfer to the Rivesaltes camp; her mother placing her on a truck run by the Oeuvre de Secours des Enfants and moving into homes in France; reuniting with her sister, who had gone through terrible times in the camps; the bombing of France that picked up in 1943; receiving letters from her grandmother in Palestine, her aunts in New York City, NY, and her uncle and aunt in London, England; arriving in London to be with her uncle and aunt; immigrating to New York City in October 1947 to live with her aunts and attend high school; and her thoughts on her wartime experiences.

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral History

    John Komski, born in 1915 in Galicia, Poland, describes growing up in a Gentile family; having some Jewish friends at the Academy of Arts in Kraków, where he graduated from in 1939; leaving Kraków when the Germans invaded but returning to join the resistance; escaping to Czechoslovakia, where he was caught by Slovaks who turned him in to the Gestapo; being rounded up in 1940 with 756 other Poles and deported to Auschwitz, where he worked in the architect's office; helping to create the museum in Auschwitz in 1941, collecting items of interest from the incoming inmates; escaping from Auschwitz to a small village, where he received false documents from the underground and boarded a train to Kraków; getting captured in Kraków and sent to prison; his transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau and then to Buchenwald, where he worked as a kitchen chef; his deportation to Gross-Rosen, where he worked in the labor relations office; being transported to Hersbruck towards the end of the war and then forced on a death march to Dachau, where he was liberated; and his immigration to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral History

    Curtis Whiteway, born in Newburyport, MA on November 3, 1925, discusses his draft into the United States Army in December 1943; his basic training in Fort Knox, KY and intensive training with Rangers; transferring to Camp Maxie, TX, where he joined the 99th Division and immediately went to England; crossing into France with his division and participating in several skirmishes with the Germans; fighting the Third Panzer Division, which helped to push American forces further into Germany through the Siegfried Line; fighting near Cologne, Germany and encountering several concentration camps; helping to liberate the few surviving prisoners at Ohrdruf; going south into combat after the arrival of the Red Cross; reaching Dachau 3-B and then liberating the Moosburg prison camp (Stalag VII A) in Germany, which had about 30,000 prisoners, including some American prisoners of war; going to the Landshut sub-camp of Dachau to meet up with English and Canadian troops; and his assignment after the war to work temporarily in Cherbourg, France.

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral History

    Lore Baer, born August 26, 1938 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, discusses her childhood in Amsterdam; how her family moved from Germany to the Netherlands in 1933; developing a close relationship with her maternal grandfather, who was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Bergen-Belsen, where he perished; her family's relationship with Elsa and Sam Izaaks, members of the underground resistance; her time in hiding with the Schouten family and becoming friends with Cornelia Schouten; her memories of living as a Catholic in order to conceal her identity as a Jew; hiding in various places on the Schouten family farm in order to avoid the Germans; her difficult separation from the Schouten family at the end of the war and her readjustment to life in Amsterdam; immigrating to the United States with her parents and settling in the Bronx, New York; and returning to the Netherlands to visit with members of the Schouten family several years after moving to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral History

    Erich Kulka (né Erich Schön), born on February 18, 1911 in Vsetín, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes his childhood and family; being raised as a conservative Jew; attending a trade school, where he studied forestry and then worked in the family lumber business; smuggling people through the woods after the German annexation of Austria; being caught, arrested, and tortured by the Gestapo in June 1939; being released from prison in August 1939 and resuming work with the underground; his second arrest in 1940, when he was taken to Dachau as a political prisoner and then transferred to Auschwitz, where he was assigned to a work detail with a group of five in the Birkenau camp; assisting in resistance activities in Auschwitz; going on a death march as the Soviets approached and then put on a train from which he escaped; fleeing from Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring in 1968; living in Vienna, Austria for three months; and how all his family now lives in Israel.

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral History

    Cornelia Schouten, born on January 21, 1920 in Huizen, Netherlands, describes growing up as one of five children of a Christian farming family in Oosterblokker, Netherlands; one of her brothers serve in the Dutch Army and fight against the Nazis in 1940; the arrest of her father and uncle during the German occupation of the Netherlands because they were striking in protest of the occupation; her family’s decision to harbor those who resisted the Nazis, including members of the resistance and men who were drafted for forced labor; sheltering the young Jewish girl, Lore Baer, for over two years; Lore’s parents emerging from hiding after the war and reclaiming their daughter; reuniting with Lore several times after the war; and eventually immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral History

    Drexel Sprecher, born on March 25, 1913 in Independence, WI, describes his family; his education at the University of Wisconsin, the London School of Economics, and at the Harvard School of Law; receiving a position on the Labor Board in 1938; his enlistment in the United States Army after the US declared war on Germany; being sent to London, England, where he was assigned to the Inspector General's office; later serving as a prosecutor of Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials; and prosecuting Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth.

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral History

    Bela Blau, born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia) in 1910, describes his family; getting married in 1930 and moving to Zilina, Slovakia; serving in the army for eighteen months and then working as a salesman representing a photo company; having a son in 1937; being dismissed from his job in 1938 because of his Jewish background; being arrested by two Hlinka Guards one day after Yom Kippur in 1942; his and his family’s deportation to Auschwitz, where he was placed in Block 10 and worked on building a bridge above the River Sota; doing writing jobs for an illiterate German Kapo because he spoke German; being assigned to the Kommando Kanada until May 1943 when he became a scribe and met his future second wife Magda; going on a death march in January 1945 from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Mauthausen, where he spent one month until he was transferred to Gusen, where he worked as an engineer fixing petrol tanks, gas tanks, and the wings of Messerschmitt planes; his transfer to Gunskirchen on May 1; and United States forces liberating him on May 7, 1945 in Gunskirchen.

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral History

    Magda Blau, born on August 19, 1916 in Michalovce, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), describes growing up in a Jewish family; becoming a kindergarten teacher; the German invasion and her deportation to Auschwitz, where she worked scrubbing floors for three months until she became an assistant to the block supervisor; being put in charge of the barrack for medical experiments in the autumn of 1942 and becoming the protégé of Dr. Eduard Wirths, the garrison physician; later working in an office and becoming the concentration camp commander of the camp for Hungarian Jews; getting a job counting potatoes in a kitchen and then a job as a concentration camp supervisor in a fabric production facility; going on a death march on January 18, 1945 to Malchow, where they were liberated by the Soviet Army; settling in Prague, Czech Republic for a short time and then immigrating to Israel; and finally immigrating to Australia in 1965.

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral History

    Barbara Lederman Rodbell, born in 1925 in Berlin, Germany, describes her childhood; moving to Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1933 with her family; becoming friends with Anne Frank and her family; the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940; her boyfriend getting her false papers through his underground contacts; the deportation of her mother, sister, and father to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz; working for the resistance and surviving using her false papers; helping other Jews find hiding places; joining a ballet company for two years after the war; and immigrating to the United States in November 1947.

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral History

    Jerry Slivka, born on July 11, 1915 in Western Ukraine, describes his memories of the Soviet takeover of Russia; moving to the neighboring town of Povorsk, Ukraine with his family; participating with the Zionist movement and joining a kibbutz; moving to Łódź, where he worked as a manager of a village store from 1939 to 1941; entering the Polish Army in 1939 but settling in Soviet-held territory after the takeover of Poland; joining the reserves of the Soviet Army; escaping a German attack and seeking refuge at Soviet military headquarters; being sent to a labor camp in Stalingrad (Volgograd), Russia and then to the railroads east of the Volga because the Soviets were suspicious of him; working in a coal mine near Moscow, Russia for one-and-a-half years before he was freed; his interment in Italy until he could return to Łódź in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral History

    Rochelle Blackman Slivka, born in 1922 in Vilnius, Lithuania, describes growing up in a Jewish family; the German occupation of Vilnius in June 1941 and moving into the ghetto with her family in October; her mother’s death in the ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1943 and being transported to the Kaiserwald concentration camp in Latvia and later to Stutthof; her father’s murder in an Estonian prison camp because he had served as a Jewish council member; her experiences in the camps until she had to go on a death march, during which the Soviet Army liberated her; beginning to make her way back to Vilnius with her sister but instead going to West Germany; separating from her sister while they both awaited permission to go to the United States; learning nursing during her stay at a German displaced persons camp; immigrating to the United States and arriving in Massachusetts on May 18, 1949; working as a nurse’s aide in an American hospital; and meeting and marrying a Holocaust survivor in the United States in 1952.

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral History

    Francis Akos, born on March 30, 1922 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his childhood; attending a music academy, from which he graduated in 1941; becoming the concertmaster for the Budapest Jewish Community Cultural Center orchestra; being drafted for forced labor into the Hungarian Army in 1943; getting captured with other Jews in Budapest while on leave from the army to get fresh clothes; being sent by train to Neuengamme on November 4, 1944; playing violin in the camp; his evacuation from Neuengamme on May 3, 1945 and being transported by the ship Cap Arcona, a passenger liner that was evacuating refugees from West Prussia; the British mistakenly attacking the Cap Arcona and three other prisoner ships, which resulted in eight thousand deaths; returning to Budapest after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1954.

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral History

    Beno Helmer, born in 1923 in Teplice, Czechoslovakia, describes his childhood and family; using his foreign language skills to land small movie roles before the war; attempting to settle in Hungary with his family before the war; his family’s deportation to Łódź in 1939 because they did not have immigration papers; arriving in the Łódź ghetto and staying there until he had to begin doing forced labor outside the ghetto in 1942; securing a job posing as a non-Jewish German and collecting information for the underground and becoming an expert at derailing trains; returning to the ghetto when his father became sick and remaining with his family until they were deported to Auschwitz after the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto; his deportations to Gross-Rosen, Krupp Bertha-Werk at Laskowitz-Meleschwitz, Buchenwald, and Ludwigslust; his liberation by American soldiers while in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp; attempting to get back to Poland and on the way joining a Polish forced labor group that was later incorporated into the Russian Army; spending time hunting for Nazi war criminals after the war; and living in Europe for several years until he immigrated to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral History

    Jerry von Halle, born on December 2, 1922 in Hamburg, Germany, describes his family and childhood; learning the Hitler salute in school and having to fly the Nazi flag over his house on holidays; moving to Amsterdam, Netherlands with his family in 1933 to get away from the Nazi party in Germany; the German invasion of the Netherlands; the Gestapo arresting and sending him to prison; being sent to Mauthausen with his brother and other boys but returning because he claimed to have tuberculosis; learning to be a shoemaker to avoid deportation; hiding in a house in the countryside with his family but returning to Amsterdam with his mother; going into hiding with his mother in the small apartment that belonged to one of his former teachers; his hider being caught and arrested four weeks before the end of the war and having to find a new place to hide; his liberation by Canadian troops; being arrested after the war with his mother because of their German passports but shortly being released when the authorities realized through what they had been; and immigrating to the United States in 1945.

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral History

    Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall, born in 1929 in Klyucharki, Czechoslovakia (Kliucharky, Ukraine), discusses her childhood; her father immigrating to the United States but being unable to arrange for her entire family to come over before the war began; no longer being able to attend school and experiencing increased tensions with her neighbors after the German annexation of Czechoslovakia; being forced to move into the ghetto with her family; being loaded onto a train after spending several weeks in the ghetto and arriving in Auschwitz two and a half days later; pretending that she was 15, so she would be old enough to work; her assignment to carry rocks between two places; being sent to the gas chambers during a selection but getting rescued just before she entered the gas chamber itself; working in an airplane factory with six hundred women; running into a forest with a friend and walking to a town that had been liberated by the Russian military; being given an apartment, food, clothing, and medical attention by the Russians; returning home to find her house destroyed; living in her grandmother’s house with other survivors and living off of the money her father sent her; learning that she had an uncle who had survived and sneaking across the border into non-communist Czechoslovakia to reunite with him; and immigrating to the United States in 1947 with her father.

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral History

    Ralph Codikow, born in 1930, in Kaunas, Lithuania, describes his family; the German occupation of Lithuania in 1941 and his brother shortly thereafter being shot at the Seventh Fort; his and his mother’s confinement to the Kaunas ghetto, where his mother saved them by pretending to be married to a male friend; his mother using her husband’s Lithuanian military service papers to forgo deportation to the Ninth Fort; being saved by his work in a ceramics factory when the children’s Aktions were decreasing the number of children in the ghetto; his and his mother’s deportation to Stutthof, where they were separated; his transfer to Landsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau in Germany, and then to Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau; contracting measles but being considered healthy enough to go on a forced march to Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Germany, in the winter; his liberation at Buchenwald in April 1945; moving to France after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral History

    Ruth Borsos, born in 1923 in Frankfurt, Germany, describes her family; moving to the Netherlands after Kristallnacht in 1938; her and her father obtaining permits to sail to the United States but not being able to do so when Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940; her deportation to Westerbork in 1943 and then to Bergen-Belsen in 1944; being interned with her father in a camp near the Swiss border when an exchange agreement with the Allies broke down; being chosen to be traded for German prisoners because of their foreign passports; their liberation from the internment camp by French forces on April 23, 1945; spending some time in a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration camp after the war; returning to the Netherlands in 1947 and receiving a visa to immigrate to the United States; and marrying another Holocaust survivor, whom she met in Washington, DC.

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral History

    Simone Marguerite Lipman (née Weil), born on April 4, 1920 in Ringendorf, France, describes her family; participating in a Jewish scouting organization, Les Eclaireurs Israélites de France, with her brother; moving to Strasbourg, France, a city with a vibrant Jewish community; graduating from high school in 1938 and moving to southern France to care for her elderly grandmother; relocating to Blâmont, France because of fears of Nazi invasion; training in early childhood education and working at a private school in Paris, France for a few months until she returned to take care of her mother who was extremely ill; the German invasion of France in May 1940; packing up her family’s belongings and driving towards southern France; arriving in Périgeaux, France, where her family had to register as Jews; going to the Rivesaltes camp in France to work for the Organization for Children’s Rescue, for which she distributed food, cared for the children, and tried to find ways to get them out of the camp; helping to rescue hundreds of children with the Catholic Church after the Nazis began to round up children in late 1942; working to reopen many children’s homes after the war ended; receiving a scholarship from America’s National Council of Jewish Women for her work during the war; moving to the United States in 1946 to attend Tulane University, where she received a master’s degree in social work; returning to Europe, where she trained employees of children’s homes to deal with the special needs of young Holocaust survivors; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral History

    Shony Alex Braun, born on July 14, 1930 in Transylvania, Romania (possibly Cristuru Secuiesc, Romania), describes his family and early childhood; learning to play the violin at age five; the occupation of his town by Hungarian forces in 1940 and by the Germans in 1944; being deported to Auschwitz in May 1944; his transfer into the Natzweiler (Struthof) camp system in France and then to Dachau, where American forces liberated him in April 1945; his immigration to the United States in 1950; and becoming a professional composer and violinist.

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral History

    Doriane Kurz, born in Vienna, Austria in March 1936, describes her family and early childhood; moving to Maastricht, Netherlands and then Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1939 for her father’s business; experiencing several Nazi air raids over Amsterdam; Dutch Jews losing their businesses in 1942; her parents being imprisoned for trying to escape from the country and then getting deported to Westerbork; her father’s transfer to Auschwitz on November 10, 1942 and never being heard from again; her mother’s return to Amsterdam to take care of her and her brother; going into hiding with two farmers in the countryside; her capture and deportation to Westerbork with her mother and brother at the end of 1943; their transfer to Bergen-Belsen; contracting typhus in March 1944; being liberated by English troops while on a train ride; going to a displaced persons camp in Maastricht in June 1945; her mother’s death in March 1945 due to cancer; and immigrating to the United States in July 1945 with her brother to live with her uncle.

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral History

    David Lieberman, born in Częstochowa, Poland on December 31, 1925, describes his family; living through pogroms as a young child; having to move into the town’s ghetto and perform forced labor after the German occupation; seeing many of his family members deported to camps; his deportation to Treblinka, where he escaped after eleven days by cutting a hole in the fence with wire cutters that he had stolen; running with two friends to the house of a nearby farmer who put the three onto a train headed back to Częstochowa; reuniting with one brother, his sister, and his mother upon his return; being taken to another concentration camp, where he worked in a munitions factory as a bullet maker; the camp’s liberation and traveling by train to Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, where he entered a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency camp; traveling to Italy with the intention of taking a boat to Palestine but being returned to Karlovy Vary by the Italian government; and soon immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral History

    Laura Margolis, born in Constantinople, Turkey in 1903, describes her family; immigrating to the United States in 1908 and settling in Ohio; becoming a social worker for the Jewish Welfare Society of Cleveland after graduating from college; joining the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and going to Havana, Cuba, where she was in charge of sheltering and feeding Jewish refugees; her transfer to Shanghai, China in May 1941, where she aided over 8,000 Jewish refugees; her capture by Japanese forces after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and going into an internment camp; faking an illness to be transported to an American hospital, where she knew a doctor; the doctor lying about her health and refusing to release her from the hospital; returning to the United States as part of a prisoner of war exchange in 1944; being sent to Barcelona, Spain in 1945 by the JDC to aid Jewish refugees; helping to organize a parcel-sending program to former prisoners of concentration camps after their liberation; moving to Israel in 1953; and returning to the United States in 1983 to retire.

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral History

    Paul Strassman, born on January 24, 1929 in Trenčín, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia), discusses his father’s work as an army officer for Austria-Hungary in World War I; the antisemitism his family experienced in the 1930s, which led them to consider escaping the country; his father divesting his share of his business; getting baptized, so they could avoid deportation; going into hiding in late August 1944; his father’s brief emergence from hiding and getting caught by the Gestapo, who sent him to Sachsenhausen; joining the Jegorov Brigade, a partisan group, in September 1944 and remaining in it until April 1945; joining the Czech Army in April 1945 as a noncommissioned officer and going to his station in Bratislava, Slovakia until the end of the war; remaining in Czechoslovakia but leaving just before the Communists took power in 1948; living briefly in Paris, France and London, England before immigrating to the United States in October 1948; and discovering that he was the sole survivor of his family.

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral History

    Ernest James, born in 1920 in Ord, NE, describes his family; joining the California National Guard in 1940; holding the position of sergeant and being called into active service in 1941; being stationed along the coast of San Francisco, CA and then going on to serve as platoon leader and company commander of the 238th Engineer Combat Battalion in the later years of the war; his unit’s attachment to the 1st Army and the 7th Corps; landing in Europe, where they swept through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany; reaching Nordhausen in April 1945 and finding workers from a V-2 missile and arms plant; ordering the German civilians to begin burying the large number of people who had already died; and assisting in the guarding of a nearby camp containing approximately 80,000-100,000 military prisoners of war.

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral History

    Chaim Engel, born in January 1916, describes growing up in Łódź, Poland; his experiences with feeling different as a Jew growing up; fighting in the Polish Army during the war and getting captured as a prisoner of war; being released and traveling to Lublin to work as a farmhand; his father’s and step-mother’s transport to Sobibór in June 1942; going to Izbica Lubelska with a friend to join a partisan unit; being caught and sent on a transport in September 1942 with about eight hundred people to Sobibór, where he worked sorting the clothes of people who had come into the camp; getting beaten for stealing pants on a couple of occasions; meeting his future wife Selma when they were both assigned to sort clothes; participating in the Sobibór uprising and escaping with Selma to a farm where they stayed until June 1944; his liberation by Russian troops and going to Parczew, Poland, where he and Selma had a child and started to re-organize their lives; moving to Holland, where they stayed until 1951 when they immigrated to Israel; and his and Selma’s immigration to the United States in 1957.

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral History

    Selma Engel (née Wynberg), born in Groningen, Netherlands in 1922, describes her family and childhood; moving to Zwolle, Netherlands when she was seven years old; her family’s ownership of a kosher hotel; her father dying of a heart attack in 1941; the German invasion of the Netherlands and the confiscation of her family’s hotel; moving with her mother into the home of another Jewish family; receiving help from a Catholic priest in 1942 to hide in a non-Jewish family’s home; never seeing her mother and brothers again; hiding in a nurse’s home in Utrecht, Netherlands for a few months until she moved into another family’s house, where the police soon discovered her; being sent to an Amsterdam prison for three months; her deportation in 1943 to the transit camp in Vught, Netherlands, from which she went to Westerbork, where she worked in the laundry room; her transfer to Sobibór, where she had to sort clothes and clean the woods and railroads; contracting typhus; meeting Chaim, her future husband, when they had to dance in front of the Germans; escaping with Chaim from Sobibór during the uprising and hiding in the woods for several weeks; staying with a farmer in exchange for money for nine months; the farmer taking her and Chaim to Chełm, Poland in 1944; their liberation in July 1944; immigrating to Israel in 1951; and immigrating to the United States in 1957.

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral History

    Morris Engelson, born in 1935 in Paberze, Lithuania, describes his family; his father’s work in the grain business; the Soviet invasion in 1939; the German invasion in 1941 and forcing the Jews of Paberze into a ghetto; dressing up as a peasant woman with his mother to escape the ghetto that was soon liquidated by the Einsatzgruppen in September 1941; moving around and hiding in different farms with his mother; being smuggled to the Lithuanian-Polish border and ending up in another ghetto; reuniting with his father in April 1943 and hiding in a barn and then a farmer’s attic; moving westward towards the end of the war and arriving in the American zone in Germany; going to a Berlin displaced persons camp and later to the Gobrasa displaced persons camp in Bavaria after the war; and immigrating to the United States after four years.

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral History

    Lonia Mosak, born on July 20, 1922 in Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki, Poland, describes her family; moving to Ciechanów, Poland when she was young; attending a separate Jewish school in Poland and serving in a Zionist youth group; completing her school education in 1936; becoming seriously ill with typhus after the German invasion of Poland in 1939 but recovering even though Jewish physicians could not use medicine to contain the epidemic; her internment in Neustadt, a labor camp in Germany; being split up from her family in 1942 and transported to Auschwitz, where she remained until January 18, 1945 doing forced labor; being forced on a death march to Gross-Rosen and then to Ravensbrück, where she was liberated by the Soviet Army on April 30, 1945; returning to Ciechanów after her liberation; residing for short periods in Łódź and Bialystok to await the return of her last brother from Russia; marrying in Austria after the war; immigrating to a Polish-Jewish neighborhood of Chicago, IL in 1946; and having two children and eventually bringing her brother to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral History

    Agnes Grossman Aranyi, born on May 2, 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her family and childhood; her father being drafted into forced labor camps from 1939 until 1942 when he was finally deported; attending Jewish school until 1942 when the war began in Hungary; the restrictions on Jewish life in Budapest; being warned by a friend to disappear because he knew that the round-ups were to begin soon; meeting a woman who worked for the underground and who took them to live as Christians in a Swedish house set up by Raoul Wallenberg; the Germans invading their home and forcing them into a ghetto; the Russians arriving to liberate the Budapest ghetto; living under Russian oppression until 1956, when she escaped to Austria with her fiancé during the Hungarian Revolution; and immigrating to North Carolina shortly thereafter.

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral History

    David Bergman, born on May 3, 1931 in Beckov, Czechoslovakia (present day Velykyĭ Bychkiv, Ukraine), describes his family and childhood; the German occupation of his town, previously annexed by Hungary, in 1944; his deportation to Auschwitz in late 1944; being transferred with his father to Płaszow, Gross-Rosen, and then Reichenbach an der Fils; being among three of 150 people in a cattle car who survived a transport to Dachau; being placed on a train to Innsbruck, Austria three days before the Americans arrived in Dachau; his liberation while on a death march from Innsbruck toward the front line of combat between United States and German troops; going into in an American hospital and rehabilitating; traveling to his old family home and finding it occupied by a Russian family; discovering that everyone in his family except him had perished; immigrating to the United States, where he settled in Cleveland, Ohio; and joining the American military to fight in the Korean War.

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral History

    Lila Lam Nawakowska, born on November 24, 1924 in Stanislawów, Poland (Stanislav, Ukraine), describes growing up in a large family; the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the Soviet occupation of Stanislav until June 1941, when the Soviets withdrew, and the Germans entered and constructed a ghetto; her father becoming the chairperson of the ghetto’s Judenrat because he was such an influential businessman in their community; remaining in the ghetto with her family until December 1942, when they were able to obtain falsified Aryan papers and escape on the eve of the ghetto's liquidation in January 1943; renting an apartment in Warsaw, Poland and remaining there until the Warsaw uprising, when she was transported to Mauthausen; briefly spending time doing forced labor in Steyr, a sub-camp of Mauthausen and in Znojmo, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); her liberation by Soviet soldiers in May 1945; and reuniting with her mother and future husband shortly after the end of the war.

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral History

    Yaffa Rosenthal, born in Solotvyno, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine) on October 7, 1926, describes her family and childhood; her experiences with antisemitism as a child; the Ukrainians taking over her town in 1938 and learning in a different language in school; her father losing his job and having to work in mines and on a cattle farm to support his family; receiving a notice that her family would be taken away in the early summer of 1941; her deportation to Yasinya (IAsinia), Ukraine and then being marched toward Galicia, Poland; escaping from the Germans and going to live with her uncle in Oradea, Romania and then with her sister in Budapest, Hungary; having a somewhat normal life until the German occupation of Hungary in 1944; hiding in the Budapest ghetto until January 1945 when she was liberated by Russian troops; trying to survive after the war and receiving help from the Swedish Red Cross; reuniting with her sister in Debrecen, Hungary and then returning with her to Budapest; participating in the Budapest Zionist organization and immigrating to Israel in 1948; getting married to an American man in 1959; and immigrating to the United States to settle in New York, NY.

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral History

    Eve Wagszul Rich, born in Kovel', Ukraine, describes her family and childhood; the German invasion and having to move into the ghetto; the Germans bursting into her home one night and killing her father in front of her; immediately running away into the forest and going to nearby villages, where she met peasants who gave her some food; going into hiding with a group of Carmelite Nuns; the Germans discovering her and sending her to Majdanek; escaping with a friend during a transport and going to Bavaria to work on a farm; her liberation by American forces; and immigrating to New York to live with her grandmother’s sister.

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral History

    Magda Mezei Lapidus, born on July 18, 1923 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her family and childhood; attending the Commercial Academy of Budapest for two years; first realizing the danger posed by the Nazis when they invaded Austria in 1938; seeing several young Hungarian men shipped out to labor camps starting in 1941; her brother being taken away to a labor camp in 1943; the German invasion of Hungary on March 19, 1944; being forced into the Budapest ghetto and living in the Star of David House; her father returning to live with them in June 1944; being forced on a march with her father to the outskirts of Budapest, at which point she was separated from her father and never saw him again; hiding in a bush on her march and ripping her identifying star off and returning to Budapest to reunite with her mother and brother; going to the Spanish Legation near the ghetto and receiving a safety pass to move into a house protected from German invasion; remaining in the house until January 18, 1945, when the Russians liberated Budapest; and discovering the fate of her father.

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral History

    Avraham Ronai, born on September 14, 1932 in Budapest, Hungary, describes growing up in a religious family; attending a secular public school and a Jewish school at night in Budapest; not experiencing many difficulties under the pro-Nazi Hungarian regime; the German invasion of Budapest in March 1944 but not really suffering until the Nazis took full control over Hungary in October 1944; the Nazis rounding up Jews into ghettos and deporting them; seeking help at the Spanish Embassy in Budapest and receiving a space in a Spanish safe-house due to the efforts of Giorgio Perlasca; remaining in the safe-house until the Soviets liberated Budapest in 1945; and immigrating to Israel in 1949 because of the oppressive Hungarian Communist regime.

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral History

    Eva Konigsberg Lang, born on April 1925 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her childhood and family; the Jewish community losing several of its rights when the war began; her relatives arriving from Czechoslovakia to live with her; being forbidden to attend school after March 1944; receiving a protective pass to get food; hearing that the wife of any man in forced labor would not be deported and getting married in 1944; hiding in a Spanish protective house on St. Paul Street and getting food supplies provided by the Jewish Council; the German occupation of Budapest; forging a telegram to prove that they were under Spanish protection and to save themselves from the Arrow Cross; and reflecting on how certain Spanish diplomats saved her life during the war.

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral History

    Cornelius Loen, born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) on May 2, 1922, describes growing up with a Jewish father and Gentile mother; the German invasion of his town on January 23, 1942 and German troops killing two of his uncles; escaping with his family to Budapest, Hungary, where they lived for ten months; his deportation to a forced labor camp in Hungary, where he remained until 1944; escaping to a nearby barn, where he hid for three days, during the liquidation of the camp; Russian troops liberating him while he hid in this barn; walking to a nearby displaced persons camp, where he met his future wife Masha; taking a Russian transport to Budapest and reuniting with his parents; discovering that his father had survived a concentration camp and his mother had helped to hide and save many Jewish people after her family was taken away; and immigrating to Los Angeles, CA in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral History

    Thomas Blatt, born in 1927 in Izbica Lubelska, Poland, describes growing up in an Orthodox family; the establishment of a ghetto run by the Germans after the war began in September 1939; working in a garage, which protected him from early ghetto roundups; trying to escape to Hungary with false papers in 1942 but getting caught; his and his family’s deportation to Sobibór, where his family was gassed immediately; the Germans choosing him as a laborer because of his mechanical skills; participating in and escaping during the Sobibór uprising on October 14, 1943 by escaping through the wire fences and avoiding the land mines; going into hiding with a friend on several farms; hiding in a stable and then in an abandoned brick factory; working as a courier for the Polish underground; and immigrating to the United States in 1959.

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral History

    Anita Magnus Frank, born on January 29, 1936 in Emmen, Netherlands, describes her family; her move to Breda, Netherlands, where her family was living when the war broke out; the German invasion of 1940 and being told to leave because the Germans were going to bomb the town; walking thirty kilometers to a farm, where they stayed for five days; returning to Breda and experiencing increased persecution; obtaining false passports and assuming Dutch names to shield their Jewish identities in 1942 (Verified from other sources, the name of the individual who assisted Anita and her family was Govardus Pinxteren, who was later honored as Righteous Among the Nations); going into hiding first in a non-Jewish neighbor's home and then in a Quaker family’s home in Bilthoven, Netherlands; living as “normal” Dutch schoolchildren except having to hide their Jewish identities and constantly being in fear; leaving their hiding place in August 1944 because the Quaker family was too scared to keep them; returning to Limburg with her parents; the liberation of Limburg in September 1944; returning to Breda in April 1945 and living in an uninhabitable, bombed house for six months until they could move into a bigger and better house in the same town; and immigrating to the United States on December 7, 1952 because antisemitism was still a problem after the war.

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral History

    Guta Blass Weintraub, born on January 22, 1924 in Łódź, Poland, describes her childhood and family; her experiences with antisemitism in her youth; attending a private, Jewish, all-girls high school until the German invasion in September 1939; moving from Łódź to Wierzbnik-Starachowice in December 1939 because of fears about what the Germans had planned; the formation of a ghetto and having to share a home with at least one other family; meeting her future husband when he came to her home in the ghetto asking for her father to make him a suit with special pockets; being rounded up in the ghetto’s marketplace and sent to labor camps; managing to smuggle out some pictures with her as she, her mother, and her father were taken to a woodworking camp; surviving several shootings and experiencing starvation; her deportation to Auschwitz in 1942 and staying there until 1944, when she was transferred to Ravensbrück; her liberation by the Swedish Red Cross; and traveling to Sweden to recover.

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral History

    Henry Schmelzer, born in March 1924 in Vienna, Austria, describes growing up as the youngest of four children in a middle-class family; graduating from a Jewish high school in 1938 shortly before it closed; his brothers fleeing, while he and the rest of his family endured Nazi raids on their home until they were evicted; his father losing his business and having severe depression; escaping to England on December 18, 1938 and finding refuge at a children's camp; remaining in England throughout the war and living with a group of young Zionists; enlisting in the British Army in 1943; being sent to a mountain unit, the 52nd Division; receiving his degree at the London School of Economics; spending 18 years in Israel; and immigrating to the United States in 1969.

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral History

    Helen Liebowitz Goldkind, born in Volosyanka, Czechoslovakia (Ukraine) on July 9, 1928, describes her childhood and family; the Hungarian occupation of Czechoslovakia and going into a ghetto in Uzhgorod, Ukraine; maintaining religious traditions in the ghetto; the Germans taking over the ghetto and deporting her and her family to Auschwitz; her transport to another camp and hearing bombs going off during the train ride; arriving in a German camp and working in a munitions factory; going on a truck with two hundred other girls to Bergen-Belsen, where English troops eventually liberated her; the Swedish Red Cross offering to take care of her and others in Sweden; discovering that only one of her sisters survived the war and had immigrated to the United States; and following her sister to the United States, where she settled in New York, NY and got married.

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral History

    Johanne Eva Liebmann (née Hirsch), born in 1924 in Karlsruhe, Germany, describes her family and childhood; her family’s deportation to the Gurs camp in southern France in October 1940; being rescued by the Children's Aid Society in September 1941 and hiding in a children’s home in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France until 1943, when she obtained false papers and crossed into Switzerland; discovering that her mother had died in Auschwitz; getting married in Geneva, Switzerland in 1945 and having a daughter in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral History

    Max Liebmann, born on September 3, 1921 in Mannheim, Germany, describes his family and childhood; attending school until December 1937, when he had to quit because of the antisemitism he was experiencing; his memories of Kristallnacht; his father travelling to Greece and Italy to do business since he could no longer do it in Germany; he and his mother being called into a Wehrmacht office shortly after the war began in September 1939; being made to do forced labor harvesting fields in East Germany; being deported with his mother to the Gurs concentration camp in France; playing the cello as part of several concerts given at Gurs; meeting his future wife in the camp through a connection his mother made; managing inventories for French camp officials; his transfer to the Talluyers camp in July 1942; escaping to Le Chambon, France to reunite with his girlfriend for a short period until they both had to find hiding places; finding a guide to take him through France and into Switzerland; arriving in Ouchy, Switzerland and receiving work papers on December 22, 1942; reuniting with his girlfriend in Switzerland on February 28, 1943 and marrying her in Geneva on April, 14, 1945; having a daughter in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral History

    Giorgio Perlasca, born on January 31, 1910 in Como, Italy, describes growing up with a father who worked for the Italian government in Padua; fighting in the Spanish Civil War and later taking a position in an Italian trade firm; working around Eastern Europe after Italy entered World War II in 1940; maintaining an official position with the Italian Trade Commission and living in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1941 and 1942; continuing to work for the Italian government until the fall of Admiral Miklos Horthy in 1944; his internment by the Hungarian government from April to October 1944 after the Germans took control of Hungary; escaping his internment with falsified papers provided by a member of the Swiss Diplomatic Corps; adopting a Spanish nationality because of his veteran status from the Spanish Civil War; posing as the Spanish Charge d'Affaires after the flight of the appointed Charge d'Affaires for Spain in December 1944; helping to establish of several safe-houses in Budapest to shelter Jews under Spanish protection; coordinating his efforts with representatives of other neutral nations, including Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden, and the representatives of the Vatican, Portugal, and Switzerland, to shelter and save Jews from deportation; and returning to Italy to start a family in February 1945.

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral History

    David J. Selznick, born in Anykščiai, Lithuania in 1912, describes growing up as the youngest child in a large family; going to Ukmergė, Lithuania to study at a yeshiva in order to become a rabbi; his father’s death shortly before his twelfth birthday and becoming the legal master of his father's estate; deciding to sell off his family's farm and livestock and move to Kaunas, Lithuania; attending a Yiddish night school in Kaunas and working during the day as a retailer of office supplies; his experiences with antisemitism, which hurt his business; selling his business to two Christians but remaining as a silent partner; receiving a visa to serve as a diplomatic envoy to New York because of his business connections but instead deciding to leave for Portugal; returning to Kaunas in 1936 because he was worried about his mother and sisters; his deportation to the Kaunas ghetto in 1941; performing forced labor until late 1944 because he had worked for the ghetto Kommandant; smuggling food to the Jewish prisoners in the ghetto; escaping during the liquidation of the Kaunas ghetto in July 1944 and fleeing into the countryside, where he hid with some other Jews; his liberation by the Soviet Army; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral History

    Elisabeth Model (née Dittmann), born in Bayreuth, Germany in 1897, describes her family; getting married in 1922 and moving to Amsterdam, where she worked as a sculptor; returning to Germany after Kristallnacht to help her mother emigrate; helping her mother sneak into the Netherlands with the help of a Dutch underground organization; her husband being imprisoned for one month by the Nazis after being falsely accused of smuggling money into the Netherlands; bribing a woman at the Spanish Consulate to give her and her husband exit visas in 1941; traveling to Madrid, Spain; and eventually arriving in to New York, NY in 1942.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral History

    Joseph Levine, born in Molodezhnyi, Russia on July 20, 1907, describes the difficulties his family faced in World War I; his family’s immigration to San Francisco, CA on February 12, 1917 and then settling in New Haven, CT; attending Franklin and Marshall College and then the graduate school for Jewish social work; working with the Jewish Board of Guardians for six years until 1941; starting to work as a parole officer in 1941; joining the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in 1945 as a social worker; going to Schwandorf, Germany, where he worked with many Polish Jews; his transfer to Dachau in October of 1945, where he also worked closely with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration; bearing witness to the war crime trials at Nuremberg; and returning to the United States, where he worked as the executive secretary of the Indiana Jewish Historical Society.

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral History

    Eugenia Blau Szamosi, born in Transylvania in 1914, describes her family, childhood, and growing up in Budapest, Hungary; her experiences with antisemitism in Hungary; marrying in November 1941 and having a son the following year and a girl the next; her husband avoiding forced labor by spending time in a mental hospital; having to move into the Jewish section of the town and wear the yellow star after the German invasion of Hungary; escaping from the Budapest ghetto and looking for a flat in town; pretending to be a Transylvanian refugee because she had Aryan looks; returning to the ghetto to work with her husband in a children’s home and await deportation; getting the supplies to make shutzpasses for people; getting Spanish passports for her and her husband, which helped to save them from deportation; her family’s liberation and her husband’s work for the International Red Cross after the war; and immigrating to Israel in June 1949.

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral History

    Irene Dynkiewicz Silver, born in January 1933 in Łódź, Poland, describes her family and the Jewish community in her town before the war; her family’s move to Warsaw just as the German bombardment of Warsaw began; the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto wall; learning how to read and write from one of her cousins; wearing a kerchief and putting on lipstick to look older and avoid deportation during ghetto-round ups; going into hiding in January 1943 with a woman who had managed to attain a Christian identity for her; not being able to leave the home in which she hid and reading to pass her time; attending school for the first time after the war; traveling to London with several other children to attend a boarding school established by a rabbi; and immigrating to Brooklyn, NY in January 1950 to live with her aunt and uncle.

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral History

    Alice Lok Cahana, born on February 7, 1929 in Sárvár, Hungary, discusses her childhood; her relationships with her parents, grandfather, and siblings; her experiences in the ghetto in Sárvár, which was situated in a brick factory; her work with children in the ghetto; her deportation by train to Auschwitz; her experiences in "C Lager" of Auschwitz; her memories of selections by Dr. Josef Mengele; her successful rescue of her sister Edith from the infirmary in Auschwitz; her survival of the Auschwitz gas chamber because of a malfunction in the chamber; her memories of camp guard Irma Grese; her transfer from Auschwitz to the Guben concentration camp where she worked in an ammunition factory; her participation in a death march with a group from Guben; her escape and subsequent return to the death march group; her separation from her sister in Bergen-Belsen; her evacuation from Bergen-Belsen and transport to a hospital in Sweden; her reunion with her father in Hungary; her illegal immigration to Israel by boat; her return to Sweden with her husband Moshe Cahana; the Cahana family's move to the United States; and her thoughts on the rescue efforts of Raoul Wallenberg in Hungary.

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral History

    Eva Brust Cooper, born in 1934 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses her childhood; living on the Pest side of the Danube River; her memories of the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944; the various types of persecution experienced by the Jews in Budapest including the wearing of yellow Stars of David; her father receiving papers from Raoul Wallenberg to avoid deportation; the family's time in hiding in various locations around Budapest; her and her mother's attempts to appear Catholic by going to church, learning the Catechism, and acquiring false identification papers; her family's return to Budapest at the end of World War II; her father's participation in negotiations with Adolf Eichmann in hopes of reducing the number of Hungarian Jews to be deported; her family's immigration to the United States and their new life in New York City; and her activities with various Holocaust survivor groups.

    Oral history interview with Jacob Vogel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral History

    Frieda Belinfante, born in 1904 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, describes her family; being raised without a religion because her father was Jewish and her mother was Gentile; the death of her sister in 1915 after an appendectomy and the divorce of her parents soon after; the death of her father in 1923 from natural causes; not being surprised by the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands; getting married in 1931 and divorcing in 1936; becoming the first female conductor of a professional orchestra in Amsterdam; participating in the cultural commission of Amsterdam and receiving instructions from the Nazis about what artists should or should not do; making false identification cards to help save people; discovering her homosexuality but trying to keep it a secret during the war; living disguised as a man for three months; taking on a new female identity and fleeing to Switzerland; participating in several activities of sabotage with other gay and lesbian refugees; returning to Amsterdam after the war and discovering the fates of the members of the resistance group in which she participated; immigrating to the United States in 1947 for a change of scenery in her work; participating in a string of concerts in the US; and her life in America.

    Oral history interview with Philip Vock

    Oral History

    Philip Vock, born in 1929 in Paris, France, discusses his family background and childhood; the German invasion of France in 1940; the confiscation of the family business by the Germans; antisemitism that he encountered in the media and in personal contacts; leaving the occupied zone of France in 1941 and finding refuge in a town on the Spanish border; the German occupation of their town in November 1942; fleeing to Nice, France, which was occupied by the Italians; being denounced to and arrested by the Gestapo as they were preparing to move to another town; being transported to Drancy concentration camp in 1943; life in Drancy and the possibility of escape from the camp; his deportation to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944; the intake process at Auschwitz and then his outside work detail; the black market within Auschwitz; a death march in January 1945 as the Allies were approaching the camp; life in Buchenwald and liberation; returning to Paris in April 1945; the return of his mother and uncle; and nightmares that he had after liberation.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Gatenio

    Oral History

    Joseph Gatenio, born in 1929 in Thessalonike, Greece, discusses his childhood; the German occupation of Thessalonike in 1940; his deportation from Greece with his family in 1943; the week-long journey to Birkenau; selections at Birkenau; the deaths of family members; his participation in the camp orchestra; how orchestra members helped him survive; being forced to leave the orchestra; the brutality of the SS and Kapos; being transferred from Birkenau to Henkel, then Sachsenhausen, Ohrdruf, Sachsenhausen again, Neubrandenburg, Ravensbrück, and finally Ludwigslust; the appalling conditions in the camps; staying in Ludwigslust until May 1 when they were transported to another camp; his liberation by American soldiers the next day; joining the Russian liberators and wandering throughout Europe for a few months; returning to Thessalonike in December 1945; and the long-term effects of his experiences during the Holocaust on his well-being.

    Oral history interview with Mariette Moscovici

    Oral History

    Mariette Moscovici, born on January 24, 1916 in Iasi, Romania, discusses her family; her father, Hani Garfiender, who was a merchant and owned a store for travel items; her mother, Cecile Garfiender, who was a housewife; attending Alexandru Labrian elementary school; attending Institute Notre Dame for high school; living in Iasi on Cuza Voda street and later on Ice Bratianu street; Rumania entering the war on June 22, 1941; German soldiers entering on the night of June 29, 1941 and taking away all the Jewish men from the shelter; going to the Jewish community the next morning to ask about the fate of the Jewish men and not receiving an answer; stopping at a friend’s house on the way home to warn the men in the family about the arrest of the Jewish men; being stopped on the way home and directed into a convoy; finding her mother and sister in the convoy; being taken to the police headquarters; more Jews arriving at the headquarters wearing pajamas and night gowns because they were taken without anytime to get dressed; the women and girls being released while the men and boys over the age 13 were detained; the chaos of the scene; her father arriving at the shelter in the afternoon; the numerous false alarms to concentrate the population in shelters; the German soldiers enter the shelter around 5pm and demanding their jewelry and money; giving one of the soldiers her money and being instructed by the soldier to go home and not enter the shelters; leaving her aunt’s house with her family the next morning (June 30, 1941) and going home; seeing posters on wall that state the “Communist Jews” of Iasi have been arrested and killed and the rest of the population can continue their lives; staying home and not knowing what happened to other people; going to a market with her cousin dressed like peasants and seeing dead bodies on the street; Jews not being allowed to travel; and the propaganda in the news.

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral History

    Henry van den Boogard, born in Holland in 1915, discusses his childhood in Tilburg, Netherlands; his early education and seminary days; his ordination to the priesthood and first mass in 1942; his memories of Jews being helped by non-Jews in the Netherlands; his personal activities with the resistance movement in southern Netherlands such as making false identification papers for various persons, smuggling children into the Netherlands for hiding, and finding hiding places in homes for Jews and other persons; his dealings with the black market in the Netherlands in order to clothe and feed people in hiding; his reflections on antisemitism in the Netherlands; the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940; the feelings of native Hollanders toward the "Dutch Nazis"; and his life after World War II in the United States where he worked to integrate Catholic churches in Virginia.

    Oral history interview with Jack Moss

    Oral History

    Jack Moss (né Jakuv Mozelsio), born in 1924 in Łódź, Poland, discusses his family background; his encounters with Polish antisemitism; his family's feelings about the possibility of a German occupation; the restrictions imposed on Jews by the Germans; the lucrative business that the Germans brought to his father's tannery; odd jobs that he did at the request of the Germans, including helping to tear down a statue of Tadeusz Kościuszko in Plac Wolności; a German friend who agreed to be a stand-in owner of the tannery, so it would not be confiscated; his uncle, aunt, and other family members fleeing to Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Poland for safety while he and his parents stayed in Łódź; the return of his sister and cousin from Tomaszów Mazowiecki; and how the rest of his family in Tomaszów Mazowiecki perished while he and the others who remained in Łódź were saved.

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral History

    Boleslaw Dytlow, born in 1932 in Pruszków, Poland, describes growing up in a Romani family; the German occupation in September 1939; moving to Warsaw, Poland with his family and earning money there as a musician; being captured on the streets in Warsaw in late 1942 and delivered into the Warsaw ghetto; meeting other Romanies in the ghetto and forming a plan to escape; escaping to the Aryan side in the spring of 1943; leaving Warsaw and only traveling by night; being ambushed by German soldiers on the outskirts of Kielce, Poland; successfully overpowering the Germans and escaping back to Warsaw; and remaining hidden outside of Warsaw until the end of the war.

    Oral history interview with Mel London

    Oral History

    Mel London, born in 1923, discusses growing up in the Bronx, NY with immigrant parents; his awareness of the political situation in Europe before World War II; his concern for family in Europe; his identification with being Jewish; enlisting in the United States Army signal corps in May 1943; going to Officer Candidate School; antisemitism he encountered in the army and prejudice because of his friendships with black soldiers; seeing the aftermath of World War II in Europe; his knowledge of the Nuremberg war crime trials; becoming a documentary filmmaker; the request to interview Albert Speer after his book "Inside the Third Reich" was published in 1970; preparing for the interview; different attitudes towards Speer among Germans of different generations; and his perceptions of Speer.

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral History

    Henry Cohen, born in 1922 in New York City, NY, describes growing up in a family of Jewish immigrants; receiving a master’s degree in city planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology; enlisting in the United States Army in 1944 and fighting with the infantry during the German campaign; his appointment as the director of the Föhrenwald displaced persons camp in Germany in January of 1946; leading the camp until July 1946; and returning to the United States to teach at the City College of New York.

    Oral history interview with Gisela Feldman

    Oral History

    Gisela Feldman, born in 1923, discusses her first encounters with antisemitism in Berlin, Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933 and her political awareness at that time; her father's deportation to Poland in 1938 because he was a Polish citizen; the confiscation of her family's apartment; being barred from going to school; her mother obtaining visas to Cuba and booking passage on the SS St. Louis; her father not being able to leave Poland in time to join them on the SS St. Louis; departing with her mother and sister from Germany in 1939; the atmosphere on board the ship; their arrival in Cuba and the announcement that their visas were no longer valid; the desperation of some passengers on board; sailing near the coast of the United States during the return journey to Europe; her family being selected to disembark in England; her job as a domestic in a convalescent home for Jewish refugees in Broadstairs and then as a nanny for a family with two children in London; her involvement in war work, making uniforms and gunpowder bags; meeting and marrying her husband in London in 1943; her mother's attempts to get permission for her father to emigrate from Poland; and her life in England after the war.

    Oral history interview with Bert Fleming and Irene Fleming

    Oral History

    Bert Fleming and Irene Fleming describe how Bert grew up in Warsaw and Łódź; Bert’s family’s deportation to Hannover, Germany before Kristallnacht; Bert’s deportation from Hannover in 1938, receiving aid from the Joint Distribution Committee, and going through the camps; Irene witnessing people being smuggled from her ghetto and fleeing to Siberia; Irene holding on to her violin through her time in the camps; their experiences with Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski and his relationship with the Nazis in the Łódź ghetto; Bert having to shave his head and watch people steal food while in the camps; Bert’s work in several different factories and the transport of all of the goods he produced to Germany; and their immigration to New York and life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral History

    Norman Belfer, born on September 27, 1922 in Wodzislaw, Poland, describes growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family; the German invasion of Wodzislaw in 1939 and hiding in his family’s factory warehouse until they were discovered; the confiscation of his father’s feather and down business; being forced to clean roads around the town with other youth; going to work for a nearby German company while the rest of his family went into hiding in an underground shelter outside of Wodzislaw; his family’s capture and transfer into the Kraków ghetto; returning home, where he retrieved some of the money his family had buried before they had left; hiding for several weeks in his father’s former factory; joining his family in the Kraków ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto on March 13, 1943; his family’s transfer to Płaszów, where an SS guard shot his father, and his mother and sisters were sent elsewhere; being transferred with his brother to Mauthausen, where they volunteered as carpenters until they were sent to Melk; digging tunnels and moving machinery for several months at Melk with his brother; going on a barge to Linz and then going on a death march to Ebensee; his liberation by American forces on May 5, 1945; walking to Salzburg with his brother but deciding to go to Palestine through Italy; and remaining and working in Italy until he immigrated to the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral History

    Carola Stern Steinhardt, born on March 8, 1925 in Nieder Ohmen, Germany, describes losing her non-Jewish friends after 1933; her experiences during Kristallnacht; attending a boarding school in Bad Nauheim until the Gestapo stormed it and harassed students; her father’s deportation to Buchenwald; her mother’s and sister’s arrival in Bad Nauheim; going to Berlin to do hard labor at an airplane factory until her deportation to Auschwitz in March 1943; her selection to be a camp “beautician,” which involved cutting the hair off of incoming prisoners; reuniting with her sister in August 1944 and learning that her parents had died; going on a march to Ravensbrück in January 1945; staying in Ravensbrück for four weeks until having to march to Malchow, where she worked in the camp kitchen; her liberation by American forces in May 1945; her internment in the Kammer displaced persons camp in Austria; and immigrating to the United States in July 1946 on an army transport.

    Oral history interview with Haim Shmueli

    Oral History

    Haim Shmueli (né Heinz Ruman Shmoll), born in 1935 in was born in 1935 in Usti nad Labem, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes his family and childhood; his mother’s conversion to Judaism, which she renounced when Hitler came to power; moving to Germany in 1938; his father’s involvement in the underground movement; his deportation to Theresienstadt and his memories of the children’s part of the camp; participating in the propaganda movie filmed in Theresienstadt; his liberation from Theresienstadt in 1945; reuniting with his father after the war; and immigrating to Israel with his father in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Itka Zygmuntowicz

    Oral History

    Itka Zygmuntowicz, born April 15, 1926 in Poland (possibly Ciechanów), discusses her family and childhood in Poland before World War II; her experiences with antisemitism before the war; relations between her family and Gentiles in her hometown; her knowledge of politics as a child and involvement in the Zionist movement; the German occupation of her hometown and the restrictions that the Germans imposed on the Jewish population; the confiscation of her family's valuables; a beating that she and her mother suffered at the hands of the Gestapo for not revealing information; her family's deportation to the ghetto in Nové Město in 1941; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942 and the mass deportation to Auschwitz; her arrival at Auschwitz and her separation from her parents and younger siblings who perished in the camp; finding a friend named Binna in the camp; her forms of spiritual, mental, and physical resistance as a prisoner; her contact with the guards in the camp; her experience sorting the belongings of dead prisoners in the "Kanada" warehouse; a death march in January 1945 to Ravensbrück concentration camp and then a transport to Malchow concentration camp; her liberation during Passover in 1945; recuperating at a hospital in Sweden after the war through the help of the Swedish Red Cross; living in a displaced persons camp in Sweden; leaving the camp with two friends and getting a job; meeting and marrying her husband and the birth of her son in 1948; and her immigration to the United States in 1953.

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Granirer Flor

    Oral History

    Gertrude Granirer Flor, born in 1921 in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, discusses her childhood; the lack of antisemitism she encountered growing up; the Soviet occupation in 1940 and the confiscation of Jewish property; Soviet propaganda and the pressure to inform on others; the arrest and execution of her step-father; involuntary deportations by the Soviets to Siberia, including the deportation of her mother; escaping from a deportation and finding refuge at the conservatory of the Universitatea din Cernauți; meeting and marrying her husband, Sam; the German occupation of Chernivtsi; German restrictions and the establishment of the ghetto in Chernivtsi; the help that the mayor of Chernivtsi extended to the Jewish population; deportation by train to a stone quarry where she and her husband stayed for several weeks; her husband telling the Romanian authorities that he was a dentist, so that they would be transferred to a work detail in a hospital; being liberated by Russian partisans after being in hiding for several days; returning to Chernivtsi and joining the Czech Army; being part of the liberation of Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); immigrating to South America with a stopover in the United States on the way; living in Columbia with an uncle on his coffee plantation for six months and then immigrating to the United States; her feelings about her new country and the difficulties she experienced as an immigrant; and how her experiences during the Holocaust have affected her life.

    Oral history interview with Renee Scheuer

    Oral History

    Renee Scheuer, born in 1909 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her childhood; antisemitism in Vienna before World War II; her and her husband’s arrest in November 1938 and the order to leave Austria in three days; traveling to Cologne, Germany and then to Belgium on foot; living in a refugee camp in Antwerp, Belgium; the occupation of Belgium by Germany in 1939 and their attempt to escape to France; returning to Belgium and living in Brussels where they had to wear Star of David badges; receiving a notice to report to a concentration camp; she and her husband going into hiding in Brussels in 1942 and staying in different hiding places until liberation in 1945; the feelings that she had during the events of the Holocaust; the resistance of the Belgian population against the Germans; the fates of her mother and sister; returning to visit Vienna in the 1970s; her immigration to the United States in 1950; and settling in New York City.

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral History

    Bent Melchoir, born in Denmark, describes growing up with a father who was a rabbi; the ease of relations between Jews and Christians in Denmark; the help that the Danish Christian community gave to the Jewish community to help them escape to Sweden; raising money with his brother to get Jews out of Denmark; the Danish resistance movement; leaving Copenhagen and arriving in Sweden by small boat; returning to Denmark three weeks after liberation; his surprise at the jubilant welcome given by the Danes when the Jews returned; the re-opening of the local synagogue for the fall holidays in 1945; and working on behalf of Soviet Jewry after the war.

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral History

    Renata Laqueur, born on November 3, 1919 in Brzeg, Poland, describes growing up in Amsterdam; never considering herself Jewish and attending a Christian school as a child; the German invasion in 1940 and registering as a Jew; her father’s decision to volunteer for the German Army as a medical research officer; her marriage to Paul Goldschmidt on December 24, 1941; becoming involved in the underground movement with Paul; her arrest on February 18, 1943, when the Gestapo took her to a prison for ten days until her transfer to the Vught transit camp in the Netherlands; her transport to the Westerbork transit camp, from where she was soon released because of her father’s connections; being arrested again in November 1943; her and Paul’s transport to Bergen-Belsen on March 15, 1944; writing a daily diary about her experiences in the camp; her liberation by the Soviet Army on April 23, 1945; recovering from illness in a field hospital outside of Dresden; spending a week in a displaced persons camp near Kassel; returning to Amsterdam on July 26, 1945; and immigrating to the United States through Canada in 1952.

    Oral history interview with Carl Hirsch

    Oral History

    Carl Hirsch, born in 1912, discusses his childhood in Vienna, Austria and Chernivtsi, Ukraine; his schooling in mathematics and engineering in his university studies; his work as a civil engineer and service in the Romanian Army before World War II; his first experiences with antisemitism when Romania occupied Chernivtsi and when he lived in Bucharest; Soviet occupation of Chernivtsi from 1940 to 1941; the deportation of business owners in Chernivtsi to Siberia; the Soviet withdrawal in June 1941 and Jews fleeing with them; the takeover of the town by Germans and Romanians and the persecution of Jews; finding a job with the railway, so he would not be taken for forced labor; the establishment of the ghetto in Chernivtsi; his marriage to Lotte; witnessing deportations from Chernivtsi; the influx of Romanians into Chernivtsi; the return of many Jews who had fled with the Russians; the integration of Chernivtsi into the Soviet Union in 1945; leaving Chernivtsi and living in Romania from 1945 until 1961; and immigrating to the United States in 1962.

    Oral history interview with Lotte Hirsch

    Oral History

    Lotte Hirsch, born in 1918 in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, describes her childhood; her encounters with antisemitism while she attended university; the Soviet occupation of Chernivtsi from 1940 to 1941 and having to stop her university studies and work in a factory; witnessing deportations to Siberia carried out by the Russians; Romanian and German troops taking over Chernivtsi and establishing a ghetto and several restrictions on the Jewish population; hearing about executions carried out by the German and Romanian soldiers; how her fiancé Carl was able to obtain an exemption from deportation because of his profession as an engineer; her marriage to Carl in a civil ceremony in the mayor's office; life under the occupation; witnessing more deportations in 1942; receiving better treatment after a new governor of Bukovina was instated; the return of Carl's cousin from deportation to Transnistria; her liberation by the Russians in 1944; and her immigration to the United States in 1962.

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral History

    Walter Meyer, born on May 31, 1926 in Kassel, Germany, describes growing up as a Catholic in a diverse religious community in Düsseldorf; his experiences during Kristallnacht; joining the Hitler Youth in 1940 but then deciding to organize another group to oppose the Hitler Youth; his recruitment into a military academy, to which his father did not allow him to go; assisting French prisoners of war in 1943 until the Gestapo caught him and placed him in a Düsseldorf prison; his transfer to a prison near Frankfurt, where he remained until the spring of 1944 when the prison director recommended him for the army; his deportation to Sachsenhausen and then Ravensbrück; escaping from Ravensbrück and hiding with a farmer who lived nearby; returning to Berlin and then Düsseldorf; recovering from tuberculosis after returning home; and immigrating to the United States in 1958.

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral History

    Dora Kramen Dimitro, born on January 22, 1922 in Eišiškės, Poland (now Lithuania), describes growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home with her parents and three siblings; attending Hebrew and Polish schools and experiencing antisemitism; the Russian arrival in Eišiškės in 1939; losing their rights as Jewish citizens when the Germans invaded in 1941; the Germans ordering them to assemble at the synagogue, where they were kept for two days and nights before many were taken away and shot; escaping with her boyfriend with the help of a Lithuanian police officer; the murder of most of her family on September 25 and 26, 1941; going to the Radun ghetto, where she met up with her father, sister, and boyfriend and stayed for ten months until they decided to escape because of ghetto liquidation warnings; running into the woods and trading valuables for food and clothing; living in the woods until late 1942 or early 1943 when they moved into the Hrodna ghetto in Belarus because they had heard of its better conditions; the transports from the ghetto two to three months after her arrival; fleeing to the Nacha Forest in Belarus; joining Jewish and Soviet partisans and staying in their underground bunker through the winter; hiding in homes or in the forest until the Russians liberated her in July 1944; returning to Eišiškės but fleeing when a group of Poles attacked the few remaining Jews there; marrying her boyfriend and living in Vilnius and Warsaw before moving to Israel in 1957; immigrating to the United States in March 1959 with her sister's help; and giving birth to a son soon after her arrival in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Herma Barber

    Oral History

    Herma Barber, born in 1921 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her childhood; experiencing antisemitism after the Anschluss in 1938; her and her parents' unsuccessful attempts to immigrate to the United States and their decision to go to Yugoslavia instead; their journey into Yugoslavia by foot; their arrest in Zagreb, Croatia and spending a week in jail; being confined to the town of Samobor after their release from jail; deportation by the Ustaša in 1941 to Mostar, which the Italian military occupied; being moved to Čapljina by the Italians; traveling to Split, Croatia without permission and being arrested and put in jail by the Italians for a week; being moved to Dubrovnik, Croatia, where she worked in a restaurant and also did knitting for a store; not having enough to eat; going to an Italian-run concentration camp in 1943; their escape from the camp to a partisan-controlled area of Yugoslavia; being in the same town as Randolph Churchill during a British diplomatic mission to the partisans in Drvar in 1944; moving constantly with help from partisans; she and her parents escaping separately to Bari, Italy in 1944 and 1945; her life in the refugee camp at Bari and her marriage in 1946; and her parents' immigration to the United States in 1946 and her immigration to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral History

    William Zeck (born on March 3, 1915 in New York City, NY) and Belle Mayer Zeck (born on February 22, 1919 in Port Henry, NY) describe their families and childhoods; Belle's work as a New York lawyer and getting a job working for the General Counsel of the Treasury and working on the Foreign Funds Control Bureau; helping the bureau to enforce the Trading With the Enemy Act, which forbade communication with and transmissions to German occupied countries; working on a book analyzing Yugoslavia’s financial laws and investigating Germany’s external assets in the United States; Belle becoming an unofficial expert on German financial affairs at the Department of the Treasury and attending the commission for the Allied nations to outline the principles of law for prosecution and trial of Europe’s major war criminals; Belle meeting William when they were both preparing for the Nuremberg Trials; the deterioration of Belle's health as she prepared for the trials and having to go home; Belle returning to Nuremberg in 1947 for the start of the trial; going back to work for the Department of the Treasury to organize the reconstruction loans for the United Kingdom, France, and Germany; their friendship with Telford Taylor; and William’s return to the United States after six years.

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral History

    Michel Reynders, born on June 29, 1930, in Uccle, Belgium, describes his experiences as the nephew of Father Bruno Reynders, who ran a rescue network that saved about 350 Jews; growing up in a tight-knit Catholic family; helping Father Bruno in his efforts to hide Jewish children by coercing local families to take them into their homes; being unaware of antisemitism until the war; helping a young girl who had fled from Fascist Italy; the German occupation and the following food shortages, imposed curfews, censored textbooks, and Jewish transports out of Belgium; beginning to observe the restrictions placed on Jewish neighbors in 1942 and realizing that it was primarily Jews who were being taken for forced labor in Germany; his introduction to the resistance movement around the end of 1942 and serving as an escort and messenger for his uncle's rescue service; initially having no idea that the children his uncle asked him to escort were Jewish or that Father Bruno was secretly hiding them throughout Belgium; eventually understanding what his family was doing and that his uncle's actions were secret and extremely risky; his family's decision to hide several Jews; graduating from medical school in 1959 and immigrating to the United States in 1961; and being named as the Honorary Vice-Consul of Belgium.

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral History

    Marthe Hoffnung Cohn, born on April 13, 1920 in Metz, France, describes her childhood; being forced by the French government to move out of Metz along with all of its other rich families; moving to Poitiers, France, where, in June 1940, Jewish refugees started coming; attending a Red Cross nursing school in Poitiers; escaping with her family to the unoccupied side of France in the summer of 1942; the arrest of her sister Stephanie, who later died in Auschwitz; becoming involved in resistance and rescue operations, which enabled her to get her parents, grandmother, two sisters, and a cousin to the unoccupied zone of France; finishing nursing school in Marseilles; leaving Marseilles for Paris, where she lived with one of her sisters and found a job with a family that did not know she was Jewish; joining the French Army after the liberation of Paris; doing intelligence work for the Army because she could speak German; going undercover as a German nurse and receiving two Croix de Guerre medals, signed by Generals De Lattre and De Gaulle, for her work; going to Vietnam with the French Army after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1956.

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral History

    Miriam Kabacznik Shulman, born on June 26, 1918, in Eišiškės, Poland (Lithuania), describes her childhood; her father’s death of typhus during World War I and living with her mother and two brothers; the Russian arrival in Eišiškės in September 1939 and the nationalization of her family’s tannery business; the Lithuanian takeover in 1940 followed by the German invasion on June 23, 1941; the German implementation of edicts that restricted and isolated Jews; the murder of most of the town’s Jews by an einsatzgruppen squad between September 25 and 26, 1941; the help their family’s friends and co-workers gave them throughout the war by hiding money and providing information and hiding places; hiding from the Germans from 1941 through 1944, when they were liberated by Russian soldiers; returning to their home in June 1944 to find an elderly couple living there; deciding to allow the couple to stay and inviting about twenty other Jews to live in their home; living through a Polish pogrom in 1944; fleeing to Vilnius the day after the pogrom and never returning to her home; spending the next years of her life in several displaced persons camps; meeting her future husband Norman in an Italian prison; and immigrating with Norman to the United States, where they had two children.

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral History

    Anna Szyller Palarczyk, born on July 21, 1918 in Kraków, Poland, describes her family; studying law in Kraków before World War II; working for the underground organization Armed Struggle Alliance; the arrest of everyone in her underground group in June 1942 and their deportation to Montelupich, where they faced harsh interrogations; her transport on August 17, 1942 to Auschwitz, where she was selected as a cleaning woman for Lauder Kommandant Otto Schmidt; walking to the Birkenau camp and being admitted to the sick-room in Birkenau for flu-like symptoms; her experiences in camp with having little food and seeing dead bodies lying around her; the women guards, including Margot Drexler (Dreschel); Katya Singer, who was from Mariková, Slovakia and was appointed as a Raportschreiberin (assistant to the guards) and her activities in the camp; making friends in the camp, which helped her to survive emotionally; the roll calls and selections she went through; the black market in Auschwitz; the Red Cross sending packages to Jewish women in the camps; concerts that were played sometimes in the camps; discovering the fates of her family and friends after the war; and seeing the Russian Army unite with the American Army during liberation.

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral History

    Steven Galezewski, born on May 11, 1923 in Inowroclaw, Poland, describes his childhood; joining the Polish underground in Mińsk Mazowiecki, Poland; recalling that, in 1940, the Nazis ordered all the Jews to wear an armband with the Star of David; the relocation of his community into the Mińsk ghetto at the end of 1940; the liquidation of the ghetto on August 21, 1942 and the survival of only 282 tradesmen who were still useful to the Nazi war effort; participating in underground activities, which included blowing up buildings or means of transportation; his resistance unit being sent under Soviet command; being stationed in Lublin, Poland; providing security for the public hanging of five SS officers in Majdanek in 1944; remaining in Soviet hands from March to July 1945; being perceived by the Soviet Union as a potentially subversive element supporting the Polish government-in-exile and then receiving a prison sentence from the Soviets; his transport to Siberia, where Polish guerrillas freed him; escaping into the American zone; joining the Polish Army in Italy but returning from Italy in 1947 and joining the British Army; immigrating to the United States in February 1951; and joining the US Army in 1956.

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral History

    George Havas, born in 1929 in Mukacheve, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine), describes the Hungarian takeover of his town after the Germans took the Sudetenland; his father no longer being allowed to practice medicine; the German takeover of Mukacheve in March 1944; his transport to Auschwitz on May 15, 1944; learning after the war that his father had died in the Sonderkommando uprising in Auschwitz; being transferred to Mauthausen and then to Ebensee, where he stayed for one year until liberation; working in the tunnels at Ebensee, where he was able to make contacts and bring back news; the death of his brother and several of his friends in Ebensee; his liberation on May 6, 1945 and leaving for Prague on June 7; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral History

    Maria Rosenbloom, born on December 26, 1918 in Kolomyia, Poland (Ukraine), describes her Orthodox Jewish family; learning the violin and playing it every weekend in the Hatikva before the war; feeling increased antisemitic sentiments and fleeing with her family into the Carpathian Mountains; attending a special gymnasium for girls in Poland; starting university in 1936 in Lvov, Poland (L'viv, Ukraine) and never being allowed to sit down because she was Jewish; vacationing with a boyfriend in the Carpathian Mountains until the Soviet invasion on September 1, 1939; getting married in 1940; the Soviets taking away her father’s store because of nationalization policies; opening a pharmacy with her husband in 1940 in a small town called Glen-na-novaria [phonetic] and being pestered by the Russians for condoms; the Nazi invasion on June 21, 1941 and registering with the troops; contracting pneumonia and being treated with leeches; moving into the ghetto after Passover in 1942; working in the ghetto soup kitchen; escaping from the ghetto on Christmas in 1942 and going to live with her friend Blancka; discovering the fates of her family during the war and finding a job in a German hospital; taking a train to Warsaw, Poland in April 1943 and hearing rumors about what was happening to the Jews; living in fear that she would be caught because of her prominent Jewish features; joining the resistance movement; the chaos of the Warsaw uprising in 1944; having to join a Hitler parade in 1944 in an attempt to fit in; taking a train to Heidelberg, Germany hoping to reunite with Blancka; the German surrender of Heidelberg to the Americans and deciding to learn English; working for the US Army and then the Joint Distribution Committee; immigrating to the United States in September 1947; and becoming a social worker.

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