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Oral history interview with Alfred Fiks

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2016.377.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.0907

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    Oral history interview with Alfred Fiks
    Transcript
    This is part 1 of the United States Holocaust Memorial
    Museum interview with Dr. Alfred I. Fiks,
    taking place on August 18, 2016, over the phone
    between Washington, DC and Costa Rica.
    Thank you very much, Dr. Fiks, for agreeing to be interviewed.
    We very much appreciate it.
    Thank you for the opportunity.
    Yes, sir.
    And so in part 1 we'll talk a little bit about your family,
    some biographical information, and the years leading up
    to the war.
    So we'll start at the very beginning.
    Could you please tell us your date of birth,
    your place of birth, and your name at birth?
    My date of birth, place, and what else?
    And your name at birth, if it was different.
    My name.
    My name was--
    I've never changed my name.
    Anyway, the date of birth was 2 June 1931.
    And the place is Berlin, Germany.
    And did you always go by Alfred, or did you
    have any nicknames growing up?
    Did I what?
    Did you have any nicknames growing up?
    Any--
    Did you always go by the name Alfred, or did you have a--
    In Berlin I was always Alfred or Alfred-chen,
    which is diminutive.
    It's Alfred or little Alfred.
    Oh, yeah, Alfred-chen.
    So you were born in Germany.
    Were your parents, as well?
    Were my parents?
    Were they born in Germany, as well?
    No.
    And so the real beginning for me goes back to their birthplace,
    actually--
    their birth places.
    Would you like to hear about them?
    Yes, please.
    My mother was born in Poland, in the capital
    city, which is Warsaw.
    And she was born in the year 1894.
    The date, in case you're interested, is May 9.
    Anyway, she was born into a family with--
    she had one sister that I know of and several brothers.
    And they lived in the Jewish Quarter of Warsaw,
    in an apartment.
    And they were very industrious people.
    During the day, that apartment where they slept at night
    was turned into a small factory of neckties.
    They would design, cut, and sew men's neckties and then--
    and sell them to the stores.
    So my mother was always--
    she always prided herself in being a big city girl.
    My father, on the other hand, was born in the country.
    And the country is really somewhat indeterminate.
    The territories in some areas between Poland
    and Russia and Ukraine kept changing hands.
    So it's difficult to know whether he was born
    in Poland, Ukraine, or Russia.
    He was born in a small town called Rasalowska, if you--
    the best spelling I know about, the only spelling I
    know for it is--
    let's see, here--
    R-A-S-A-L-O-W-K-A, Rasalowska.
    It was what was called a shtetl.
    A shtetl is a village, a Jewish village,
    from the German word stadt, which is city.
    So it was a shtetl where all the men were bearded
    and every other one was a rabbi.
    And if you've seen Fiddler on the Roof,
    you know what I'm talking about.
    Anyway, so he was born in this country town.
    But he was looking for wider opportunity
    for work and creativeness than he could
    find in that little village.
    And at some point he moved.
    He picked himself up and moved to Warsaw.
    And I don't know how they met, but they did--
    he and my mother did meet.
    But before that-- I guess--
    well, I'm not sure if it was before or after.
    But at some point--
    my father was born in 1893.
    So he was one year older than my mother.
    And he was in Warsaw taking courses.
    His love in life was playing the violin, just
    like Fiddler on the Roof.
    But he realized that it was difficult to make a livelihood
    from playing the violin.
    And so he went to Warsaw to learn--
    [COUGH] excuse me--
    to learn the craft, art and craft
    of making ladies fur coats--
    fur, F-U-R--
    Fur coats.
    --from the design of the coat to getting these animal skins,
    making a design for the coat, cutting the animal skin
    to appropriate shape, sewing them together--
    the whole thing, from beginning to end, because
    in those days, of course, there was no central heating
    in the homes.
    And the houses were cold.
    So he went to--
    So he learned the--
    And at some point he married--
    no, he didn't-- at some point he met my mother.
    Also at some point, apparently, the Russians moved into Warsaw.
    And they conscripted him.
    They forced him to join the Russian army.
    This was World War I, which, if you remember, started in 1914.
    Yes, sir.
    And what were your parents' names,
    before we talk more about that?
    My father was David Fiks.
    David.
    And my mother was Estera.
    Estera.
    OK.
    E-S-T-E-R-A.
    Thank you.
    And so he was drafted into the Russian army?
    He was drafted into the Russian-- that's--
    anyway, you understand that a lot
    of the information about this period
    are things that I learned as an adult or an adolescent.
    They were not things from my childhood.
    I didn't know anything about where
    my father came from then--
    So he never talked--
    --with one exception.
    On vacations my father would not--
    would usually not go on vacations with us.
    My mother and I would travel alone, and sometimes
    with my other brother.
    But-- and sometimes we would travel to Poland on vacation
    and meet one of my mother's--
    he would-- we would meet my mother's favorite brother,
    who was a very tall man, almost three--
    well, almost six feet high.
    So we would meet him on--
    in a seaside resort called Zopot--
    Z-O-P-O-T, Zopot-- which was near the city of-- at that time
    it was called Danzig.
    Now it's called Gdansk in Polish, G-D-A-N-S-K.
    And so I knew that there was a Polish connection.
    But everything else I learned as an adolescent or as an adult.
    So your father never talked about his childhood?
    Never about the war or anything like that?
    Did my mother-- what was the question?
    So your father never talked about his childhood
    in Poland or his experiences during the war?
    Well, a little bit.
    And--
    Oh, I see.
    And the stories were not always the same,
    which makes me a little bit suspect of what
    really happened.
    But there was always an element of self with time and old age.
    There's an element of time where the story's
    growing and making oneself more and more important.
    But anyway, the-- he was drafted into the Russian Army.
    And the story I heard was that he was taken prisoner
    by the Germans.
    And as a Jewish soldier, he was treated better
    as a prisoner in a German camp than he had been as a soldier
    in the Russian army.
    Really?
    So he decided that Germany must be a pretty good place to live,
    one that might give him more economic opportunity
    to develop.
    And after the war, which would be 1918, 1919,
    he moved to Germany.
    Really?
    Yes.
    Just because of the way he was treated as a prisoner of war.
    Well, I'm sure there were other factors,
    but I don't know what they were.
    Well, it was generally known that in Poland, the Jews
    lived in their own little--
    well, it's a self-imposed ghetto, really.
    But it's in their own areas, their own neighborhoods.
    Whereas in Berlin they were more integrated into the city.
    I see.
    And there were neighbors who were not Jewish next door.
    So it was-- that was generally known.
    So he knew that there would naturally
    be more opportunity in Germany than there had been in Poland.
    And so--
    And then, in 1920, he sent for my mother.
    This is a story that I hear.
    And they got married in Berlin.
    I know that's true because I have a photo, a wedding
    photograph from Berlin, 1920.
    Now, did I get off your question, or--
    No, no.
    This is-- you covered a lot of the questions I had.
    Good.
    So what were your parents like?
    What were their personalities?
    What were they like?
    Yes, sir.
    That's an interesting question.
    My father, his whole life--
    well, while he was actively working,
    his whole life was his work.
    As soon as he could he set up his own little store
    with his own little workshop behind it,
    making the fur coats.
    And he would devote all day, and I mean all day, to working.
    My mother was the sociable one.
    My father was not at all sociable.
    And he was-- and I think he tended to be a perfectionist.
    My mother would handle the customers
    in the front of the store, in the showroom.
    And she liked to meet people and talk to people,
    unlike my father, I think, generally.
    And I don't have any memory of ever playing with my father,
    for example.
    And so they--
    The only thing I-- the only time--
    well, I didn't realize I was playing.
    Once, in my childhood, there was a happening that I just--
    I don't remember-- I don't know if it was from my own memory
    or what I was told in adolescence and adulthood.
    But I believe it was true.
    I was very young in getting my adult teeth, were coming in.
    And so I don't know what happened,
    but I think I did something that my mother told me not to do.
    And so she gave me a slap in the face.
    And one of my baby teeth fell out as a result of the slap.
    And so I was going to get even with her.
    I took the little baby tooth to my father, who was in the shop.
    See, we lived near--
    the apartment we lived in was near the store.
    So I didn't have to go far to go to my father
    and show him what my mother had done to me.
    [LAUGHTER]
    But I think that was the last attempt
    to get my mother into trouble that happened.
    And so your parents owned the store where they both--
    your father made the coats.
    Yes.
    And your mother worked out front.
    Yes.
    It was a small retail store in a residential neighborhood
    in Berlin.
    It was not a Jewish neighborhood.
    There were lots of other people around.
    It was in a building which was an apartment house, which
    had about four or five stories with an open courtyard
    inside the buildings.
    And the store was in front of the building, on the street,
    at street level.
    And the apartment was inside, also on--
    at street level, but inside the courtyard.
    We had about three or four rooms back there.
    Apartment-- nice apartment, middle class.
    My parents, both my father and mother, were not religious.
    And their families did not seem to be very religious.
    I don't know for sure.
    But for example, I never met--
    well, I met my maternal grandmother once.
    Of the four grandparents, that's the only one I ever met.
    And she of course, as partially remember
    and partially I was told, she would embrace me and kiss me
    on the cheek.
    And I started crying because she was all wrinkly and very
    ancient, it seemed to me.
    I was a baby at the time, or a very young child.
    Anyway, I started crying because a strange-looking woman was
    hugging me and kissing me.
    And that was-- yeah, the--
    So I started crying.
    And my mother says, it's ridiculous what you're doing.
    When I get old and I kiss you, will you also cry?
    [LAUGHTER]
    I was beyond words.
    I remember in one of our past phone conversations
    you mentioned that your mother was a feminist?
    Well, yes.
    Her attitude, I think, was very enlightened.
    I don't think she belonged to any organized
    group of feminists.
    But she didn't like housework too much, for example.
    In Germany we had a--
    well, I really had two mothers, you see,
    because I had my real mother, but she was--
    during the day she was always in the store, or much of the time.
    Sometimes she would cook meals.
    But usually the one who cooked meals
    was Marie, Mary, who was with us for many years that I remember.
    And she was a combination housekeeper and nanny.
    So I really had one and a half mothers.
    And while your mom was at the store, Marie was there.
    While my mom was at the store Marie would care for me,
    take care of me, whether in the apartment
    or whether she would take me out for a walk through the park.
    That was one of our favorite activities,
    going to the main park in Berlin,
    which has a zoo inside it.
    It's a wonderful part called the Tiergarten,
    the garden of animals.
    And everything went all right until some yellow benches
    appeared in the park.
    This would have been in--
    I don't know, after--
    between 1935 and '39.
    Maybe '36 or '37.
    Yellow benches appeared in the park.
    And the yellow benches, I found out later, were for Jews only.
    Jews were not allowed to sit on benches with normal people.
    And before we jump too far ahead--
    Sorry?
    Before we jump too far ahead, let-- could we go back
    to your family a little bit?
    OK.
    So you said you met one of your mother's brothers a few times.
    Yes.
    Did you ever meet any other aunts or uncles?
    No.
    Well, not in Poland.
    I did meet some later on, in France.
    But that-- we leave that for after 1939.
    In my early childhood I did not meet any other brothers
    or sisters.
    So in my earlier years the only one that I met
    was my Uncle [? Shia ?] and my mother's mother, whom
    I cried when she embraced me.
    What about siblings?
    You mentioned a brother.
    Now, I also mentioned that my parents were very--
    they were not religious.
    They wanted to assimilate into the German culture.
    And in 1921 they produced their first child.
    And remember, they got married in 1920.
    Yes, sir.
    In 1921 Max appeared.
    A boy appeared, and they named him
    Max, which is not exclusively German, but very German.
    In-- I don't know.
    A few years later, a second boy, a second son appeared.
    And they named him Fritz, F-R-I-T-Z.
    Can you imagine Fritz Fiks?
    Poor boy.
    Anyway, Fritz died of diphtheria.
    The injection they give to babies now against diphtheria
    was not yet developed--
    or just coming out.
    I'm not sure.
    But anyway, he died of diphtheria
    sometime before 1931, because that's
    when they had me as a replacement for Frtiz's death.
    Well, I shouldn't say that.
    I don't know if that was actually true.
    But I like to say that.
    But I never met Fritz.
    But what I'm trying to--
    what I'm trying to point out is that they
    were-- they wanted to assimilate into German culture.
    They named a son Max, Frtiz, and then yours truly, Alfred.
    Pretty German names.
    They're not Jewish names or biblical names.
    So they made a choice to choose very--
    Huh?
    They made a choice to choose very German names?
    They what?
    Your parents-- they chose to pick very German names?
    I'm sorry, I can't understand.
    Are you speaking into the phone?
    Is this better?
    I think so.
    So your parents specifically chose very German names.
    Did they specifically--
    Chose German names?
    No, I just--
    I'm a social scientist, so I use that, as an adult,
    to indicate that they really wanted to assimilate
    into German culture.
    Yes.
    For example, they had season tickets
    to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
    based on my father's love of music
    and the desire to really belong into Berlin culture.
    And so he wanted to be part of something
    bigger than he had been in Poland.
    Yes, sir.
    And they-- in terms of religious training,
    we just went to synagogue once a year, on the high holy days.
    I'm going to change ears.
    Hold on.
    OK.
    And so Max was 10 years older than you?
    Correct.
    So what was he like, having an older brother?
    Well, Max was-- he was OK.
    He was very studious, a very studious boy.
    They put him-- they wanted him to learn to play the piano.
    But in order to get him to practice his piano
    they would put a box of candies on the piano.
    And after every-- after so many minutes or quarter hours,
    I don't know, he was able to take a chocolate candy.
    He was a little bit pudgy, not very physical.
    He was very studious.
    They gave him a nickname, Lekko, L-E-K-K-O, Lekko,
    which is short for lexicon.
    Lexicon, in German, means something
    like what you call the Britannica--
    encyclopedia.
    Lexicon means encyclopedia.
    And that was his nickname?
    That was his nickname.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Lekko.
    Lekko.
    Lekko.
    So he was very studious, very smart, it sounds like?
    Very studious.
    I guess he was smart, yeah.
    And he was the intellectual light of--
    hope of the family.
    In my mother's eyes, Max was the intellectual one.
    Now, I was-- my specialty was psychomotor ability.
    I could fix anything with my hands.
    So I was going to be a super duper arts and craftsperson.
    Oh, and Fritz, he was the extrovert.
    We judge from his one--
    I've only seen one photograph of Fritz.
    He was, I don't know, eight years old or something.
    And he had a chocolate cigarette in his mouth--
    we assume it was chocolate.
    So he was, like you said, the extrovert of y'all?
    Was he?
    So you think he was the more outgoing one of the brothers?
    I'm sorry, I'm having trouble.
    I get an echo in back of your voice.
    Is this better?
    Maybe.
    I don't know.
    Say something else.
    So Fritz was outgoing?
    I didn't under--
    I didn't catch that.
    Fritz was the outgoing brother?
    Fritz?
    Well, you understand, I never knew Fritz,
    because he died before I was born.
    But from what your parents said, he was--
    He was-- yeah, he was outgoing and devilish.
    And that was his specialty.
    And then I came along.
    And I was very good with my hands.
    And later, it turned out, they wanted
    me to take over the store when my father would retire.
    And they told you this later?
    They told me what later?
    That they wanted you to take over the store?
    No, but it was obvious from their comments.
    They never told me that outright.
    Oh, I see.
    It was obvious from the comments they would make.
    And you said that your parents wanted to integrate
    into German society?
    Yes.
    So what--
    Hm?
    What languages did you speak at home and outside of the home?
    Well, outside of the home, German.
    Inside of the home, my parents would talk, I guess,
    something--
    a combination of German and Yiddish.
    Well, Yiddish is a dialect of German,
    you may or may not know.
    So they talked this combination German-Yiddish,
    except when they didn't want me to under-- to hear something
    or to understand something they were saying.
    And then they would switch to Polish.
    When they didn't want you to know
    what they were talking about?
    Right.
    Did you ever learn Polish?
    No.
    No.
    Just a few words.
    Just a few words?
    [POLISH], give me a kiss.
    Let's see.
    So you said your family was middle class?
    Very middle class.
    Very bourgeois.
    Had they been affected by the depression at all?
    Well, they lived through it.
    They lived through it.
    But I don't see that--
    it didn't destroy the store.
    I was born in '31.
    So '31 was kind of during--
    well, I don't know when you want to put the depression.
    But we were OK.
    I didn't see any--
    as a child, I didn't see any lack of food
    or the necessities of life around.
    And we stayed in the apartment.
    So far as I know, all my life in Berlin
    we were in that apartment with that store.
    Should I go on?
    Sure.
    Yes, please.
    Hello?
    Sure.
    Yes, please.
    OK.
    Let me-- I have a few notes down here.
    Let's see if I covered all this.
    In 1930 my parents became German citizens.
    They took out German citizenship.
    So they were naturalized German citizens.
    And then I already said the three names of three sons.
    Season tickets to the philharmonic orchestra.
    Hitler came in in 1933.
    And after that things became more and more uncomfortable
    and ugly and threatening.
    And what was Berlin like at this time?
    You mentioned the Tiergarten.
    Berlin-- well, the neighborhood we lived in was very nice.
    It was a middle class neighborhood
    with a tall building.
    We were-- one of the main drags in Berlin
    is called the K-damm, the Kurfurstendamm,
    which was just two blocks away from us.
    Oh, wow.
    It was a very commercial avenue full of cafes and fancy shops
    and department stores.
    It was quite developed.
    And I was quite happy there.
    And--
    Until Hitler showed his presence.
    Yes.
    And at this time you said you did not
    live in a Jewish neighborhood?
    I'm sorry?
    You said that you did not live in a Jewish neighborhood?
    No, it was not a Jewish neighborhood.
    I don't know if there was--
    I don't know if there was any such a thing.
    There may have been a particular street,
    maybe, where mostly Jews lived and the stores
    were mostly Jews--
    the kosher store.
    We did not have a kosher house, for example.
    So Berlin was--
    Although I don't think they ate pork if they had a choice.
    So you remember Berlin being very integrated.
    There weren't really differences--
    Yes.
    --the way you saw it.
    I had some-- I had friends.
    I don't know if they were all Jewish.
    You don't ask what's your religion to friends.
    And, as a matter of fact, if and when
    we get to talk about Kristallnacht,
    the Night of Broken Glasses--
    do you know why they call it the-- you know
    why they call it Kristallnacht?
    That would be around November, 1938.
    The reason is that German hoods--
    Nazis mixed the SSR, the Brownshirts mixed with
    unemployed bums and no-good people who really disliked
    Jews--
    they went around and burned and broke
    into a lot of Jewish property and burned a lot of synagogues,
    broke a lot of stores, stole a lot of merchandise.
    And we were hit, too.
    I don't know if you want to hear about it.
    Yes, absolutely.
    But before we get there--
    going through my list of questions here.
    Before you-- we get there, what?
    Oh, I'm just going through my list of questions.
    OK.
    So what--
    What is the question?
    So how-- I guess we could talk about,
    how did you receive news?
    Did--
    How did I what?
    Receive news?
    Did you have a radio?
    I think we did have a radio.
    But at my age I don't remember listening to it.
    I don't know about my parents.
    They would-- their social activities
    would consist of, as I said, go to the symphony orchestra
    performances and have social events in the house
    and play cards with their friends.
    And I know you mentioned you liked going to the park.
    What--
    Yes, I liked it when Marie would take me to the park every day--
    not every day, but maybe two or three times a week.
    And it was about a--
    oh, I don't know, maybe about a 10-block walk
    to the park and 10 blocks to come back.
    And so we got plenty of exercise that way--
    until we had to sit on yellow benches.
    I hate the color yellow to this day.
    What else do you remember about the Tiergarten
    or anything else you use--
    About?
    What else do you remember about the park
    or what else you did for fun?
    Hold on.
    I'm going to change ears again.
    OK.
    Let's try it again.
    What else?
    Do you remember about the park or other things
    you did for fun?
    Well, the-- what else?
    The animal-- the zoo in the park was always of great interest
    to me.
    And we would not go to the zoo all the time,
    but I liked doing that.
    And what else?
    Let's see.
    That's the only thing that stands out in my--
    I had a very sophisticated scooter which was a--
    you stood on it.
    And you stood on a pedal and you pumped the pedal,
    and it pushed you.
    And you pushed you ahead on the scooter.
    So that was a--
    and I have a photograph of that.
    And it's very-- that was the best activity I had.
    And what else?
    Oh, and I was very happy about Berlin
    until, one, the yellow benches, and two, in 1934, I don't know.
    Let's see.
    I must have been--
    it must have been '37 or '38 that they threw me out
    of public school because they wanted
    Jewish children to go to their own school,
    not to be mixed with Aryans.
    And so were you in elementary school, then?
    Elementary, early elementary school.
    And I liked my public school and the friends I had there.
    And I did not like the Jewish school.
    That was one price I had to pay.
    Yeah, so this was the Grundschule?
    Hm?
    This was the Grundschule?
    This is the what?
    The elementary school in Germany,
    is it called Grundschule?
    I don't remember the official name of it.
    If I ever knew it, I don't remember it.
    My early development was also interesting,
    I think, from another point of view,
    which is that my personality development was
    a constant competition between Hitler
    and the picture he painted of Jewish people
    and what my mother told me.
    My mother thought I was the cat's meow.
    She thought I was great, not intellectual like Max
    you understand.
    But with my hands, I was great.
    And I was a great child.
    And when I didn't get her into trouble with my loose teeth
    to my father, she thought I was the greatest
    child in the world.
    And Hitler, of course, in the cartoons and the propaganda
    he was putting out in the newspapers you saw
    and the posters you saw was that Jewish people
    were on one level with the sewer rats.
    They were under people.
    They were not normal persons.
    So you grew up with these--
    I grew up with this dichotomy, this--
    These two conflicting--
    --conflicting picture of myself and my personality.
    Maybe I'm a-- well, I'm a Gemini anyway,
    so I have these two aspects.
    And one day we had a German military parade,
    a local parade coming through the neighborhood.
    And it was soldiers marching and then a whole bunch,
    maybe 100 or more, soldiers on motorcycles,
    but motorcycles with sidecars.
    And they-- to me, that was the greatest form of transportation
    I had ever seen.
    And there would be soldiers with guns.
    And it had the appeal to me that it has for most young boys.
    I wanted to see the parade.
    But a little kid dressed in a Hitler-Jugend, Hitler youth
    outfit, came up to me.
    And he said, [SPEAKING GERMAN] Jews are not allowed here.
    So he chased me away, essentially.
    And this was another--
    Well, you learn to retreat into yourself.
    And that has an effect on personality development,
    as well.
    So at that--
    But the big event was the thing that happened in November,
    '38, the Kristallnacht, when they came in and broke
    into our apartment.
    And so if this--
    if Kristallnacht was in '38, you were seven years old?
    Correct.
    And I remember we were sitting and eating, having
    supper in the kitchen.
    And I was eating tomato soup when we hear the kitchen
    windows breaking.
    And flying pieces of glass come into my soup.
    And I knew this was not normal.
    And so I ran away from the kitchen.
    And I went to hide under my parents' bed.
    Oh, I had a friend with me.
    And we both ran away to my-- and went
    to hide underneath the bed.
    And these hoodlums came into our apartment.
    And the reason the thing was called
    Kristallnacht is that a lot of Jewish people
    had crystal chandeliers in their living rooms.
    We did not.
    But a lot of Jewish people did.
    And one of their favorite targets, the hoodlums,
    was to break those crystal chandeliers.
    That's why it's called Kristallnacht, night
    or the broken crystals.
    Anyway, I heard them coming into the bedroom.
    We didn't move or say anything under the bed,
    but obviously it was the first place they looked.
    And I learned later they were looking for my father.
    But they pulled me out.
    And they realized I was just a child.
    So at that time they were not interested in children.
    And this--
    My father had been warned that there
    would be this raid, this attack from the hoodlums this night.
    He was warned by some non-Jewish friends
    not to be at home that night.
    And he wasn't.
    He had gone to hide with some non-Jewish, nominally Christian
    people.
    At one of their homes?
    Yes.
    And he stayed with them for about four or five days.
    How long were the men in your home?
    I don't know.
    My memory, of course, is very partial and very rusty.
    But my impression is that it wasn't more than an hour.
    Probably something between half an hour and an hour.
    And how did they act towards your mother and you once they--
    Well, she took advantage of-- the Germans
    are supposed to be very gallant and very courteous to women.
    And she threw that in their face.
    Also, the policy is that they were only arresting Jewish men
    on that date.
    They did not go after the women and children
    until a later date.
    And was Max home?
    No.
    You see, when I was thrown out of public school
    he was thrown out of public university.
    So in--
    And we were able to organize visas for Max
    to go study in the US because my father had a cousin
    living in Brooklyn who offered to take him
    in while he was going to study.
    And Max was lucky enough to get that student
    visa from the American Embassy.
    And so he had left--
    I don't know when he left--
    around '37, '38.
    And so he was able to get a visa.
    Sorry?
    Max was able to get a visa.
    But the rest of the family was not?
    That's correct.
    That's correct, because the rest of the family applied
    for visas in 1938.
    And I don't know if you are aware that at that time,
    the visa program was on a quota basis.
    The quotas were based on what percentage of the US population
    comes from the country that you were born in.
    And the Polish quota--
    although I was born in Germany, we
    were under the Polish quota because of my parents.
    And the Polish quota was very small and very over-subscribed,
    because most of the Jews were from Poland.
    Plus, there were some German Jews, also,
    who had it much easier.
    But the visas, as you will learn from my later tale,
    we did not get the visa until 1943, five years later.
    Five years.
    And in those five years a lot of applicants
    were gassed and burned in the concentration camps.
    We were very lucky getting out when we could.
    Yes, sir.
    And so after Kristallnacht, your dad returned home
    after four or five days?
    I don't remember him returning home.
    But something else happened in--
    well, I'm jumping around in that period.
    Remember, I told you that in 1930 they
    became German citizens?
    Yes, sir.
    In 1934, the German citizenship was revoked, nullified.
    You are no longer German citizens
    because you are unworthy.
    So after they finally get the citizen--
    So after '34 it was quite evident--
    well, now it's quite evident, in retrospect.
    It wasn't evident at the time.
    But in 1934 they lost their citizenship.
    And in 1938, at about the same time as the Kristallnacht--
    since they didn't find him at home,
    you see, to arrest him and send him
    to Poland or whatever or some camp,
    the police president sent him a letter, my father,
    saying that you have--
    I don't know-- a number of weeks to get out of German territory.
    And this was from the head of police?
    Yeah.
    And if you don't comply, you will be ejected forcefully.
    But you see there's several problems in the soup.
    One is that if you don't have citizenship in a country that
    means you can't get a passport.
    And if you can't get a passport it's
    impossible to get a visa anywhere, because there's
    no place to enter the visa.
    So this was all part of the soup, the anti-Semitic soup
    that Hitler cooked up.
    And so in 1938, I think--
    I believe right after escaping from home--
    oh, they also appointed an administrator,
    an Aryan administrator, the Nazis
    did, who were essentially controlling
    all of our goods and property.
    And anything that got left behind he
    would inherit, so to speak, as our inheritor.
    But to make a long story short--
    well, no, I don't know the long story is the truth.
    I only know the short story, which
    is that he escaped to France, my father did.
    I don't know how.
    He escaped to France.
    And then in Paris--
    he had a brother in Paris, my father
    did, who also had a fur store in Paris.
    And he went to stay with them.
    And he wrote a letter to Max, who was in the US,
    describing his experience in Kristallnacht.
    It's a 23-page letter handwritten
    in German, the original of which is now with the Holocaust
    Museum in Berlin.
    Telling him about what happened?
    About what happened to him in Kristallnacht, yes.
    But anyway, the--
    I'm looking here.
    In 1939-- so my father was--
    the letter was written in about January of '39, to Max.
    And we had to get out of Germany, as well,
    because in the letter which ejected,
    which warned him to get out of Germany--
    [COUGH] Excuse me.
    It said, "including your wife and son."
    So it named all of you.
    Sorry?
    The letter named all of you, that you all had to get out.
    Right.
    Right.
    Right.
    Right.
    And, let's see, so happily--
    the other problem with getting out of Germany
    was that no country was accepting Jewish refugees,
    because every country had their own social problems,
    and they did not--
    they were not looking to accept a whole bunch of refugees
    who would bring their own--
    their additional social problems.
    So let's see.
    Where am I here?
    So then my--
    I guess my father, through his brother, had
    a contact with the French government,
    because at that time, perhaps luckily, the prime minister
    of France was the first Jewish prime minister
    in French history.
    His name was Léon Blum, B-L-U-M. And through contacts with Léon
    Blum, the story goes, they were able to organize visas for us
    to go-- to my mother and me to come to France.
    And so early in 1939 we received a postcard
    from the French consulate, my mother and I did--
    my mother did, from the French consulate in Berlin
    asking us to appear at their office on such and such a date
    for the purpose of receiving a visa.
    And that postcard probably saved our lives.
    And so both you and your mother had to go to this office.
    Right.
    And did they interview you, or they--
    I don't know if I went.
    I don't remember going.
    I see.
    So maybe my mother went by herself.
    I don't know.
    Or if I went with her, I don't remember it.
    But anyway, we were--
    you may or may not know that the European war
    started on 1 September, 1939, when Hitler attacked Poland.
    And so we left, oh, in one of the train service after--
    see when Hitler attacked Poland, Poland called
    on a treaty that Poland had with England
    and with France which said that England and France would
    come to the aid of Poland if Poland is attacked.
    And that's what happened.
    And that was the start of World War II in Europe.
    In US, of course, it didn't happen until 7 January, 1941.
    So you were still in Germany when the war started.
    We were still in Germany, but we had--
    they gave us visas on an official-looking piece
    of paper, since we didn't have passports to put the visa in.
    They stamped the visa in their-- on
    their own official-looking piece of paper.
    And so when--
    Sorry?
    When did you leave Berlin?
    Well, I think it was June or July, as I remember it,
    of 1939--
    just in time before September.
    And what--
    Because I mean, obviously, even if you'd have stayed
    there would be no train service between Berlin and Paris
    once the war had started between the countries.
    And you were about eight at this time?
    In '39 I was eight, correct.
    And how much of this did you understand--
    [LAUGHTER]
    --having to leave home and all of this?
    Well, there's still a lot of it I don't understand.
    Yes, sir.
    How much of it?
    Very little.
    All I know is that Hitler didn't like Jews,
    and apparently I was one of the group he didn't like.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Because I was thrown out of school.
    And I was kicked away from parades
    and made to sit on ugly yellow benches.
    But, as a senior citizen who has survived all this crap,
    one has a balanced view of everything.
    So we were what would--
    well, no, we're not finished yet.
    But we were not there for the worst part of the Holocaust,
    because I would not be talking to you if I had been.
    We looked up the records.
    In Jerusalem there is a big museum for the Holocaust.
    And all the victims are entered into a big, big register.
    And we found a lot of the names of--
    see, the Germans were very meticulous
    keeping track of all the names of everyone they murdered.
    And apparently they never expected
    that they would be prosecuted on murder charges.
    But anyway, we found a lot of the names of my mother's family
    on that list.
    So we are on '39, and we're leaving Berlin, heading
    to Paris to join my father.
    And wherever we were we had to check with the American embassy
    to see what had happened.
    How far along are we on the waiting list?
    Shall I go on?
    Yes.
    But what was that train ride like, from Berlin to Paris?
    The train ride?
    Well, it was--
    I liked trains.
    I still like trains.
    I like European trains more than American trains, but--
    Was it very crowded?
    No.
    They had the train organized.
    Everybody has a seat number.
    So there's no problems about--
    they don't sell more tickets than the space,
    or didn't, in my experience.
    But no, it was not yet--
    I don't remember seeing any people in the train
    in the same situation we were.
    They may have been.
    But anyway, I remember we went first to Belgium.
    The capital of Belgium is Brussels.
    And we had a friend, or my parents
    had a friend in Brussels who said he would
    meet the train in Brussels.
    And he was organizing a big national holiday for us.
    And we arrived in Brussels, and sure enough, there
    was a national holiday going on, not knowing that on this date
    was a national holiday of Belgium.
    And I was impressed, as a kid, by the sense of humor
    that our friend had.
    And I don't-- did much of this make sense to me?
    Well, I understood the basic concept of survival.
    That was clear-- and that people would
    do almost anything to survive.
    But we were not in the concentration camps yet.
    And so we were not as bad off as some people would be later on.
    So in '39 then, we got to Paris and discovered
    that we would still have a long wait for the visas to US.
    So then the problem became--
    oh, then what happened was that in 1940 the Germans
    occupied about half of France.
    And there was an occupied part of France
    and then there was a frontier running
    from the northwest of France to the southeast of France.
    I don't know.
    How did that work?
    Anyway, there was the two sections of France.
    And the Germans occupied the section we were in.
    And the other section had a government
    made up of pro-German French political leaders, Petain.
    But that frontier between occupied and unoccupied France
    would also play an important part in our troubles
    pretty soon thereafter.
    And in Paris did--
    In what?
    In Paris, did you stay with your uncle?
    Yes, as I remember it.
    Yes.
    In Paris-- oh, OK.
    In Paris-- that's true.
    In Paris I met my father's brother who had the fur store.
    And then I also met my mother's sister,
    her only sister I believe, who had three children--
    one of who was about my age.
    So we didn't stay in Paris very long.
    We-- on the advice of I don't know whom we were advised to go
    to a small town by the name of Niort, N-I-O-R-T,
    which is in the southwest of France,
    near the city of Bordeaux.
    And so that's the city we went to live in.
    And we rented a small apartment.
    And I have been back to visit.
    And what were your parents doing at this time?
    Were they trying to find a way to leave France?
    Well, they were checking with the embassy
    to see what had happened with their visas.
    And then they were arranging for--
    at some point-- and as a kid, I don't know what point it was.
    At some point they developed a plan B, which was just
    as well they had a plan B.
    Plan A was to go to--
    Sorry?
    Plan A was to go to the US?
    Right.
    And so what was the backup plan?
    Well, let me say a word about plan A first.
    Yes, sir.
    Max-- by this time Pearl Harbor had happened
    and the US had joined the war.
    So this is early 1942?
    Well, hm.
    I'd say, I suppose so, yes.
    I'm not sure.
    I'm not very precise on my dates because my memory is fuzzy
    anyway.
    That's OK.
    Max, who had this visa--
    this student visa, decided that in order
    to help us get the US visa more rapidly he had his own plan.
    His plan was, he would join--
    he would volunteer for the US Army.
    And he would write a letter to President Roosevelt explaining
    the sacrifice he was doing for his new country.
    And could the president do anything
    to get us visas more quickly?
    [LAUGHTER]
    Really?
    That's what he did.
    And we will never know if it did any good or not.
    But in 1941--
    This was '41.
    And in '41 there was no sign of visas yet--
    American visas.
    And so my parents had to come up with plan
    B. Plan B was to find another place that maybe would accept
    us that would be a safer place to wait for the American visas.
    And they found such a place in Cuba.
    But I don't know if you want me to start on that.
    Well, would-- does this seem like a good stopping--
    Sorry?
    Can you speak louder and slow?
    Yes, sir.
    Do you think this is a good place to stop part 1?
    Yeah.
    Yes, I think so.
    OK.
    Is there anything that you wanted to add at this point?
    Or should we end part 1?
    No.
    At this point, no.
    But the next time we talk I may have an addition to make--
    Yes, sir.
    Absolutely.
    --if possible.
    Well, Dr. Fiks, I want to thank you again
    for taking the time to talk with me today.
    And this concludes part 1 of the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum interview with Dr. Alfred Fiks on August 18,
    2016.
    This is Part Two of the United States Holocaust Memorial
    Museum interview with Dr. Alfred I Fiks taking place
    on September 29, 2016.
    We left off Part One with you describing your travels
    from Berlin to Brussels, and then to Paris,
    where you met up with your father,
    and where your parents continued their efforts to get visas out
    of Europe.
    But before we go on, I think you had wanted to make a summary
    statement about Part One.
    Hello.
    OK.
    Thinking about my early childhood in Berlin,
    I was thinking of some way to summarize it
    adequately and accurately.
    And I would like to say the following.
    I consider that my early childhood in Berlin
    was very pleasant, and I was a happy little kid
    until the evil of Hitler and Hitlerism came out.
    So that-- I was happy until I get thrown out
    of public schools.
    I was happy until I got chased away
    from a military parade that went through the neighborhood
    by the Hitler-Jugend.
    And I was happy until Kristallnacht
    when glass splinters flew into my soup,
    and I was pulled out forcefully from under my bed hiding
    from hooligans who were coming around
    to break up our property.
    And I was happy until my father had to go into hiding
    and become a fugitive.
    So that's-- I would say that that summarizes it for me.
    Is there anything else you would like to add about Part One
    before we pick up in Paris?
    Well, to set a larger frame, perhaps, for the whole--
    for the whole interview is to say that our--
    we claim to have survived the light part of the Holocaust,
    because of the 10 year period of anxiety, tension,
    and having to escape from place to place in order to survive.
    And I would say that the 10 year period
    started in '33 with the arrival of Hitler,
    and ended in '43 with our arrival in New York City.
    But at the moment on the details, I think we are--
    we had left Berlin, my mother and I,
    just before the war started in Europe,
    and we were now in Paris.
    Shall I go on?
    Yes, sir, please.
    OK.
    Well, we arrived in Paris, and in a sense,
    it was a family reunion because my mother had
    a sister living in Paris, and my father
    had a brother living in Paris.
    So in a sense, it was family reunion.
    But it was also a period of very, very high tension
    and anxiety, because it was around summer or fall of 1939.
    And the European war started on the 1st of September, 1939.
    So the French were expecting an attack from the Germans
    any moment.
    And in the-- in all their foresight,
    they were predicting that there would be an attack using gas.
    And so the problem was to protect the citizens
    against gas attacks, as had been the case in World War
    One, which had ended some time ago.
    But the problem was that there were many refugees in Paris.
    We were not the only ones.
    There were refugees from many countries, not all Jewish--
    some Jewish, some not.
    There were many refugees in Paris.
    And the government was about to issue gas masks to protect
    the civilians, only there was one little problem
    that, although a large percentage of the population
    of Paris were refugees, there were only enough gas masks
    to hand out to French citizens.
    And so the advice that they gave by radio to refugees
    who wouldn't qualify for the gas masks, it sounds kind of funny
    now and we can laugh about it.
    But then, it wasn't so funny.
    They said the best--
    the best substitute you can-- if you don't have a gas mask
    and there is an attack, the best thing you can do
    is to find a used diaper, a baby's used diaper,
    and breathe through the urine smell of the baby.
    Really?
    That was the advice?
    That was the advice given us by the government
    to people without gas masks.
    Anyway, it seems like a long time ago and a different period
    of history.
    It was.
    But we-- it was decided that we and my aunt and her--
    two of her children, we would leave
    Paris to go live in-- to live in the countryside
    where things were quieter and there wasn't so much tension
    and anxiety.
    And we decided to--
    not we, I mean, I was a little kid,
    and I'm speaking now as an adult so a lot of years
    have filled in in between.
    But the adults decided that we would go to a city called
    Niort, N-I-O-R-T. And the reason being that somebody
    in the family, I believe, knew a man who worked in the local
    municipal government of this little town.
    It was a little town of about maybe 50,000 inhabitants,
    something like that.
    And that he would--
    he might be able to give us some protection in case
    the Germans came and occupied.
    And where is Niort?
    Niort is in the Department of Deux-Sévres,
    which is near Poitiers and Bordeaux, Southwest of France.
    Oh, I see.
    N-I-O-R-T.
    Yes, sir.
    OK.
    Well, anyway, so that's where we went.
    And the first place we lived in was a place out of a dream.
    Everyone called it the Chateau, meaning the castle.
    Because it was a large house, and it was on the edge of a--
    there was a river running through the property,
    and there were large gardens.
    It was idyllic.
    It was something out of a dream.
    So everybody called it the Chateau.
    And I can-- we were there--
    I don't know how long we were there.
    There was a group of us, not only our own immediate family,
    but other refugees were there, too.
    And it was a large house with many rooms.
    It seemed like it, anyway.
    I'm remembering as best I can.
    And it was a dream, not only in its location because
    of the river the children had--
    could play all day long in that area.
    There was even a rowboat down at the-- down at the bottom
    of the walkway to the river.
    So it was a dream come true.
    I had food.
    I never had before in Berlin, including
    artichokes, which seems like something very luxurious.
    And I was enchanted with the place.
    And I believe my parents were, as well, though I
    am talking from supposition.
    So we were there for, I don't know whether it was a few--
    it was at least a few weeks.
    And it might have been longer.
    But then for what--
    for reasons unknown to me as a child, I was eight at the time.
    I didn't know why, but we moved downtown in Niort.
    We stayed in Niort, but moved downtown to a street called
    Melaise, M-E-L-A-I-S-E, to Number 28, Melaise.
    And that was a memorable place for me.
    We had a-- we rented a single--
    a one-- we rented a single second story
    room for my parents and myself.
    But the room had no bathrooms.
    So I remember very, very well the pail--
    the bathroom pail that everybody used at night, for example.
    So that-- which had to be carried down in the morning
    and emptied out.
    And that was not a--
    it was not painful, but it was memorable.
    Did your aunt and cousins stay at the Chateau?
    No, they did not, no.
    They also moved to different little places in town.
    So my aunt lived about a block away.
    My aunt and my cousin lived about a block away.
    And so-- and our address, I think the--
    I don't know exactly--
    the Germans arrived sometimes in 1940.
    They occupied half of France, and including the-- including
    Niort.
    And across from our second floor room was no bathroom.
    We noticed that there was a place that
    at night played a lot of music, fairly medium loud,
    and had a lot of pretty women in it.
    So it was obvious that this--
    later on, I found out that it was
    a German soldiers' bordello, or prostitution house.
    But you see, the Germans are very, very orderly,
    even when they're carrying out evil missions.
    The military police would come around every night very,
    very late, I am told--
    I was told, and make sure that everybody--
    all the soldiers were out of Niort.
    The soldiers could not spend the night there.
    And this music had to stop at a certain hour
    so people could sleep.
    So that's why 28 women there was very memorable to me.
    And when I returned to France after the war,
    it was one address I visited with a great curiosity.
    OK.
    But then life went on.
    Being in the center of town didn't--
    it meant you had to play in the street,
    and the street was with cobblestones.
    So that was interesting, but slippery.
    They were slippery when-- especially after the rain,
    cobblestones were.
    One memory is one evening, my mother and I were visiting--
    I don't know whether it was my aunt--
    no, it couldn't have been my aunt.
    We were visiting some friends who lived
    on the other side of town.
    And we were on our way home--
    now, I should preface this by saying that my mother was
    a fairly attractive woman.
    And so-- that was obvious.
    So when my mother and I were on the way home,
    we suddenly heard that someone was walking behind us.
    And it turned out to be two German soldiers.
    And we got scared and began to walk a little bit faster.
    And then they walked faster.
    And it seemed like they were beginning to talk to my mother,
    and it seemed like they had had a few drinks under their belt.
    So we began walking really fast hand in hand,
    walking in the direction of our apartment, our room,
    as fast as we could, and feeling a little bit
    of-- a little bit of anxiety.
    Of course, they didn't know that we understood German.
    When they said-- one said to the other one--
    no, he didn't say it to the other one.
    He said it to us without knowing that we understood German.
    He said, [GERMAN],, which means, don't be afraid,
    we're just Austrians, not Germans, you see.
    But of course, they were in the German army.
    And my mother and I looked at each other
    and smiled, but walked as fast as we could anyway.
    And that was-- that experience-- that instance
    got recorded in my memory.
    Another instance that I remember was, once-- about once a month,
    I believe, each Jewish family had to report to the German
    command office, or the Kommandantur, with a K,
    K-O-M-M-A-N-D-A-T-U-R. [INAUDIBLE]..
    Somebody from the family had to come with documents
    to have them stamped once a month,
    because they were tracking their prey quite assiduously.
    Now what-- while my mother and I were standing
    in line, a German officer who was kind
    of in the-- walking around the office to make sure
    that everyone was behaving, he came over
    and he picked me up in his arms.
    And this really-- well, he--
    I don't know if he was--
    I say German, obviously.
    He was an officer in the German army with German uniform.
    He might have been Austrian.
    I don't know.
    But this officer picked me up in his arms,
    and I thought he was about to eat me alive,
    which is funny now.
    But at that time, it wasn't so incredulous.
    And now, he-- what he did then was
    to take out his wallet from his pocket,
    and take out a photograph to show my mother his child,
    to show her a photo of his child.
    And this showed an amount of humanity
    that one was not used to witnessing
    from German soldiers.
    So perhaps, he indeed was Austrian, possibly.
    And what was-- what was my-- what
    was his motive in doing that?
    I don't know.
    As I say, my mother was an attractive woman,
    so he might have been--
    he might have wanted to start a conversation with her.
    But-- or--
    I don't know.
    Maybe he was just being a human being.
    And I remember that as an unlikely event during the war.
    In the following year in 1940, I had an interesting experience
    in that my parents, my father and mother for reasons
    unknown to me, were arrested by the French police
    and placed into the local jail.
    In Niort.
    In Niort.
    This was all in Niort.
    And I had the memorable experience
    then of carrying a meal of--
    of carrying a good meal to jail for them
    every once a day that my aunt would cook,
    and I would carry the food to the jail.
    And then after about two or three weeks,
    they were released.
    I don't know why they were arrested,
    and I don't know why they were released.
    And somehow after we got to the US, very, very seldom
    that anyone ever speak of the period since 1933.
    The period was so traumatic that one did not
    want to recall anything.
    And I being a little kid in the new country,
    I was more interested in learning about the new country
    than in learning ancient history.
    During the time that they were in jail--
    Sorry?
    During the time that they were in jail,
    were you by yourself in the apartment?
    I don't remember.
    I don't know if I moved in with my aunt, or if I stayed.
    It's unlikely that I would have stayed alone.
    I probably moved in with my aunt, but I don't know.
    I see.
    All right.
    Now, as I say, in 1940, French was
    half occupied and half free.
    The word free in quotation marks,
    because the Germans put in a French--
    a government of French leaders, but friendly to Germany.
    So that was the free part.
    I think it was a fig leaf to--
    not to take-- see, because France had declared Paris
    an open city, which means they were not
    going to fight the Germans to take it,
    because they did not want to see Paris get destroyed.
    And so Paris was declared an open city.
    The Germans moved in almost casually,
    and not being noticed.
    And they set up this half--
    this government and half France, the southern half,
    with Nazi leaning Frenchmen in the command.
    Also at this time, '40, '41, my parents--
    and especially, I guess, after the jailing,
    my parents decided that they needed a Plan B,
    because we might never get the US visa as we might be dead
    before we got the US visas.
    And so Plan B was put into effect.
    What did it consist of?
    Well, first of all, the key to it
    was that Max, my brother in New York,
    was going to try to arrange visas to Cuba.
    Cuba, at that time, was one of-- one
    or two countries that was accepting Jewish refugees.
    No other country was accepting Jewish refugees,
    as the incident with the ship called the St. Louis in 1939
    proved that the US certainly wasn't going
    to accept Jewish refugees.
    And nobody among the refugees ever
    thought about entering illegally.
    They wouldn't know how, anyway.
    Anyway, the first part of the plan was--
    not the first, but the principle part of the plan
    was for Max to arrange visas to Cuba as a place
    to wait, a safe haven--
    a safe place to wait--
    to await the US visas, if it took another three years
    or five years or 10 years.
    So he had-- so he was working on that.
    Meanwhile, we had to make our--
    we had to put in to--
    get to a place where we could get transportation to Cuba.
    From where we were in Niort, the closest place
    would be either Portugal or North Africa.
    So we had to sneak illegally across the border--
    quote, end quote-- between--
    we were in the occupied part in Niort, you see.
    And we had to walk across the frontier to so-called free
    France, or Vichy France, because the seat of the government was
    in a town called Vichy, V-E-I-C-H-Y, I believe.
    Yes, sir.
    Same place where they make a lot of bottled water.
    You may have heard of Vichy water.
    We had-- we worked--
    they would look-- they were local farmers who
    were leading groups.
    I don't know how often.
    I don't know if every night, or just once a week,
    or once in a month.
    But in order to make extra money, they would lead groups.
    I don't know.
    A lady in our group was between five or 10 people in it.
    And they led the group--
    at first, they took the group from places like Niort
    to a central meeting place closer to the border,
    and then in trucks.
    And then getting off the truck, one
    would have to walk across the border.
    And then on the other side, they would have arranged another
    truck to take us to Limoges, L-I-M-O-G-E-S,
    which is a city in the so-called free part.
    Anyway-- but Limoges was the first step in the free part.
    So we walked across the border one night, but--
    and we-- my mother begged my--
    her sister, my aunt, to come with us,
    and she wouldn't, because she thought
    she was protected by the fact of being a French citizen,
    and the fact of having two out of three children
    born in France.
    So she thought she was safe.
    But she wound up in Auschwitz several years later.
    And my mother, of course, and the rest of us,
    we feel bad about that she didn't pay attention
    to us in '41.
    Walking across that border was interesting,
    because it was not-- it was hilly, it was a hilly walk--
    not mountainous, but small hills.
    And my mother, unfortunately, on the trip, panicked.
    And the reason she panicked was because we
    were at the top of a hill, and we were heading downward.
    And in the valley below, she saw what she
    believed was a lake of water.
    And she panicked.
    And she said she is not going to go into any water.
    And it was dangerous because there
    were German patrols with dogs that would control
    that border periodically.
    We could hear the dogs in the distance barking.
    But it was explained to her--
    to my mother, eventually, that it was not water
    at the bottom of the hill in the valley, it was fog.
    So first, she didn't believe that.
    But she came around to believing it
    and calmed her down a little bit.
    And we made it through safely, and we got to the truck
    on the other side, and got as far as Limoges.
    In Limoges, we had the address of a safe house that
    would put us up for the night.
    So we went looking for that safe house to rest our weary heads.
    But we found out it was full-- it was full up and there was no
    room--
    no room at the inn.
    And-- well, I don't know.
    As a little kid, I didn't--
    I missed a lot of information, obviously.
    But luckily, we found--
    we made contact with a lady, a local lady,
    who rented us a one bed in--
    one bed for three people--
    for the three of us in her attic,
    no blankets, and we had to use a mattress to cover ourselves
    with.
    And of course, you understand that since we were illegal
    now in the free French zone, we had no papers.
    If she had called the police on us,
    we would have been finished.
    But I remember that night in that
    it was one of the experiences that
    will stay with me for the rest of my days.
    Another one is we were heading--
    our objective was to head to Marseilles,
    the big port in the South of France,
    where we would catch a ship to take us
    from Marseilles to Casablanca in Morocco, which
    is in North Africa.
    Where in theory, we would catch another ship
    which would take us to Cuba.
    I didn't know this-- all of this ahead of time,
    but I know it now.
    Yes, sir.
    But back in 1941, you see, food was rationed--
    food was rationed.
    And maybe for any readers or listeners to this treatise,
    we should mention that it was before computers,
    and it was before cell phones, so that communication
    and information flow were still a little bit--
    well, how shall I say it--
    checkered, like Swiss cheese.
    And we-- happily, we were able to find the holes through
    the Swiss cheese, because the people-- the German--
    neither the French nor the German authorities
    on the free side knew that we had left our abode in Niort
    without official permission.
    Because when you're going to sneak across the border,
    it's best not to alert your hunters.
    Yes, sir.
    So being in Limoges without papers, we didn't have food--
    and food was rationed--
    food was rationed.
    You couldn't do-- even if you had the money,
    you couldn't buy the food unless you had coupons
    for whatever you wanted to buy.
    And we were hungry.
    And so we-- I helped my mother make half a bread heist,
    I think of it.
    It wasn't really a heist because we paid for two--
    we bought-- we had a coupon for one loaf,
    but we needed two in order to last us the day,
    the three of us.
    And so thanks to our own abilities,
    and local confusion, and maybe the bread lady's connivance,
    or liberalism, or humanity, we were-- we
    carried out two loaves of bread.
    We were only allowed--
    officially, we were only allowed one.
    Although, we paid for two loaves,
    we only had coupons for one.
    So that was that that was..., that put the dot on the Limoges
    I.
    OK.
    Though, now we were on route, we made our way to Marseilles--
    And can-- I'm sorry, Dr. Fiks, can I ask you a question?
    Sure.
    So back when you said that it was
    the local farmers that were helping
    people get across the border--
    Yes.
    --do you know how your parents came into contact with them,
    or how they found out that these farmers were doing this?
    I had no idea how they came into contact.
    Everybody-- my aunt, for example, in Niort,
    once a month, she would do a--
    everybody would-- people--
    in war time, people have to--
    often have to do things that are illegal according
    to the authorities to survive.
    My aunt, for example, she was earning her livelihood
    by once a month taking a trip to Paris by train.
    And in Niort, chickens were plentiful,
    because there were local farms around.
    So she bought, I don't know how many, maybe 10 chickens,
    and she put them in a big sack, like a flower sack.
    And she traveled on the train with this.
    And in Paris, she would sell those chickens.
    I don't know if she sold them all at once, or one at a time.
    And then-- then in Niort, the thing that was scarce was coal.
    And so in Paris, you would buy coal,
    which was available in Paris, and fill that same--
    I don't know if it was the same sack.
    I hope it was a different sack.
    And fill another sack with the coal
    to take back to Niort to sell it in Niort.
    That's how she made her living.
    I tell you, I bring up the story to indicate that
    in order to survive, many people who
    do not have independent money--
    sources of money have to do things
    that are not officially blessed or authorized.
    So these farmers, they are hurting for money, too.
    And I don't know how the contact was made-- how my parents made
    the contact, but just talking to people
    and asking for what kind of services you were looking for,
    somebody would know about someone who did that.
    Should I go on?
    Yes, sir, please.
    OK.
    So we made-- we made our way to Marseilles
    and we boarded the ship without any problem.
    Now, here what's important-- here what's interesting is that
    if it were--
    if it were today, we wouldn't be able to do
    that because they would pick us out easily
    from a computer list.
    But there were no computer lists in those days.
    And I think through the lack of computer lists,
    we were able to get away from Marseilles.
    So you were able to--
    But I noticed that--
    we notice and my parents talked about it afterwards,
    that although this was free France,
    the last man down the gangplank from the ship
    was a German officer to give the permission to leave.
    So if he had known that there was any illegals on board,
    he could have said, no, the ship won't leave unless-- until we
    get this person off.
    But you were able to successfully sneak on.
    Huh?
    Say again, please.
    But you and your family were able to successfully sneak on.
    You were able to get on the ship.
    We were able to get out of France, right.
    OK.
    And now, that ship, to get from Marseilles,
    we sailed through the Mediterranean westward.
    And then we had to sail around the corner of Africa there.
    But there is a straight, it is a very narrow border
    between Africa and Spain.
    They come together very--
    in Gibraltar.
    The Rock of Gibraltar is right there.
    And that's-- the waterway between Africa and Europe are
    called the Straits of Gibraltar.
    At that time, Gibraltar was still an English possession.
    I believe now, they're more--
    they're independent, or part of Spain.
    I don't know.
    But in those days, we were buzzed--
    in other words, we were inspected
    by an English airplane while we were
    going through the Straits of Gibraltar.
    They wanted to be sure that this wasn't a ship to--
    friendly to the Germans, bringing supplies
    to the Germans.
    They didn't know whether the ship
    would turn right or left after crossing
    the Straits of Gibraltar.
    But anyway, we were also lucky when
    we were buzzed by the English Royal Air Force
    with their round red, white, and blue emblem.
    And I was happy that they didn't shoot us, or sink us, or bomb
    us mistakenly.
    Anyway, we arrived in Casablanca,
    which is right around the corner from Gibraltar.
    And I'm sorry, but before we talk about Casablanca,
    could you tell me a little bit about the ship and the trip
    from Marseilles?
    Was it--
    It was-- well, we stopped at a few places on the way.
    One of them was called Oran, O-R-A-N.
    I think that's Algeria.
    So I can't really say very much, because I
    have no memory of anything memorable
    that happened to me on the way.
    All we notice is dark people on the shore, dark colored people.
    And that was proper, because we were looking at Africa.
    But there was none--
    I can't think of any memories in the few days
    that it took us to go to Casablanca.
    Do you remember if there were a lot of other people onboard,
    maybe other refugees or--
    Oh, yes, there were a lot of other people onboard.
    So it was a big ship.
    It was a big ship, yes.
    Yeah, it wasn't a small launch.
    It was a big ship.
    It was a big ship, and we arrived in Casablanca.
    Do you remember if-- were there other refugees like your family
    onboard?
    Well, looking back as an adult, I would suspect there were,
    but I wasn't aware of it at the time.
    And how did--
    I guess your mother, you mentioned
    that she was afraid of water when you
    were crossing into free France.
    How was she-- how was she on the trip?
    She didn't swim.
    But she didn't-- in a big ship, she didn't mind it.
    So is-- like you said, kind of on an uneventful
    trip to Casablanca.
    Yeah.
    Yes, I would say that, at least to my memory.
    I was 10 at the time.
    Shall I go on?
    Yes, sir, please.
    OK.
    We were-- I don't remember exactly how long--
    I think we were in Casablanca about three or four
    weeks waiting for another ship that should take us to Cuba.
    The other-- the new--
    the other ship we were waiting for
    was Portuguese, which was deliberate on someone's part,
    because Portugal was neutral in the Second World War.
    And so that increased our safety margin
    that nobody would torpedo the boat, or bomb the boat.
    But Casablanca gave me some memorable experiences.
    The place where they put us was interesting.
    They took us-- and we-- it must have been more refugees onboard
    than just us.
    I believe there must have been a maybe 100 or 200.
    The building was a large, large building, three
    or four floors tall, and it had an atrium in the center.
    And it had only one door, and no one was allowed out
    without permission.
    And in order to enforce that, I could see looking down
    into the atrium from a balcony that
    was all around the circle of the atrium,
    I could see a big Moroccan soldier, a big black skin
    soldier.
    He was wearing a fez.
    I don't know, maybe it's something not everyone knows
    what a fez is.
    A fez is a red, round hat made out
    of felt with a tassel in the middle.
    And he was wearing a fez standing guard every hour--
    every minute of every hour that I could see the front door.
    And he had on his shoulder a rifle all day long.
    And the rifle had his bayonet attached to it.
    So that would call the attention of a young boy.
    And it did.
    The menu-- the daily menu was interesting.
    We would get bread, hard boiled eggs, green olives, and water.
    That was it-- every day, once a day.
    I don't remember if it was brought once a day
    or twice a day.
    So that was our existence in Casablanca.
    But we were very happy that we were not in worse conditions.
    After some weeks, our ship arrived.
    Everyone was taken to the port by bus.
    The name of the ship was Serpa, S-E-R-P-A, Pinto, P-I-N-T-O,
    Serpa Pinto.
    And that gave us a very memorable--
    gave me a very memorable experience, the boarding
    process for the Serpa Pinto.
    It seemed like the Serpa Pinto was entirely for the refugees.
    And I'll tell you why in a moment.
    There were several buses heading down to the port.
    And when people got there, they lined up.
    The-- they would check people's passports and visas
    before being allowed on board.
    It was a long line, as I said, but our turn finally came,
    but there was a problem, a memorable problem.
    The Cuban visas that we had had an expiration date on them,
    which was about two or three days before we would get there.
    So that the visas would be expired by the time
    we got there.
    The captain was so exacting that he wouldn't let us on the ship.
    Now, we felt our--
    we felt ourselves so close to success on Plan B,
    to have this happen was destroying to my parents.
    Negotiations went on between the ship's captains
    and the refugee organization people, who luckily were there.
    My parents and I were back on the dock
    walking the length of it back and forth, back and forth.
    All the people who had already boarded lined up at the railing
    to watch our drama below.
    My parents and I were very upset at this,
    and gradually felt more and more hopeless.
    I was afraid that my mother and father--
    or father were thinking about jumping
    in the narrow stretch of water between dock and ship
    and drowning themselves in order to end their agony.
    I kept walking between each of them
    in the edge of the dock trying to push them
    further and further away from the edge
    by convincing them that all would end up well here.
    I don't know if I convinced them, or myself, either.
    But after what seemed like an hour or two,
    the problem was indeed solved because they allowed us
    to board.
    Even our spectators clapped and cheered.
    My parents and I were crying with joy, and relief,
    exhausted.
    And you were 10 years old at this point?
    At this time, I was about 10 and a half, something like that.
    So at this point, even though you might not
    understand all of the details of what's going on, you--
    while you're down there waiting, you
    understand the importance of getting on that ship.
    I get the drift, yes.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    I got the drift.
    So now we were crossing the Atlantic.
    The Serpa Pinto was a cargo ship.
    It was not a passenger ship.
    The cargo was us.
    We refugees were the cargo.
    So bunks were built in the cargo hold below the waterline,
    three bunks high, three beds high, no portholes,
    if you get my picture.
    When the sea was rough, some people
    would get seasick and vomit.
    The ventilation left a lot to be desired.
    And so my favorite place was always up on deck,
    but my mother was not very keen on about that.
    Routine set in after about a week, and kids found other kids
    and started playing around until land, ho.
    Finally, after three weeks, we landed at a port.
    But there was a surprise in the port we landed at,
    because it was not Havana Cuba.
    It was Jamaica.
    Nobody had told me that, but maybe they told my parents.
    I don't know.
    Now, at that time, Jamaica was still a British colony.
    And so the reason for stopping in Jamaica was the following.
    The Brits wanted to check over the passengers cause--
    presumably looking for Nazi spies who were sneaking in
    with the refugees, kind of like ISIS
    Jihadis sneaking in with the migrants from the near east.
    But I was happy, because for a few days,
    we stopped in a bright and clean detention camp.
    We each got a clean towel and soap, which were luxuries then.
    The beds had blankets on them, which we didn't really need.
    And after a few days, we went back to the Serpa Pinto.
    We were not-- I was not told if they found
    any German spies, of course.
    A few days later in 1942, we arrived in Cuba.
    Probably in January, '42 we arrived in Cuba, very excited.
    And lo and behold, the problem of the expired visas
    never came up.
    Really?
    Joy of joys.
    Yes.
    We were beginning to learn the refugee routine.
    First, you're taken to a detention camp.
    Then they sort you out.
    This camp was called--
    in Cuba, this camp was called Tiscornia, T-I-S-C-O-R-N-I-A,
    on the outskirts of Havana.
    We were there about two or three weeks before we were dropped
    in Havana proper to find lodging in the private economy,
    in private houses.
    And what were-- what were those two to three weeks
    like in this camp?
    Oh, it was a ball.
    I mean, for me, it was a ball because it
    was just dawn to dusk playing with other kids.
    We couldn't-- we couldn't go outside the gates of the camp,
    but nobody bothered us inside the camp.
    So I was--
    I don't know what the state of mind was of my parents,
    because I was a 10, 11-year-old kid.
    But we were happy to--
    when we transferred from the camp to a private residence.
    We found an adequate room for the three of us to sleep in,
    with kitchen and bathroom privileges
    shared with the owner.
    The owner was a very nice older widow
    living with her grown son in a row house in old town--
    in Old Havana--
    Havana Vieja.
    The address was Obrapia--
    the name of the street was Obrapia, O-B-R-A-P-I-A,
    Number 506.
    We had an upstairs bedroom with a balcony on the street.
    I liked Havana very much, except for large cockroaches sometimes
    in the house, and sometimes in the street, which
    I had never seen in Europe.
    I was-- it was a different world to me.
    I enjoyed it-- the climate, the people, the language, the food.
    I loved mangoes and fried plantain.
    And of course, as soon as we got into town,
    my parents would contact the local US Embassy
    to let them know that we were still alive and still waiting.
    Were your--
    OK.
    We're getting pretty close to the climax
    here, because in 1943, the spring of '43, success arrived.
    Our US visas were finally granted
    five years after my father applied for them in Berlin.
    Wow.
    How many refugees, I asked myself afterwards,
    with less luck or less resources had died in the interim.
    What was it--
    But we-- huh?
    What was it like when you found out that the US
    visas had come through?
    Oh, it was unbelievable joy.
    It was unbelievable joy.
    And it was--
    I would see my brother again, and I would be free again.
    And, well, I don't know any of that at the time,
    but I mean, looking back now.
    And it would be my first flight.
    But taking Pan American Airways from Havana to Miami
    gave me a memorable experience, as well.
    Of course, everybody wanted to go to Miami,
    because that's where--
    to the US because that's where the streets are paved in gold.
    That was a myth that refugees believed in.
    It was my-- as I say, it was my first flight and--
    but when we got on board the plane,
    I could hardly see outside to see
    what the airport looked like.
    All the windows had cardboard covers kind of
    jammed into them.
    Really?
    So to keep people from looking out, I suppose.
    But as you know, little boys are curious animals.
    So I bent the cover of my window cover--
    I bent the cover of the cardboard
    on my window, just one corner of it, to see a bit of the airport
    that we were sitting in.
    And that apparently set off an alarm
    because a stewardess came over.
    I got nervous, especially when she asked for my wristwatch.
    Now, you'll never guess why she asked for my wristwatch.
    They had to examine it to make sure that it was not a camera,
    and that I was not a spy.
    Really?
    Even though 12 years old--
    11 years old.
    Oh, wow.
    It sounds funny in retrospect, but it
    wasn't funny at the time.
    In those days, the world was at war and values changed,
    and people's reactions changed from what
    they are in normal times.
    You want to ask me anything?
    I guess, when she took your wristwatch,
    did she tell you why she was doing that, or was it just--
    No, no, she didn't.
    --give it to me?
    I don't know if she did or she didn't.
    I really don't know.
    And what did-- what did your parents think?
    But if she didn't tell me, then I imagined it--
    I imagined the reason.
    It's the only one I can see as an adult doing
    an analysis on cardboard covers or the windows on airplanes.
    And were you sitting with your parents when this happened?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    And were they worried?
    But what did they think?
    Well, I don't know.
    It was a relatively--
    it was not a major thing.
    I think it just took a few minutes so that--
    it passed over very quickly and I
    think I'm the only one who remembers it.
    I doubt that my parents would remember it.
    And before we go on, I want to go back to the time
    that you're living in Havana.
    What-- besides working on the visas, what
    were your parents doing while you were living in the city?
    Were they working or--
    Well, OK.
    That's an interesting question, because they--
    on the refugee visas that we got would not have
    permitted my father to work.
    Because if my father worked, he would take a job away
    from a Cuban--
    from a Cuban.
    I see.
    And the government wouldn't like that.
    So during the day, they wouldn't do very much of anything.
    They would read and write, you go for walks.
    My father would report down to the Cuban office--
    the Cuban police office very frequently.
    I don't know why.
    But we had a funny event happened there.
    My father being German in his behavior, and much of it--
    and some of his behavior, he would not--
    I mean, Cuban--
    Cuba is a tropical island, as you know,
    with pretty fairly warm temperatures.
    But he would not leave the house without a jacket on.
    So apparently, his visits to the police
    were not welcomed by the police.
    There was no point in him going down there.
    I don't know why he was going there.
    But the funny part of it was that on one occasion,
    they grabbed him by the scruff of the jacket,
    and they pushed him out the door.
    They couldn't communicate, because the languages.
    So they would put-- they pushed him out of the door,
    and he nearly fell on the road-- in the road, in the street.
    But he-- then he understood that he shouldn't come down there.
    But that was funny.
    And we were living--
    we were getting a small amount of money from the--
    the Joint Distribution Committee was an organization
    devoted to helping Jewish refugees who
    were fleeing Nazism.
    And so I believe my parents were getting a small monthly sum.
    I don't know how they were receiving it,
    but they were receiving it to keep them with some cash.
    Should I go on?
    Well, I was going to--
    I was going to ask, so while your parents are not working,
    I know there was the language barrier.
    But did you go to school at all, or did your parents maybe
    continue your lessons in some way?
    I do not remember going to a school in Havana.
    Well, I remember going to some classes
    to begin learning English, but I don't remember going to school.
    It's interesting, I'd never thought about that before.
    Good question.
    Yes, I-- that's interesting.
    I wonder why I didn't go to school.
    Maybe they didn't want refugee's kids in the school
    to take up room and teachers.
    I don't know.
    I don't know the explanation.
    But you do remember going maybe not to a school,
    but somewhere to start learning English.
    I do.
    Did--
    But that was maybe one or two hours a week.
    Did your parents go to these classes, too?
    No.
    They were-- I don't know.
    They should have, but they didn't.
    So--
    And during this entire time, y'all are writing to Max
    so that he knows what's happening and he knows that
    y'all are coming to the US.
    Yes, I assume so.
    Although, I did not write to him, but I assume my parents
    did.
    Max at this time was doing an interest-- no,
    no, not at this time.
    Well, yes, at this time.
    At this time, Max was going to university in New York.
    That was his-- that was the purpose of his visa--
    the visa he had gotten.
    And that's what he was there for.
    But he decided to drop out of university and volunteer--
    now, this was-- we're talking about--
    well, OK.
    Now, the US went into the war on December 7, 1941, I believe--
    Yes, sir.
    --with Pearl Harbor.
    So it must have been after that, because he volunteered
    for the US Army because he was-- one, he was patriotic
    and he wanted to beat Hitler.
    And number two, he thought it might
    help his parents and brother get American visas faster.
    So after he volunteered for the US Army,
    he wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, Franklin Delano
    Roosevelt, to call his--
    to call his action to the attention of his president
    to see what he could do for our visas.
    I doubt that President Roosevelt ever saw the letter,
    or that it helped at all with the visas.
    But it was a memorable event, memorable story
    to keep in mind.
    Yes, sir.
    OK.
    Then shall I go on?
    Yes, please.
    OK.
    So I got my watch--
    I got my watch back on the Pan Am flight.
    And I just got--
    just got scolded not to bend the cover back of the window.
    They didn't want people to take pictures of airports,
    you see, in wartime, because it might
    have some military significance if some other country wanted
    to bomb the airport, or something like that.
    We landed in Miami.
    But-- so the irony of me-- of Pan Am thinking I might
    be a spy was one small point.
    But a larger irony appeared when we landed in Miami.
    Because when we were going through immigration,
    each one of us got a small identification paper slip.
    It had on it our names.
    I don't remember if it had our photograph.
    I don't think so.
    Date of birth, et cetera, and then it has a stamped sign--
    stamped information sign on it, which said, enemy alien.
    Really.
    My father and mother and me enemies?
    We had just come from Germany where
    we had been considered enemies.
    So now we come to our safe haven and they, too,
    consider us enemies.
    The irony was great not at the moment,
    but a few years later when I looked at that slip of paper,
    it came through to me and hit me on the forehead.
    So you finally got to--
    It was-- it was not understandable till many years
    later, because our last nationality had been German.
    So that might be the reason they considered us enemy aliens.
    So you finally get to where you want to go,
    and you're given an ID that says you're an enemy alien.
    Right.
    Yes.
    But at least we did not get sent to another detention camp,
    which was a big accomplishment.
    And how marvelous a landed was where the door--
    those streets were not paved in gold,
    but the doorknobs were round instead of European style.
    And the windows opened up and down instead of European
    in and out.
    And everybody had a refrigerator.
    So I was in heaven.
    I hated drinking milk in Germany,
    because it was room temperature.
    And it usually had a skim on top of it.
    Whereas, in the US, I loved drinking milk
    because it was refrigerated.
    And so how long did you stay in Miami?
    How long-- not very long.
    Man, less than a week, I think.
    We took-- we would take-- we had arranged
    that we would be received by a cousin of my father
    who lived in Brooklyn, New York.
    So we were looking for trains to get to New York City.
    And our plan was that on the way to New York City,
    we would stop en route in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
    Because Spartanburg was home to Camp Croft, C-R-O-F-T.
    Camp Croft, in those days, was a US Army Infantry School where
    Max was in training, or refresher training.
    I don't know.
    So we stopped in and saw him.
    It was really something to meet my brother again
    after several years of separation
    and in US Army uniform.
    Yes.
    I would have loved to have been in the US Army
    to fight the Nazis.
    But my brother got to do it, even
    though I would have made a much better soldier than he.
    Now, the train connections from Miami
    to Spartanburg, South Carolina, and then again
    from Spartanburg to New York City
    were very, very challenging in 1943,
    especially without knowing English.
    One funny incident that happened on the way,
    after we saw Max for a few days--
    visited Spartanburg and Max a few days,
    we continued on north on the train.
    And we knew we had to go--
    to get to New York, we knew we had to change trains
    in Washington, DC.
    So we got on the--
    Spartanburg was no problem because Max put us
    on the right train to get to Washington.
    In Washington, DC, we had to--
    we had to get off and look for the train to New York.
    Here's where the incident occurred.
    We were looking for somebody to ask,
    where's the train to New York in any several-- any
    of several other languages, not including English.
    So we were walking through-- in the train station,
    and we saw a young man with a sweater on.
    And on his sweater, he has a large--
    the letter F, like in Frank.
    The letter F was-- a very large letter F
    was sewn on his sweater.
    So my mother reasoned that that must indicate that he
    speaks francais, French.
    But unfortunately, that theory didn't work out very well.
    But we did finally find the train to New York,
    and we did finally make our way to Brooklyn,
    to the Brooklyn apartment of the cousin of my father
    who was going to put us up for a [CUT OFF] established
    in the new world.
    So that's the end of that second part of my life.
    This is part three of the United States Holocaust Memorial
    Museum oral history interview with Dr. Alfred I.
    Fiks on November 3, 2016.
    At the end of part two, we got cut off.
    The phone shut down.
    But we left off with your arrival in Brooklyn
    and staying with your father's cousin.
    So Dr. Fiks, could you please tell me a little bit more
    about Brooklyn?
    What was it like?
    Well, OK.
    I was quite happy in Brooklyn trying
    to adapt to a new life, a new language, new foods,
    new customs.
    But even though I had taken some language lessons
    in Cuba, some English lessons in Cuba,
    I was having a rough time with the language.
    I'll give you one example.
    Now at this point, I am 12 years old.
    It's 1943.
    So they sent me to the candy store.
    They give me a quarter and told me to go to the candy store
    to buy some candy.
    So I went.
    I did not understand the instructions,
    but I was going to repeat them monkey wise.
    But when I came back, everybody had
    a great time laughing at me because I
    brought back two candles.
    Instead of the candy?
    So I still had a lot of work to do
    with my language and my comprehension.
    But that came.
    I believe I went into sixth or seventh grade in school.
    I started that as soon as we got to Brooklyn.
    And that helped.
    And a lot of kids were friendly and helped me.
    Without knowing anything about baseball, I was told to--
    when people asked me what kind of baseball fan I am,
    I was told to reply, Yankee.
    I had no idea what that meant, but that's what I replied.
    So when you started school, you were learning English
    as you went along.
    I'm sorry?
    So when you started school, you were learning English
    just as you went along?
    It was an English school.
    It was in Brooklyn public school.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    OK.
    The apartment where we were living with my father's cousin
    was very close to Ebbets Field, where at that time,
    the Brooklyn Dodgers were playing all the time.
    That was their home court.
    And so all the cheering and the yelling and the applause
    could be heard clearly from the apartment
    because it was only two blocks away,
    this stadium, Ebbets Field.
    And I think it was a few years later, a few years after that,
    it was about '49 that the yelling even became louder
    because Jackie Robinson, who was the star player of the Brooklyn
    Dodgers and the first Black American
    to play in the big leagues, was playing.
    And it was part of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
    And so we were quite aware of what was going on
    in the baseball world.
    Let's see.
    So how-- I'm sorry.
    Go ahead.
    We didn't stay too long with the cousin.
    We soon took our own apartment because my father obtained
    employment, landed a job in Manhattan
    working in a fur factory.
    And so we had an income now, which
    we didn't have for a few years.
    And we got our own apartment, also in Brooklyn, maybe
    about a mile away from my cousin's house.
    And then I went to a different public school.
    And that worked out OK.
    Public school, I don't have any particular memories about it.
    I guess you graduate from eighth grade, if I remember correctly
    and go to high school after that.
    And that's what I did.
    When I graduated public school, I
    went to Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn.
    And I felt quite grown up there because well, first of all,
    in June of '48, I wrote an essay describing our escape
    from Hitler.
    It was called We Sought Freedom.
    And lo and behold, I entered it in an essay competition,
    and behold, I won first place with my little essay.
    Oh, wow.
    And I still carry the prize around with me until this day
    because it was a very useful tool for a wordsmith.
    It was a thesaurus, Roget's Thesaurus.
    And it's inscribed, First Place Winner Richard Young Essay
    Contest, Alfred Fiks, da da da da da, 1948.
    So it's one of my prized possessions,
    as you can imagine.
    Yes, sir.
    About this time, our family grew by one member.
    Not that my mother had a baby.
    But what happened was that when we
    were living in France, in Niort, and my mother's sister was
    living nearby, about a block away,
    she had living with her one boy and one girl.
    And the girl, of course, would be my cousin.
    And they would both be my cousins.
    But we're now after the war, you see.
    And Faye, my mother pleaded with her sister
    to come with us when we left Niort to walk over the frontier
    and make our way to Marseilles to escape to North Africa
    and Cuba.
    But she thought she was safe.
    She was safe because she was a French citizen
    and she didn't believe that the Germans would
    touch French citizens.
    About a year after we left, the Nazi doctrine of Jews
    had to wear a yellow star to identify themselves,
    that came into existence in France the year after we left.
    And soon after, one day short of walking on the street,
    and the police came and arrested her and put her on a truck, she
    and my cousin, my girl cousin.
    And it seems that there were two kinds of French citizens.
    One would be citizenship through being born in France,
    and the other was citizenship that
    is granted to you because you stayed in the country
    a certain number of years and applied for citizenship.
    And she was the latter kind of citizen.
    She was not born in France.
    She was born in Poland.
    And so they picked her up, and she ultimately--
    well, I'm getting ahead of the story.
    And she had her daughter with her.
    And her daughter would be my age,
    so that would be about nine years old, around nine.
    And she told her daughter she was
    going to hand the daughter of to a stranger in the street
    to show that the daughter would not be arrested.
    And the guards did not insist on it
    because her daughter was actually born in France,
    so she was a native born citizen.
    And it saved her life because her mother, my aunt,
    wound up in Auschwitz.
    And she was murdered in Auschwitz
    along with several other relatives.
    But the point is that after the war,
    she had two brothers, also my cousins.
    My cousin had two brothers.
    And so they were trying to organize their life again
    after the end of the war.
    And they decided that it would be
    best if their little sister went to live with her aunt, namely
    my mother, in Brooklyn.
    And that's what happened.
    So my cousin Faye came to live with us,
    and I suddenly had a sister.
    So that was a memorable thing.
    And it always made us feel bad that they did not come
    with us when we left Niort.
    And instead, my aunt was killed.
    So now, by the time that my cousin arrived,
    I was an established American, quote unquote.
    So I could take her under my wing
    and help her with her assimilation process.
    So meanwhile, at this time, I was in high school, as I said.
    And after the essay experience, there
    was one other memorable event when
    I was in a group of high school students,
    and we were working on a project, which
    was the following.
    Modern day Israel was established,
    was voted on by the United Nations in 1947.
    And Israel was re-established in 1948.
    And among the Jewish group, there
    was a lot of pro-Zionist feeling of helping
    this new Jewish state, which would be natural.
    And if Israel had existed in 1939,
    we would have had it much easier,
    and many, many people who are dead, who died,
    who were killed during the war would be alive
    because they would have had a place to run to.
    Well, anyway, this student committee
    wrote the story of an American Jewish military officer
    by the name of David Marcus, rank of Colonel,
    US Army, trained in West Point, because he volunteered
    to help the Israelis organize their army,
    train them to get them in better shape
    to withstand the attack by their Arab neighbors
    when independence was declared.
    And that's what happened.
    He was quite well-known there.
    And as a matter of fact, they made a movie out of it
    called Cast A Giant Shadow with Kirk Douglas.
    Probably before your time.
    But that was about the same person
    that we wrote the children's book about with illustrations
    and all.
    And it got published by the Brandt--
    I think it was the Brandt Publishing Company.
    So that was a high point of my high school education.
    And then after that, I got a BBA degree,
    a Bachelor of Business Administration,
    from the City University of New York.
    We're up to 1953 now.
    And before we go any further, let's
    jump back to when you arrived in Brooklyn.
    And so your family is there.
    What was Max doing during this time?
    I know he was in the army, and y'all visited him in South
    Carolina.
    But where did he go from there?
    Max is not with us because he's in the army.
    I think I mentioned that we visited him
    in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he
    was stationed in the military.
    Yes, sir.
    Camp Croft.
    And so he was in the army.
    And he spoke perfect French and German.
    And so the army, in all their wisdom,
    they sent him to the Aleutian Islands,
    which were off the coast of Alaska, where
    there would be no use for his German and French ability.
    Maybe they had him classified as an enemy alien, too.
    I don't know.
    Let's see.
    So he was still in the army when we arrived in Brooklyn.
    That's the answer to your question.
    And once he went to the Aleutian Islands,
    were y'all still able to keep in touch with him?
    Was he able to tell you about what he was doing?
    Well, he wrote to us, and he told us
    what life was like in the Aleutian Islands,
    that there was a girl behind every tree,
    but there were no trees.
    My brother was not a very physical person.
    He was more intellectual and chubby.
    So the army correctly, probably, made him
    a personnel clerk in the army company where he was assigned.
    So that's where he was.
    Happily, the Japanese had left the Aleutian Islands
    before the US Army arrived there.
    Otherwise, the ending might have been different.
    Any other questions?
    Yeah.
    So I know you went to school.
    You started learning English.
    And your father started working at the factory.
    How did your parents adjust to life in America?
    How did--?
    How did your parents adjust to life in America?
    Well, they were very busy working
    trying to make a living.
    My father did not stay long in his job
    because he liked to be self-employed.
    He didn't like to work for others.
    So he opened a little store, first store right in Brooklyn,
    as a matter of fact, in the same building as we were living,
    which follows a pattern that they
    had been used to in Berlin, where the store also
    was in the same building as where we lived.
    So there was no commuting problems.
    I think I mentioned also that my brother had volunteered
    to join the army because he thought it might help our US
    visa application.
    But I doubt that it did.
    But in any case, he was trying all
    he could to get us to the states, and he succeeded.
    OK?
    Yes, sir.
    And did your mother work in your father's store?
    Oh, yes.
    Yes, indeed.
    Just like in Berlin, they really set up the Berlin model
    and replicated it, I guess, which would be normal.
    Rather than start from zero, they
    would repeat what had worked for them before.
    And so my mother was in the front receiving customers
    and talking to them.
    She was more sociable than my father,
    so that worked out fine because my father was
    in the back in the workshop where the work was done,
    and my mother was in the front receiving customers, talking
    to them, and making them feel important.
    And so she always worked, although--
    now one difference with Berlin is that in Berlin, we
    had Marie, who was the housekeeper, baby sitter, baby
    nanny, et cetera.
    But in Brooklyn, we did not have such a person.
    So my mother was doing double duty.
    How much news did you receive?
    Sorry?
    How much news did you receive about what
    was going on in Europe?
    Well, both my mother and I, we were always
    tuned into a radio and news station.
    So we were quite aware of the news.
    When we got to Brooklyn in 1943, the war was still going on
    and would not be finished until 1945.
    So we were quite interested.
    And they would read the New York newspaper that came out.
    One came out in German and one came out in Yiddish.
    They would read the newspapers and I
    would listen to the radio.
    So you were able to follow the events of the war
    as it was going on.
    Well, yes.
    Yes, because we had great interest in the subject.
    I remember to this day, in 1947, the United Nations General
    Assembly was voting on the resolution that would split.
    The resolution was on the partition
    of the land that was a British mandate, the land that
    now occupies Israel in Jordan, Transjordan.
    At that time it was Transjordan because it
    was on the other side of the Jordan River.
    And I remember my father and I listening to the vote
    as they called out the names of each country
    to receive their votes, yay or nay,
    on whether they were in favor of partitioning that territory
    between Jews and Arabs.
    And that resolution passed, to our delight.
    It passed.
    I'm very happy that it was supported by the US and all
    the European countries.
    The cynics in the world said that, well, that
    was just a squashing of their own guilt feelings.
    That's why they voted for the partitioning of that territory.
    But I think that was a great occurrence.
    And modern Zionism was set up to construct a Jewish homeland
    in the historical homeland, in historical Israel.
    And to a large extent, they did what the Zionist leaders
    of a century ago were planning.
    Of course, they hadn't counted on Hitler or the United
    Nations.
    But I think there is a point to be
    made that if there had been no Holocaust,
    there might be no Israel today.
    So in a way, we can say that maybe the innocent victims
    of the Holocaust who were slaughtered like animals,
    worse than animals, maybe they didn't die in vain.
    There are those fanatic Jews, whom
    I disagree with 1000%, a group of orthodox Jews
    who say that the reason for the Holocaust
    was that the Jews had stopped following the laws of Moses,
    the laws of God.
    That was the reason for God sending Hitler to punish them.
    And I think those people are either psychotic, idiotic,
    or worse.
    Anyway, I don't have any use for that kind of attitude.
    Let's see.
    Where was I?
    So you were asking about the news.
    And yeah, we were very much interested
    in news and the books that came out in that era,
    a book called Exodus after the name of a ship which
    was bringing refugees to what was then Palestine,
    and the British would turn them back.
    There was a lot of drama and a lot of passion
    that was used by both sides of the issue there.
    But I'm very happy.
    I'm a big friend of Israel's, not of the illegal settlements
    on the West Bank.
    But I'm supporting Israel that adapts to the 21st century
    as they are doing in the technological field.
    But that is not a half theocracy because I
    think the orthodox religious people have
    too much power there for the well-or
    the well-being of the country.
    But that's just my opinion.
    Well, OK.
    I graduated from high school.
    And then I went on to the City University of New York, which
    was a very convenient circumstance
    because New York and San Francisco
    were the only two cities that had free universities.
    And so I was able to attend City University of New York
    without having to worry about where do I
    get the money to pay for it.
    And I would go to my classes every day
    by subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
    And after my classes, usually in the morning,
    I would come in the afternoon.
    And in the afternoon I would have various part time jobs.
    I was a delivery boy for a drugstore.
    And then I worked for my father as well,
    helping him in the workshop.
    I was a delivery boy for fur coats
    when people wanted them brought to them.
    I would be earning $0.25 an hour,
    which enabled me to even save some,
    even though I spent a lot on going to the movies
    once a week with my friends.
    And what made you study?
    Hold on, please.
    OK, I changed ears again.
    I see.
    What made you decide to study business administration?
    Well, I was kind of forced into it
    because I had no other outstanding interests.
    And my parents were pushing me to study something
    that would enable me to take over the store
    when they retired.
    But you see, the best laid plans of mice and men,
    we know what happens to them.
    Even though they thought I was studying business
    administration, my major was in a new field
    called industrial psychology.
    So you told them that you were studying
    business administration while you were studying--
    And the degree I got is a BBA degree.
    Oh, I see.
    And I was attending classes at the business
    school of City University.
    But my major was industrial psychology,
    which was not exactly how to administer a store or set
    prices or customer relations or stuff like that.
    Industrial psychology dealt largely
    with learning and training of your workers,
    how to train them.
    And it dealt largely with psychometrics,
    mental measurements.
    I was in a part of psychology, which
    tries to be more scientific than the clinicians
    with the couches.
    And so based on the axiom in science that everything that
    exists in some quantity, so if you
    were looking for a person that had good aptitude in assembling
    small units of objects, then you might
    want to measure how good each applicant is
    in their psychomotor ability that they demonstrate
    on a test in their job interviewing situation.
    Or if your job requires high intelligence,
    you might want to measure the intelligence
    to see who were the smartest ones.
    That is psychometrics.
    It is the scientific method of constructing
    tests that would measure some aspect of human behavior.
    So this major, incidentally, set me up for a problem later
    on which I'll come to in a minute.
    But after I graduated from City, at that time
    it was called City College of New York.
    It was 1953.
    And I had to get a master's degree in order
    to be able to do anything in industrial psychology
    or to get a job.
    And so I applied to Penn State University.
    And in 1954, I received an MS degree, Master of Science
    in research psychology.
    And that was my first experience going to a US university
    with a campus.
    It was quite eye-opening.
    And this was at Penn State?
    Yes, at Penn State.
    And it was my first time of moving out of the house,
    out of my parents' house, or apartment.
    So I was becoming independent.
    And I had a normal interest in girls and women.
    So things were developing according to plan.
    I got my master's degree in 1954.
    But after that, I knocked around in a few different jobs, all
    with psychology, but in research psychology,
    not in the clinical counseling end of it.
    And in 1962, I have a PhD degree from Purdue University
    in Indiana.
    Now by that time, I am married and have one daughter, I guess.
    Yes.
    So life goes on.
    But I don't want to go into too much detail on my resume here.
    But after the doctorate, I worked for an outfit called
    Humrro, H-U-M-R-R-O, which is a Human Resources Research Office
    of George Washington University, who had a contract with the US
    Department of the Army to do research on psychological
    applications to their needs, whether it's marksmanship
    or interviewing prisoners or training their own people,
    or what have you.
    And I worked with HUMRRO for several years
    in problems of selection and training and language learning.
    We developed a course totally on tape
    in Vietnamese for American advisors
    who were heading over to Vietnam, which you may remember
    from your historical readings.
    And what interested you in psychology?
    How did you become involved with that back with your bachelor's?
    Well, I got interested in psychology
    because it was the only course I got an A in.
    And looking back, I don't know if it
    was the best choice for me.
    One never knows.
    You know, you can't do experiments with your own life
    because you never have a control condition.
    You never know what might have happened if A,B, C, D.
    So I could have used some psychological vocational
    counseling of my own, maybe.
    But I think that psychology fit me pretty well--
    not perfectly, but it fit me pretty well.
    And then the application of it to languages
    fit into my background because I was able to speak almost four
    of them.
    So that worked out OK.
    And after HUMRRO, I had some friends
    who worked with Peace Corps, the US Peace Corps.
    This was a program set up by President John F.
    Kennedy, which caught the imagination of many people
    for its idealism and its practical aspects.
    But I worked with them on foreign language training
    and on doing evaluation of their foreign language training.
    Let's see.
    From Peace Corps, the next project
    was with USAID, which is the US Agency for International
    Development, our so-called giveaway program.
    And AID would come to Congress every year asking for money.
    And Congress would say, well, how
    do we know that your projects are achieving anything or doing
    any good, whether the project is road building
    or setting up a clinic or setting up a health project.
    And so USAID put in a big effort to evaluate their own projects.
    And they evaluated them not using their own people,
    but using people like me who were hired on a contract basis
    to do the evaluations.
    And so I did evaluations in about a dozen
    different countries for USAID.
    And it was challenging work because on the one side,
    you got to see a lot of places and travel.
    But on the other side, the project people
    on whom you were dependent as the evaluator,
    they were not too happy to see you.
    And so there was a question of local resistance
    to giving you any information that you might find negative,
    for example.
    But everybody did their best pointing out
    strengths and weaknesses of projects, shortcomings,
    how can they be corrected.
    And then you had to have the people.
    But you couldn't force the people to read your report,
    your evaluation report.
    So my evaluation reports did not have too many readers,
    and that was a source of frustration to me.
    But it's one I had to live with.
    The money was pretty good, not wildly big,
    but it was adequate to live on.
    I was now a married man with two children.
    So this work with USAID led me to a job offer
    in West Africa as technical advisor
    to the West Africans Examinations Council.
    Now this would be 1970, '72.
    West Africa was largely--
    at that time, many were still colonies
    of various European countries.
    For example, Nigeria, where I was stationed,
    was a British colony until 1960.
    And as a British colony, how did they pick their high school
    graduates?
    Well, they used a British system of O level
    and A level examinations, which largely
    consisted of essay questions.
    And the essay questions would have
    to be sent to England for grading.
    The grades would have to be sent back to Nigeria.
    And the system was wide open for corruption,
    where the students who came from families who had money
    could afford to buy their child a certificate that they
    had graduated, graduation certificate
    from secondary school.
    But the poor people couldn't.
    So the US came along, and they were
    interested in getting the English influence out of there,
    US government was.
    So we were trying to set up the West African Examinations
    Council to do their own testing, not with essay questions,
    but with multiple choice true false questions
    and things that could be scored mechanically, maybe.
    And we were setting up the multiple choice examination
    models for the Nigerian Education Council, which was
    for all of West Africa, really.
    So I was working in Nigeria and Ghana
    for two years on that project with some success.
    And then the contract finished, period.
    And I returned to the United States.
    And so over the years, even going back to high school,
    did you ever talk with your family, or maybe your friends,
    about your experiences during the war?
    Very little.
    My best friends, they knew.
    But it was not a popular subject of conversation.
    No.
    And I was not especially interested in emphasizing that,
    either.
    I wanted to become better at my new life
    rather than talk about my old life.
    So instead of looking back, you wanted to focus on--
    Move forward.
    Yeah.
    Do you ever talk about your experiences today?
    Yes.
    I'm talking to you.
    Yes, sir.
    But guess, have you talked to your family, your wife
    or your children?
    Yes, yes.
    As a matter of fact, my Costa Rican son,
    he works with sound systems here.
    And so he also interviewed me, doing something
    similar to what you're doing on a less professional scale,
    of course.
    But he did the same thing because he had curiosity.
    Yes.
    And you know, you get to my point in life,
    you begin to look back and say, well,
    if I have any messages to leave people,
    you better get busy writing the message
    because your time is limited.
    So that's what we're doing.
    And Sigmund Freud was right.
    Sigmund Freud said sex is the most powerful motivation
    that there is, for, especially for men.
    And that's true, except when you get
    to be my age, when it becomes equally important to be
    able to point to some significance in your life,
    this question of what have I done with my life?
    Have I done anything significant?
    Well, not really.
    I did not get a Nobel Prize for any specialty.
    And the stuff I've written will never compete with Hemingway.
    So it's very difficult to find things
    that matter that you have done in your life.
    And that's why I was attracted to your program of your museum.
    And so you mentioned wanting to leave a message.
    Sorry?
    So you mentioned wanting to leave a message, your reason
    for recording the interview.
    If there's one thing about your experiences
    that you wish people knew or you think
    it's important to emphasize, what would that be?
    Well, that's the $64,000 question.
    Well, I don't know.
    My experiences have brought me to a position on God,
    for example.
    But I'm not so sure that my opinion about religion
    is relevant to other people because other people are
    reacting to the needs that they have experienced.
    They don't care what conclusions I have come to.
    If I come out and give you some short statement on why
    I believe that atheism is the most defensible position
    on the question of God, I'm not sure it's
    going to affect a single person's views.
    But anyway, you've tempted me, and I'll tell you now.
    I will state the basic reason why
    I am an atheist, because I try to live logically
    and scientifically and only believe things where I can
    have evidence of its existence.
    And I have had no evidence of any God or afterlife
    for anything like that.
    In addition, Christians and Jews,
    too, I suppose, they believe that--
    well, Jews call him Adonai or Yahweh or Jehovah.
    The Christians call him God the Father because the Christian
    God, it's a three-headed God with the Father, the Son,
    and the Holy Spirit.
    But talking about God the Father,
    who, incidentally, is the same God as the Muslims call Allah.
    Allah is God the Father to the Christians and God to the Jews.
    And I believe all three religions
    believe that God is one, all powerful, number two, all
    knowing.
    He knows everything.
    And three, all good.
    And my own thought about what happened to me in my childhood,
    and what happens in the world repeatedly in different places,
    is that there is so much unhappiness and misery
    and sickness and death and cruelty and injustice
    that where is this God who is all knowing,
    all powerful, and all good?
    He or she must be on strike.
    Anyway, that's the funny answer I come up with.
    But I think you get my message.
    Yes, sir.
    But you see, every person is working with their own history,
    not other people's history.
    That's why history is irrelevant.
    And that's why most people ignore history,
    and they commit the same errors over and over
    again because they don't learn from other people,
    because it's not natural to learn from other people's
    histories.
    You can only learn from your own history.
    And so here we are.
    My delight at being successful in reaching
    US soil, US territory, my delight
    will be shortened and diminished if it turns out
    that next Tuesday, the citizens of the US
    elect Trump president.
    If that happens, I will seriously
    re-examine my decision of having taken out American citizenship.
    And well, I don't live there anyway,
    but I'm still a US citizen.
    But if that event happens, I will
    be destroyed in my belief about the US
    because if anything else--
    I don't know, you may have read--
    do you read The New York Times?
    Some.
    Yes, sir.
    Anyway, Tom Friedman last week had a good column
    on with all the shortcomings of Hillary Clinton,
    the minimum requirement to become president is decency.
    And you know that Hillary Clinton,
    aside from all her other errors and faults,
    she is a very decent person.
    And you cannot say that about Trump because he is most
    indecent.
    And if that doesn't come through to the American voters,
    then I will be terribly, terribly disappointed.
    Anyway, I don't know.
    I think I've given you sufficient catharsis here.
    Is there anything about your wartime
    experiences that we haven't talked about that you
    would like to add?
    I don't know.
    Maybe I would have been better off in philosophy
    than psychology.
    But no.
    The short answer to your question is no.
    I thank you very much for having great patience
    and listening to my ramblings.
    No, thank you, sir.
    Well, if you don't want to add anything right now,
    we can always do an addition later.
    But it sounds like we will conclude.
    So thank you again, Dr. Fiks.
    This is very much appreciated for all three
    parts of your interview.
    And this concludes the United States Holocaust Memorial
    Museum interview with Dr. Alfred I. Fiks.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Dr. Alfred I. Fiks, born on June 2, 1931 in Berlin, Germany, discusses his parents and their immigration to Germany from Poland; his father’s service in the Russian army during World War I; going to the Tiergarten in Berlin with his nanny, Marie; his brothers, Max and Fritz; the death of Fritz; the fur coat store owned and operated by his parents; the tradition of going to synagogue for the high holidays; his parents’ desire and efforts to integrate into German society; his family’s apartment near Kurfürstendamm; watching a military parade and being told to leave by a member of the Hitler Youth; being thrown out of public school and sent to a Jewish school in 1937 or 1938; antisemitic propaganda; the revocation of his parents’ German citizenship in 1934; how Max was able to get a student visa to the United States; his parents’ unsuccessful efforts to acquire visas to the US in 1938; his family’s experiences during Kristallnacht; his father’s in-depth letter to Max describing Kristallnacht; his father’s escape to Paris, France; his father arranging visas to France for him and his mother; traveling by train to Brussels, Belgium and then to Paris; reuniting with his father; Max’s decision to join the US Army and his letter to President Roosevelt; moving to Niort, France; getting visas to Cuba; (Part 2) the fear of gas attacks in Paris; living in the country outside of Niort; moving to downtown Niort; encounters with German soldiers; the arrest of his parents; the German occupation of France; escaping to Limoges, France with the help of local farmers; his aunt’s refusal to leave Niort and her later deportation; traveling to Marseille, France; sneaking aboard a ship to Casablanca, Morocco; staying in Casablanca for a few weeks with other refugees; the Serpa Pinto’s captain’s initial refusal to allow the family to board the ship; the ship’s three-week journey from Casablanca to Havana, Cuba; stopping in Jamaica and spending a few days in a detention camp; arriving in Cuba; spending a few weeks in the Tiscornia detention camp; moving to Old Havana and adjusting to life in Cuba; his parents receiving money from the Joint Distribution Committee; attending English classes; receiving visas to go to the US in the spring of 1943; flying to Miami, FL; receiving an identification card with a stamp reading “enemy alien”; reactions to life in the US; traveling by train to visit his brother Max at Camp Croft in Spartanburg, SC; going to live with his father’s cousin in Brooklyn, NY in 1943; the fate of his relatives; keeping up with world events during and after the war; the creation of Israel; earning his bachelor's degree in business administration with a major in industrial psychology; earning his master's degree and later PhD; marrying and having children; his interest and career in psychology and languages; traveling and living internationally; not talking much about his wartime experiences; and his thoughts on religion, history, and his US citizenship.
    Interviewee
    Dr. Alfred Fiks
    Interviewer
    Katherine Saint John
    Date
    interview:  2016 August 18
    interview:  2016 September 29
    interview:  2016 November 03

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    3 digital files : MP3.

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Fiks, Alfred, 1931-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Katherine Saint John, on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch, conducted the oral history interview with Alfred Fiks by telephone on August 18, 2016, September 29, 2016, and November 3, 2016.
    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 08:05:30
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn551494

    Additional Resources

    Transcripts (3)
    Time Coded Notes (3)

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    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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