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Oral history interview with Peter Schulhof

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2017.202.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.0931

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    Oral history interview with Peter Schulhof
    Transcript
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Mr. Peter Schulhof on May 1,
    2017 in Brooklyn, New York.
    Thank you very much, Mr. Schulhof,
    for agreeing to speak with us today to share your experiences
    and that of your family and tell us
    a little bit about how you all were affected
    by the Nazi repressive policies in Europe
    during World War II that culminated in the Holocaust.
    I'm going to start our interview with the most basic questions.
    Sure.
    And we'll build from there.
    OK.
    So can you tell me what is the date of your birth?
    June 13, 1937.
    And what was your name at birth?
    Petr Schulhof.
    Petr Schulhof.
    And where were you born?
    In Prague, Czech Republic now, Czechoslovakia then.
    OK, do you have any early memories from being in Prague?
    It's hard to tell whether my memories were direct memories
    or ones that I've been talked to with my parents
    about, but there a couple of images
    I would say that I was a little child because I was three
    at the oldest when we left, a couple of images
    that I have for whatever reason.
    One was looking out the kitchen window
    of our apartment in Prague, watching
    my parents cross the street.
    And I had a babysitter.
    I don't know.
    I think they were going to the movies or something,
    but, for whatever reason--
    You remember that.
    --I have that image.
    And the other is not so surprising
    I guess, but I remember walking into my grandparents' home
    in Cesky Brod, which is a little west of Prague,
    and there was a big wooden cabinet
    on the right side in which they stored chocolates.
    Well, of course, there are things
    that are important in life, and chocolates is one of them.
    That's right.
    After that, it's more not direct memories,
    you know, just little snippets like that.
    Well, that's how-- that's what children remember.
    It's an episode.
    And do you know now what area of Prague you lived in,
    what neighborhood you lived in?
    Yes, when I was born, it was in Nove Mesto,
    which is a part of Prague.
    And then my parents moved to a larger apartment a little
    further out.
    I think it's on what they called [NON-ENGLISH].
    [NON-ENGLISH]
    Yeah, Black Church Street, [NON-ENGLISH].
    OK.
    Out a little ways, but still in the city.
    Still in the city?
    Yes.
    So was it a residential neighborhood?
    Yes, in both cases.
    Single family homes or apartment buildings?
    No, these were apartment buildings.
    And would have they been built, do you think,
    in the 19th century, like so many city apartments were?
    The apartment house in Nove Mesto was probably.
    I would say probably the late part of the 19th century.
    The other apartment was newer.
    So I would probably say 1920s or something like that.
    Really new, really new.
    Oh, yeah.
    For that time, really new.
    Yes, yes.
    No, it's not an old part of Prague, that second apartment.
    North?
    South?
    I lived in Prague.
    That's one of the reasons I'm asking.
    I think it's more east, the second apartment.
    OK, so was it on the side where the castle was,
    on the side of the river where the castle was?
    No, it was on the other side I'm pretty sure.
    That's right.
    Excuse me, the east would be that way.
    Yeah, and it was near what they call the New Jewish Cemetery,
    rather than the Old Jewish Cemetery.
    OK, OK.
    What were your parents' names?
    My father's name was Joseph Schulhof.
    He was called Pepa.
    My mother's name, maiden name, was Charlotte Poras.
    She was born in Hungary actually.
    Poras?
    Poras, P-O-R-A-S, yeah.
    And that was her maiden name.
    That was my mother's maiden name.
    How did they meet?
    My father's first job was as an electrical engineer
    in a mining--
    with a mining company in the northeastern part of Bohemia,
    near Poland.
    And my mother-- my mother's mother, my grandmother,
    died at a very young age.
    And her father remarried her stepmother.
    And she and my aunt didn't get along that well.
    My mother ended up with her aunt and uncle in Poland.
    I've forgotten the name, I'm afraid, of the town,
    but very near the Czech border.
    And so they both went to a dance,
    and that's where they met.
    Wow.
    What was their common language?
    It must have been German because my mother did not
    speak Czech at the time.
    She subsequently spoke it quite fluently, but, at that time,
    she may have spoken some Polish because of where she lived,
    but I think they probably spoke in German because they
    both spoke German quite fluently.
    And that's probably what ended up happening.
    Do you remember about when this was?
    Was this after the First World War that they met?
    Yes, it was in the early '20s.
    OK, so there was no Austro-Hungarian Empire anymore.
    No, no.
    Everybody had become independent.
    Poland was independent.
    And the Czech Republic was formed our of Austro-Hungarian
    Empire, right?
    Right, OK.
    Did you have brothers and sisters?
    No, I did not.
    OK, so you were the only child?
    Yes, probably as a result of subsequent events.
    Yeah.
    What about your father?
    Did he have brothers and sisters?
    Yes, he did.
    He had two stepbrothers and then a full brother
    and a full sister.
    So that would be five siblings?
    Five siblings, yes.
    My grandfather's wife, first wife,
    passed away at a fairly young age.
    And he had had two children with her.
    And they were his stepbrothers.
    And then he remarried my grandmother,
    and they had three children.
    And were they all from Prague?
    All that area, yes.
    My father and his--
    well, I think all of his siblings
    were born in Cesky Brod, which is a small town east of Prague.
    May we break?
    Yeah, sure.
    So they were born-- the family, you say,
    it sounds like they were really based in Cesky Brod.
    Is that right?
    Yes, that's correct.
    They moved subsequently, the brothers and so on, into Prague.
    They all lived in Prague as adults,
    but they were born in Cesky Brod and brought up there.
    It's a small town.
    OK, so what did your grandfather--
    how did your grandfather support his family?
    He had a shop in the same building that he lived in
    and that the family lived in.
    And it was like a general store I would say,
    mainly focused on materials and clothing from what I gather.
    And do you know anything of the family history, how
    the family had ended up in Cesky Brod, where they had come from?
    Well, my grandmother, actually, originally,
    was from Austria, from Vienna.
    My grandfather and the Schulhof family
    went back many generations in Bohemia.
    How they actually ended up in Cesky Brod,
    I'm afraid I don't ever remember talking about with my parents,
    but they had been there for quite a while, many years.
    And then, before that, they were a number of different places,
    including--
    well, I don't remember all the names of the towns.
    But, nevertheless, in Bohemia?
    In that area, in Bohemia, in the, more or less,
    towards the eastern part of Bohemia
    on the east side of Prague.
    What language did your grandfather
    speak with his children and his wife?
    What was the--
    Czech.
    Czech.
    Not German?
    Not German.
    Well, they may have known German,
    but, no, they spoke Czech at home.
    OK.
    And so did my parents and I.
    OK, because many, many--
    well, of course, Czechoslovakia had many Germans.
    And so there was German spoken, but many Jews also
    spoke German--
    Correct.
    --rather than Czech.
    Correct, especially, relatively well-educated people
    spoke both languages.
    That's right.
    That's right.
    Do you know if what your family--
    now and this could be any member of your family--
    how they identified themselves?
    Because, in a place like Czechoslovakia,
    you could have an identity that is primarily Austro-Hungarian.
    You could have an identity more that is affiliated
    with the new Czech state.
    I think I'm talking more political identity, you know,
    where they saw their--
    what they thought of what was going on.
    And this would have been before your birth.
    Right.
    But it was a new country.
    Yes.
    And, of course, it affected its citizens.
    Right.
    Now you asked how did they identify themselves.
    And I would say, if they were asked point blank, well, what
    are you, they would say Jewish.
    OK.
    But they didn't speak Yiddish at all.
    It was like, no, we don't do that.
    It was German if not Czech, Czech primarily.
    And, in terms of you mentioned politics,
    my father looked back at the time after the First World War,
    until the beginning of the Second World War,
    as a beautiful time for Czechoslovakia.
    Sorry.
    It's OK.
    No, don't need that.
    I'm afraid I get emotional at times.
    Yeah, it was a democratic state, and he
    tended to be more on the I would say socialist side of things,
    but not very active in politics.
    He thought of himself as an early Zionist in a way, but,
    again, more in his thoughts than in his actions.
    But that just gives you a little idea, I think,
    of where he was coming from.
    And my mother was a different story because of her background.
    She was born in Kaposvar in Hungary
    and, as I mentioned earlier, had to be
    moved around because of her family's circumstances.
    So, in fact, later on, without being derogatory about it,
    my uncles were saying that my mother didn't
    have any problem moving around because she was from Hungary
    just like the Gypsies.
    Rootless.
    Yes.
    Rootless.
    Which was probably correct in a way.
    Yeah.
    Well, yeah, there is a lot to be said.
    In our modern age, we are more rootless.
    But, at that time, it was sort of at the cusp.
    Right, right.
    And, well, all of them felt very Czech, but Jewish.
    OK, that's what I wanted.
    That's what I wanted to get a sense of.
    Was your father's family religious?
    Not so much, I would say.
    And I don't think my parents were all that religious
    either earlier on.
    I think my father, in particular,
    got more so as he got older and then when we
    came to them-- after we came to the United States.
    But my impression is that it wasn't so much.
    You know, they went to services occasionally and so on,
    but my parents never kept a kosher home for instance.
    And so I guess you can get the feel from that.
    Would you say that they were more assimilated then?
    Yes, I would say so.
    I mean, my father had a good position.
    He had his own firm before we had
    to leave Czechoslovakia and a lot of friends,
    family, neighbors who weren't necessarily
    from the same background.
    So I guess you'd say they were pretty well assimilated.
    And that's one of the reasons why
    it was so hard for them to yank themselves out of there.
    Let's talk a little bit about--
    well, let me ask about your mother.
    I made an assumption, and it might be the wrong assumption,
    that you knew your father's family better
    than you knew your mother's family,
    but that may not be true.
    No, I think that's true.
    But, of course, I didn't know any of them
    very well because I was a tot.
    But we were in Prague, and my father's family
    was all around us.
    And we met up all the time.
    There were older cousins, but not that much older.
    The youngest of my cousins was my aunt Marta's daughter,
    Daisy, who was probably five years older than me.
    And we got together a lot.
    And, your father's siblings both the half siblings--
    the step-siblings and the full ones can
    you tell me their names?
    Sure, there was Jarda, Jaroslav.
    Jaroslav.
    And I'm having a senior moment here.
    That's OK.
    Well, let me tell you about his full siblings first.
    Marta was his sister, followed by Rudolf, Ruda,
    who ended up coming to the United States before we did.
    And how can I forget my uncles'-- other uncles' name?
    It's OK.
    But, if it comes to you later, then we'll just stop,
    and you can say, oh, it was so and so.
    That's fine.
    But he had two older--
    they were both boys?
    Yes.
    OK, the step-siblings were boys.
    Right, brothers, right.
    Brothers.
    And then--
    They were pretty close.
    --was one of them Karel?
    Karel, thank you very much.
    OK.
    Thank you, yeah.
    It's just from the Facebook post.
    Well, yeah, Karel and Jarda, right.
    Karel and Jarda.
    And then Rudolf--
    Was youngest.
    --the youngest and Marta.
    Marta.
    Marta, his sister.
    Right.
    All right.
    And did you see--
    was he closer to any one of them?
    Well, I think he was closest to Marta and Rudolf
    because the others were quite a bit older.
    And it wasn't so much because they were half brothers.
    They were fairly close anyhow, but, as you say closer,
    then I think it was, particularly, Ruda because he
    was nine years younger.
    And so, when he was born, my father was already nine.
    And he sort of was there to bring him up in Cesky Brod.
    And Marta was somewhere in between.
    I think she was four or five years younger than--
    maybe less, three, four years younger than my father.
    So he was smack in the middle?
    No.
    He was the oldest--
    He was the oldest.
    --of the three.
    Of the three.
    Right.
    But, of the five, he was in the middle, correct.
    How is it that Rudolf came to the United States?
    Well, he actually was following his to-be wife who was
    originally from Berlin and whose parents and she had moved
    temporarily from Berlin in the '30s, in the late--
    mid to late '30s.
    And his to-be father-in-law was in the greeting card business.
    And he took that business along with him
    and was able to come to the United States.
    And, in 1939, my uncle Ruda was able to follow them because they
    went to Belgium first.
    And he followed them to Belgium where
    he was married to his wife.
    And they then came here to New York.
    That kind of story, that's a sort of German-Jewish exodus
    story.
    And '39 is pretty late.
    Yes, yes.
    It's after Kristallnacht.
    Right, and the hand writing was definitely
    on the wall to most people and especially in Germany.
    And he was young.
    He was not nearly as founded in Czechoslovakia I think.
    And he had no problem just running after his to-be wife.
    So that's what happened.
    OK.
    And he actually joined his father-in-law's firm here,
    and they did very well.
    What's the name of the firm here?
    The firm was called Reproducta.
    Reproducta.
    And was it based in New York?
    Yes, it was.
    OK, and so he got out.
    He got out before everybody else,
    and he was able to come here, yes.
    In later years, how did your father--
    I mean because I think that Czechoslovakia was occupied
    when you were a year old.
    Correct.
    And you would have no memory of it.
    No.
    But how did your parents speak of that?
    How did they speak of this experience?
    Had they been surprised?
    Had they been shocked?
    I mean, was this expected?
    I don't think it was expected.
    I don't think anybody expected it, given the history, at least,
    people who--
    general people who didn't have inroads
    into the politics or contacts.
    I think the Germans were more aware of the situation
    than the Czechs were.
    I think, when it happened, they were pretty horrified,
    my mother in particular, whether it was because of her fact
    that she had a young child or just her personality,
    but she immediately thought of it in worse terms than my father
    because, probably, as a result of influence
    of the fact that his family had lived there for so long
    and that his situation with his business and his work--
    and I think he was hoping, at least, that it would pass.
    Do you know what year your father was born?
    1903.
    So he was a young man.
    Yeah.
    He was in his '30s, and he was building his career.
    That's correct, and he was doing quite well.
    And had all of the siblings gotten higher education?
    I don't know.
    You know, I don't think so they certainly
    went through high school.
    And I don't remember whether any of them went beyond that.
    I know that my uncles, my older uncles, one of them
    was in the First World War and had actually
    been sent to Russia, met his wife there, and then
    ended up bringing her back.
    So he was in the Austro-Hungarian army?
    Yes, yes, as was my grandfather on my mother's side.
    He was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
    It didn't do any good later on, but, nevertheless, he
    was in the army then.
    So I'm afraid I can't tell you too much
    about their level of education beyond high school.
    I know they all went through the gymnasium.
    OK, yeah.
    And what were their professions?
    Well, starting from the youngest--
    Ruda.
    --Ruda was a salesperson.
    He had that kind of personality.
    My aunt didn't have a profession.
    She was a mother and stayed home.
    And, my two older brothers, one had a lamp manufacturing
    company.
    I still have some of the lamps he--
    Really?
    Yeah.
    And, my other uncle, I think he was in some kind of sales,
    but I'm not sure exactly what.
    Do you know the name of the lamp manufacturing company?
    No, I don't.
    No, I don't.
    What about your father's business?
    Do you know the name of your father's business?
    I used to.
    I don't remember at the moment.
    I can think about it.
    OK, OK.
    So your father went at least through gymnasium.
    My father went beyond gymnasium.
    So he might have been the only one?
    He might have been, but I'm not positive about that.
    That's why I'm saying I'm not sure about my--
    I don't think Ruda went beyond gymnasium,
    and I am pretty sure Marta did not either,
    but I'm not positive of either of that, any of that,
    I'm afraid, certainly, not of the other siblings.
    My father went to, yes, university level
    technical school.
    In Czechoslovakia?
    In Prague, but it was a German school.
    OK, after the invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia
    by Hitler and the Nazis in 1938, I believe, was it--
    '39.
    '39.
    Oh, was it '39?
    That's right.
    It was '39.
    It was '39.
    I got my dates mixed up.
    How did this impact your larger family
    and your immediate family?
    Well, while we were still there, it
    didn't seem to have impacted them that much.
    There were all sorts of restrictions
    being put in place I understand, but they were leading
    their lives, more or less.
    So your grandfather with his store in Cesky Brod?
    Yes, but, unfortunately or maybe fortunately for him,
    he passed away in his 60s, when he was in his 60s.
    So he passed away just before all of this happened.
    Ah, many people would say fortunately for him.
    That's right my grandmother, his wife,
    was still alive until after we left, but shortly after we left,
    she had a heart attack and also passed away.
    So she was spared.
    On my mother's side--
    and, as I mentioned earlier, I didn't know them quite as well.
    We visited Kaposvar, and I was tiny.
    And I met my grandfather, my mother's father,
    and my step-grandmother, but I can't remember any of that.
    And, some of the other parts of family,
    my mother had a full sister, Kato, Katalin,
    who was two years younger.
    And we can talk more about her later on if you want.
    And then she had stepbrothers and sisters.
    And so I was a tot, and I got to know them, but not that well.
    And I didn't hear all that much about them.
    They were still in Hungary.
    So they were not invaded by the Nazis until 1944 or thereabouts.
    And that's when things really went downhill.
    Yeah, that's right.
    So, when the Germans first occupy, it's ominous,
    but it doesn't yet have a direct impact.
    Right.
    OK.
    And it was my mother who felt that impact more than any
    of the other parts of my family, and she expressed it.
    And her personality was rather--
    he was very outgoing.
    She was not so much.
    And so I would say, in their marriage,
    he tended to be the stronger one of the two in terms
    of his personality, in terms of his willpower and so on,
    but, amazingly for me, thinking back on their relationship,
    she was extremely strong about getting out
    of Czechoslovakia at the time because she felt threatened.
    So she's the impetus?
    Absolutely.
    Because that was one of my questions.
    It is unusual to--
    not unusual to leave, but, in a family that
    is so grounded, to be the only ones of the family.
    Very often, in Germany, we hear of one branch trying to get out,
    and then another branch trying to get out
    and some later and some earlier.
    And, sometimes, the later ones, it's too late,
    but they all do want to leave.
    And this doesn't sound like it's the same thing.
    Not so at all, no.
    My father's brothers-- of course, Ruda had left,
    but his older brothers were quite vehement about trying
    to convince him and, therefore, my mother
    to stay because they thought it would pass.
    And their roots were so deeply in Czechoslovakia
    that they thought it would be horrible for my parents to leave
    and then especially when it turned out
    the only place we could end up going to
    was China because nothing else was open to us
    by the time my parents finally made up their minds that,
    yes, they were going to leave.
    My mother convinced my father thoroughly.
    It took him-- it took her some time, huh?
    Yes, a little bit Well, it was not years
    because there wasn't years to be had.
    It was months, but, nevertheless, it took some time.
    But he ended up being convinced to the point where he really
    was active about doing something about it.
    But the rest of the family, as you probably
    know from reading some of our other material, his older
    brother Karel tried very hard to convince him to stay.
    You're going to go to China?
    You'll be dying in the streets.
    You don't have a position there.
    You don't have much money.
    They won't let you take any.
    How are you going to survive, stay?
    And it must have been very difficult for my father
    to be torn in a way, but I guess my mother
    must have been very convincing.
    And do they ever tell you about their process,
    their actual attempts to leave, and what that meant
    and which consulates they visited and so on and so forth?
    Oh, yes.
    Tell me about that.
    Right, they tried very hard to get out in other ways.
    They went to the American consulate
    and registered there and were told that they would be heard--
    they'd hear from them and that they
    should let them know if anything changed in their situation.
    But time went by, and nothing happened.
    And they went back again, my father in particular,
    and was told that, oh, well, it would take at least five,
    six, seven years before they would have any chance of being
    under the quota, I guess.
    And so it became quite clear more and more that things
    were not getting better there.
    You were all Czech citizens?
    Absolutely.
    Your mother as well?
    Yes, my mother had become a Czech citizen.
    She spoke Czech quite fluently by that time
    and didn't, I don't think, consider herself a Czech,
    but would have stayed right there.
    They had a good life--
    theater, social life, what have you.
    It's a beautiful place to live.
    Yes, still is.
    Still is.
    Still is.
    Anyhow, yeah, so where were we?
    We were at the consulates, the various consulates,
    and the Americans saying it will be five, six, seven years.
    That's right and there were no other opening
    places which weren't being occupied by the Germans anyhow.
    So they were left with very few options, in fact,
    only one, and that was to go to China, to Shanghai in particular
    how did they get a visa to do that?
    They didn't need one because Shanghai was an open port.
    That's what made it possible.
    And so--
    Did they need transit visas from any countries to get there?
    Well, the Germans needed to let them out.
    And, well, the story is that my father
    applied to get an exit visa and was soon visited
    by Nazi officials to document everything that they
    owned in their apartment.
    I mean, my father says down to the last toothpaste tube.
    That's thorough.
    Oh yeah.
    And they assigned a value to each piece of their property,
    as well as whatever they had in terms of banking arrangements
    and so on, and then said, OK, double that amount,
    and we'll let you get out.
    So, of course, he said to them--
    and, of course, I don't remember this,
    but I remember him telling me about this.
    He said, well, you know exactly what our assets are.
    You've written it all down.
    And now you're asking for twice as much.
    Obviously, we don't have the resources to do that.
    Oh, yes, but maybe your family will help.
    And so, in fact, he had an aunt who was married to his uncle,
    and they were well off.
    And this was a father--
    his father's sister or his mother's sister?
    No, this is--
    I mean his father's brother or mother's brother?
    His father's brother.
    OK, so also a Schulhof.
    Also a Schulhof, right.
    And she was kind enough to, quote, "lend him" the money,
    enough to double the value of all of his assets.
    How cynical.
    Yes.
    And I guess that startled him or whatever,
    but they did provide them with exit visas.
    What was her name?
    Do you remember?
    Yes, I do.
    I should, but I don't at the moment.
    OK, we'll come to it.
    We'll come to it.
    Yeah.
    Rosa.
    Rosa.
    Tante Rosa.
    Tante Rosa, I remember seeing a Facebook post with her picture.
    Yes.
    And so, surprise, surprise to the officials,
    they came up with the money and got the visas, exit visas.
    Yes.
    For all three of you.
    All three of us, right.
    Were they able to take anything out, any money out?
    Very little, but some, very little.
    They had enough to get to Genoa, which
    is where the ship that was going to take us to Shanghai
    originated.
    And that's about it.
    And I'll tell you more in a minute,
    but the process of getting out was not simple
    either in that they had to pack up whatever they were allowed
    to take, which was a very basic few things plus,
    again, cynically, crystal, which the Germans packed
    with almost nothing in the box.
    So they would break.
    So they would break so much of it did arrive, and some of it
    was still intact, but much of it was not.
    Anyhow, and a few clothing things and some few things.
    And my father, fortunately, was a document keeper.
    And he took along things that others may not have ever thought
    about taking, but he did.
    Such as?
    Well, for one thing, they were not
    supposed to have their Czech passports with them.
    They were not allowed to have them,
    but they lied, which is unusual because they were very straight.
    They said that they were lost, and they got the Czech police
    to verify that.
    And so they were lost.
    So they got a substitute passport,
    which was a German passport, but they kept on their bodies,
    as we went out, the original Czech passports, which helped us
    a lot later.
    And I was on my mother's passport.
    So I also had a passport.
    And they made all the arrangements
    for the ship, paid for that with money that came
    from themselves and my aunt.
    And, actually, not so, actually, it
    didn't happen until they were in Genoa.
    They found themselves without enough money and cabled
    my relatives in Prague, as well as my mother's--
    I should mention my mother's side, her side of the family,
    had people who had been living here, in the New York area,
    for quite a while prior to the war
    and who had been in contact somewhat.
    And she had written them about their situation.
    And they actually-- that sort of ties
    in with that visit to the consulate
    because they had written, providing assurances
    that they would take care of us if we needed, had we
    been able to come to the United States.
    So that you wouldn't have been a burden on the state?
    State, correct.
    OK, and that didn't help?
    Apparently not, apparently not.
    Wow.
    Well, I mean the American, what you call it,
    State Department had a reputation
    at the time of not being very friendly towards Jewish people.
    I don't know whether that played in directly
    or whether there was some other situation,
    but that comes to my mind at least from other things
    that I have read and heard about.
    In any event, yeah, no, that didn't help.
    But, when they were in Genoa and needed some money
    to provide for the rest of the trip
    just to have some cash and so on--
    I guess the trip had been paid for prior to that, sorry.
    But they, basically, ran out of money.
    They contacted my mother's father and my father's relatives
    in Prague and my mother's relatives here,
    as well as my uncle Ruda who had already
    then been here in New York.
    And, within I guess it was a matter of hours,
    they got telegraphed money from all over.
    So they ended up with more than they needed.
    But, even that, to get the passage was a problem,
    as you may have read in some of the material that we've--
    Tell us.
    --put on Facebook.
    Yeah, everything had been arranged.
    My father was very organized.
    And, as I think I mentioned earlier, he was-- well,
    maybe I was speaking to Gus, but he was what now may be called
    a--
    what's the term?
    He contacted people and got to know them.
    Extrovert?
    Well, he was an extrovert, but he--
    oh, anyhow, I'm sorry.
    I'm having my moments here.
    That's OK.
    It was fortunate that he was outgoing, got to know people,
    became friends quite easily.
    And it was helpful, not only for his business purposes,
    but for social and, in this case, life purposes.
    All arrangements were made.
    He was, as I say, very organized, extremely organized.
    And, the night before we were meant to leave,
    they were in a taxi having gone somewhere,
    perhaps visiting my aunt I think.
    In Prague still?
    In Prague.
    And, on their way back to their apartment,
    they were going to stop Vaclavske Namesti--
    Central Street.
    --street, main square in Prague at the shipping company
    to pick up the tickets.
    And it was just a matter of, supposedly,
    going up there, getting the tickets, coming right back So
    my mother stayed in the taxi while he ran up, ostensibly,
    to get the passage tickets, and it took a long while.
    And, finally, he showed up white as a sheet,
    my mother was telling me, because, when he went up
    there to get his tickets, he was told there weren't any tickets.
    But he said I paid for them.
    What do you mean?
    I've got a receipt and so on.
    Well, sorry, tickets are not--
    no tickets are available.
    Well, here's where his contacts came into play.
    And he was a nervous kind of person,
    but, when it came to difficult situations, he was all there.
    I mean he rose to the occasion.
    Yeah, he calmed down and was thinking
    about things in a rational kind of way, which turned out
    to be a lifesaver because he remembered that he had met--
    I think it was on the train.
    I don't know where it was between Cesky Brod and Prague
    or someplace.
    He had met a man who was the director
    or the head of the transportation
    department for Skoda, a major manufacturing company.
    Skoda being the automobile manufacturers?
    Well, among other things, heavy machinery,
    optics, auto manufacturing later on.
    And he remembered his name and how to contact him.
    It was like 5 o'clock in the afternoon on a weekday.
    And he called that man and found him at his desk fortunately,
    told him the story, and he said wait about half an hour
    and then go back.
    So my father nervously waited for half an hour
    and then went back.
    And, sure enough, now they had the tickets.
    Oh my goodness, oh my goodness.
    Networking, that's the word I was thinking for, networking.
    Networking, he knew how to network.
    Yeah, they didn't call it that.
    No, they didn't, but it's also on the slimmest--
    on the slimmest margin, this stranger
    provides that linchpin, that life or death situation.
    He might have found another way out, but, in this case--
    Doubtful, but, yes, you're right.
    This man, did you ever know who he was, what his name was?
    I don't know.
    I have-- I have a letter opener from Skoda.
    No, he knew the name, obviously, and he may have told me it,
    but I don't recall it.
    I would have liked to have contacted him.
    We've been back to Prague-- who knows what happened to him
    by the way--
    to thank him, but that never happened.
    Yeah, my father said on a number of occasions
    that our story was a combination of using one's wit and luck,
    pure old luck.
    I think of it as little molecules bouncing around
    in a box, and some got out, and some did not.
    Yeah, and it depends on what other molecules they hit.
    That's right.
    Some of them were kind and some of them not so much.
    And what openings there were and whether they
    managed to find those openings or just happened to find them.
    Yeah, yeah.
    So, from Prague to Genoa, do you know how you traveled?
    Train.
    Do you remember any of it?
    No, I do not.
    I can't.
    I remember, again, scenes from the ship.
    We were on that ship, the Conte Verde, an Italian liner,
    from Shanghai to--
    I mean from Genoa to Shanghai.
    How did it-- what was the route?
    Through the Suez Canal and then through the Straits between
    what was called Ceylon and India and then to Manila--
    to Singapore and to Manila and then, finally, to Shanghai.
    Do you know how long it took?
    A month.
    A month.
    That was May of 1940.
    May of 1940.
    Yeah, and so we got the train through--
    Austria?
    Austria and Italy of course.
    Before we go to your China story,
    which sounds very exotic--
    we don't have that many people who can tell us directly
    what that was like--
    I'd like to go further on the European story
    and ask about all the people that you've introduced us to.
    What happened to them?
    Let's start with Karel, Jaroslav, Marta, Daisy,
    your mother's side of the family, your aunt Tante Rosa.
    Could you let us know?
    They all died in the Holocaust.
    The only survivors, besides us, was my aunt Kathy
    who went through Auschwitz.
    Katalin?
    Katalin.
    Her nicknames were Kato.
    And then, when she came here, it became Kathy,
    but her official name was Katalin, K-A-T-A-L-I-N.
    And she survived.
    And we can talk about it more later on.
    That's part of the China experience in a strange way.
    And my uncle Ruda and one cousin, Jarda--
    Jaroslav's daughter who also survived Auschwitz and who
    went back to Prague after the war and stayed there
    and married a fellow there and who died not too long ago.
    We met when we went to Prague.
    So was she able to provide you with details of what happened
    to the rest of the family?
    No, because I don't think she really
    knew any more than we did.
    We knew the dates of their deaths
    because the Nazis kept very good records of that kind of thing.
    And their names appear on one of the synagogue walls in Prague
    with the dates.
    And my parents found out about it not until after the war,
    and they were all gone, all of them.
    Did they-- were they taken through Theresienstadt or direct
    to--
    Yes, the Czech relatives were temporarily,
    but I don't think the Hungarian relatives were.
    No, they wouldn't have been.
    And they were taken directly to Auschwitz, most of them.
    But some of them ended up not in Auschwitz.
    I think Tante Rosa was in one of the other camps,
    and I've forgotten the name of it, Bergen-Belsen maybe.
    Your mother's instinct.
    Yes, that's--
    When was the next time that any member of your family
    went back to Prague?
    My parents went back in 1968 I think it was.
    So that's already 23 years after the war ends.
    Right.
    And they had, by then, found out and knew?
    Oh absolutely.
    It hit my father very hard.
    It was one of those what-if situations,
    if he had prevailed on them.
    Did he feel guilty about that?
    I imagine not that direct guilt because it wasn't like he
    could have done any more than he did, but he escaped.
    They did not.
    That creates guilt just in itself.
    And, probably, he wished he had been more forceful in convincing
    them that he was doing the right thing
    and then that they were not.
    But he also didn't know that.
    He didn't know that.
    He didn't know that.
    It was all such an unknown.
    Yes, and, nevertheless, I know there were things
    that he was sorry about that weren't his fault.
    No, no.
    And, as far as my mother's side, there
    was just nothing that we could have possibly done.
    And there were some distant cousins
    who survived by converting to Catholicism.
    And they ended up coming here to the United States,
    but they were never close relatives.
    And we didn't have that much to do with them.
    We met, and we had some getting togethers,
    but they were short lived.
    And they went out on their own.
    And so there was no close connection there,
    and they were distant cousins anyhow.
    These would have been from Hungary from your mother's side?
    Yes, my mother's side, right.
    OK, what a loss.
    I mean, when you think, it's such a large family.
    Yeah, my cousins were, from all indications,
    lovely, bright children the ones that I probably
    met and knew well in Prague.
    Well, I remember-- and we'll come
    to this in more detail towards the end of our interview--
    but the Facebook posts that is it
    your son who has put them together?
    Well, it was his idea.
    His idea.
    And he relied on me to put together
    which documents and photographs I wanted to scan and send
    to him to put on the Facebook thing
    with each paragraph of my father's memoir.
    What a beautiful-- I mean lovely, lovely photos.
    And, Daisy, I mean such a sweet girl.
    And so, from what I know from my parents,
    so were my other cousins.
    They ranged in age.
    Vera, the one who survived, was the oldest.
    She was something in her teens when she was taken.
    And the rest were somewhere between Daisy,
    who was five years older-- so she must have been eight
    or nine and then in between.
    They were all several different ages.
    Jarda had another child, and Karel had two.
    And Marta had just Daisy.
    OK, China, what are the earliest memories that you would have
    of China
    OK, that's a whole different period
    because not only were my direct experiences much more positive,
    strangely, but the way I felt about things
    also was much more positive my parents were very protective,
    not to the point they wouldn't let me do things,
    in fact, quite the opposite once we were established in China.
    But I did not feel any weight on my shoulders
    as a result of what was going on,
    even after they knew the specifics.
    I heard about it, but in a way that
    didn't make me feel very negative about things at all.
    Were your parents storytellers?
    Because you know the stories.
    I do.
    Well, I was the only child.
    We were close.
    We were off in our own world so to speak.
    And we had a close relationship.
    So, yeah, I heard a lot of stories.
    OK, but I can understand that it wouldn't have been--
    when they heard of them, that it would have been at a time
    when they would feel that you could handle it, understand it--
    Right
    --cope with whatever the fallout is.
    Yes, and they did it in a way, which, as I say,
    didn't traumatize me in any way to the point where,
    when we arrived in the United States,
    I said something to the effect that I felt very sorry
    for people who aren't Jewish.
    And what made you say that?
    Just the way I felt I guess, at which point,
    my parents thought it might be a good idea
    to make me realize what's really going on.
    And they sent me off to a summer camp
    the first summer here in New York,
    which was run by Quaker people.
    And it was a nice experience actually,
    but it opened the world for me a little bit.
    Anyhow, I can go back.
    That's OK.
    So what were your parents' first experiences then?
    How did they establish themselves
    when they got to Shanghai?
    Well, because of the generosity of our family,
    they had a little money, and they
    were able to rent a small apartment
    in the French Concession.
    I can tell you about concessions if you like.
    Yeah, what are concessions?
    The major coastal cities in China at that time,
    like Shanghai and like the city we ended up in,
    Tientsin, which is now called Tianjin,
    were divided up, in large part, by the Western powers.
    And so, Shanghai and Tientsin, there was a very Chinese part,
    but the core of the cities in both cases
    were divided up by the Western powers
    so that there was an English Concession, so to speak,
    and a French Concession, and other countries' concessions
    that were physically part of--
    let's say the British Concession was the law of England prevailed
    in that part of--
    Oh, really?
    I didn't know that.
    Yes, and so, the French Concession,
    the same thing for the French.
    So this apartment happened to be in the French Concession.
    That doesn't mean that we couldn't
    live there if we weren't French, but the law of France.
    And so they had--
    we had a small apartment of which I have some photos.
    My father-- mainly, my father collected these things
    and kept them of the apartment.
    And they got to be friends with neighbors
    who were in similar circumstances,
    not from, necessarily, Czechoslovakia, relatively
    few people, but some.
    And, being who he was, my father started joining things.
    So he became a member of the Czech platoon of the British--
    I don't know what they call them-- armed services kind
    of organization in Shanghai.
    And he got to know a lot of people as a result of that.
    And they had as one of their functions,
    to go around in middle of the night
    and just see that things were all right
    and also pick up dead bodies because there
    were poor people who just passed away from hunger, not Europeans
    so much as Chinese.
    That was one of--
    Were there many Jewish refugees?
    There were a number, yes.
    And Shanghai probably became the largest such concentration
    in China of people, most of which or many of whom
    stayed there during the war.
    But so he was doing that, and he--
    making friends.
    And so was my mother, actually, with neighbors.
    And the one little recollection I have from my Shanghai time,
    because we were only living in Shanghai for about nine months,
    was I befriended some child in the playground
    right near where we lived.
    And I used to like to play with him almost daily in the sand
    or whatever.
    I was four, thereabouts.
    I learned to speak his language, which
    I was convinced was English.
    It tuned out it was German.
    And that was pointed out to me at some point by my parents.
    You know, that's not English.
    That's German.
    And I refused to believe that.
    [SPEAKING GERMAN], I said.
    What do they know?
    It took a while for me to get the picture, but I did.
    So I do remember, again, a little scene of being
    in the playground with him.
    That's pretty much all.
    I don't remember much of that.
    And it was a short period of time.
    Well, you know, there was another route to Shanghai
    that some Jewish refugees took, and that
    could have been mostly Polish refugees and Baltic refugees.
    They got visas from Sugihara, who was the Chinese--
    Japanese diplomat, and came with Trans-Siberian Railroad.
    Right.
    Did you ever meet any of such people?
    Do you know?
    There were I think a few that I, personally, didn't know.
    They were my parents' age, and so they knew them.
    But we ended up in what was then called Tientsin
    because my father found a little ad in the local paper looking
    for an engineer, which he was.
    That's one of the reasons that I ended up
    getting my degree in engineering because he felt very strongly
    that he could practice his profession anywhere
    in the world, unlike some people who
    were doctors or lawyers or other professions.
    So that made an impression.
    In any event, he answered that little ad.
    It was a little ad in the local paper from a Swiss firm who
    operated all over the world.
    And their main headquarters in Asia was in Japan at that time.
    It was pre-Pearl Harbor.
    And it was in Kobe in Japan.
    And he answered that ad and was called in for an interview,
    left my mother and me in Shanghai,
    and took a ship over to Japan, was interviewed,
    and was accepted for a position in Tientsin, China.
    Was that far from Shanghai?
    Quite, it's about 1,000 miles.
    Oh, wow.
    It's way north, not the utmost north of China,
    but it's near Beijing, a little east and somewhat south
    of Beijing.
    It's 60 miles, I think, in between.
    And it's a port, but not a port like you
    think of on the ocean or the sea,
    but connected by canals to the ocean.
    It was really the Yellow Sea or even the Gulf.
    And so he was over there and got the position
    and then cabled my mother and said pack everything up
    and come over.
    And so she had that job, and that's what we did.
    We went over to Japan, and he had
    a stay there for several weeks before going on to Tientsin
    to get oriented and so on.
    Do you remember going to Japan with her?
    No, I've been back since coming here to the United States.
    We stopped over, and I remember that.
    And then we've been back to--
    Carol and I, my wife and I, have been to Japan,
    but I don't remember that part of it.
    Again, I know stories, which I was told, nothing major.
    But the people-- the fellow who hired him was married.
    And my mother told the story of they
    wanted to invite us to dinner, but they
    said we're being rationed and very severely rationed.
    And they found some way of getting some food,
    and we ended up having dinner with them.
    And so it was getting to be a little social kind of situation.
    And I was a happy little four-year-old.
    So that was in--
    With all this stuff swirling around you.
    Yeah, exactly.
    OK, so then you go.
    After the several weeks in Japan, you leave for Tientsin.
    Tientsin, right.
    Tientsin.
    By ship.
    By ship.
    Right.
    Any memories of that?
    No.
    OK.
    I do remember after that.
    OK, so tell us first how--
    tell us first the adult part of the story.
    That is how you got established, what your father did,
    where did you live.
    And then we'll go to your memories.
    OK, sure.
    So my father had this position.
    He became manager of a factory that they
    wanted to build and develop of electric electrodes for welding
    and other purposes.
    And he was no expert in that particular area,
    but he was bright enough, I guess, to learn enough about it.
    And he successfully did establish that factory
    and that part of the company The name of the company
    was Liebermann Waelchli and Company, a Swiss firm.
    Liebermann?
    Waelchli.
    Waelchli.
    W-A-E-L-C-H-I.
    OK.
    And Company.
    And they did all kinds of import, export, manufacturing.
    You name it.
    They did it pretty much all over the world, including--
    Are they still in existence as far as you know?
    I don't think so.
    I don't think so.
    Anyhow, and his-- he had a boss there,
    and he had a number of people working for him to develop
    the factory and then after the factory--
    and, by the way, material was very hard to get.
    And he had to use his ingenuity to get the required
    materials and his engineering background
    to take care of some of the technical stuff and so on,
    but he ended up successfully developing that factory
    and opening it and running it afterwards.
    And there were a lot of Chinese workers there,
    as well as some of his officers let's call them.
    I mean, they weren't officers of the company.
    They were just his--
    they were supervisory people.
    And we first lived in a hotel for some period of time
    called the Talati House, which was
    a hotel that was owned by an Indian immigrant whose name was
    Talati.
    And we lived there for I'd say several months.
    Unfortunately, during that period,
    I developed a mild case of TB, and so my parents
    took me to a German Jewish doctor
    who had been an earlier immigrant to Shanghai
    actually to Tientsin.
    I'm sorry.
    He was in Tientsin.
    And he diagnosed it and told my parents
    that I should have bed rest and that there
    wasn't a hell of a lot more to do about it,
    which they dutifully did for me.
    And I was in this small apartment in the hotel and,
    basically, bedridden for some period of time,
    but, eventually, not too--
    fairly quickly, got better so that I was up and around.
    And so it was OK after a while.
    Were there concessions also in Tientsin?
    Yes, there were.
    We were in the British Concession at that time.
    The French Concession adjoined it.
    They were almost like wedge shaped, running to the river.
    And was there a British presence then?
    Absolutely, and, after Pearl Harbor--
    I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit.
    That's OK.
    But, after Pearl Harbor, those British and American,
    Dutch, Belgian citizens who didn't figure out
    that they were should get out of there or didn't want to
    were interned by the Japanese.
    It was not anything like the German concentration camp,
    but they were, much as the Jewish community in Shanghai
    was also--
    sort of the ghetto was made into a more official internship.
    So you're saying that the Japanese
    occupied this part of China?
    See, I did get ahead of myself.
    OK.
    So let me backtrack.
    Yeah, let's backtrack a bit, OK.
    So here we were in the Talati House Hotel.
    In Talati House, yes.
    And I guess there were other people around,
    and there were some younger kids.
    And I got to be friends.
    And there were some older, but still children.
    I have pictures of me and a couple
    of older girls up on the roof of the Talati House.
    And then Pearl Harbor hit while we were there.
    My father had just--
    my parents had just registered me in a British school.
    It was kindergarten.
    I guess it was a British grammar school.
    So there were more levels above that, but I was that age.
    So it was maybe even prekindergarten.
    I was four or five, maybe getting close to five
    at that point.
    He had registered me, and it was like opening day
    and then Pearl Harbor hit.
    And, all of a sudden, the Japanese who had
    occupied large parts of China prior to that,
    but had not ventured into these cities
    where these Western nations had their concessions--
    so they were not in Tientsin, for instance,
    or Shanghai for that matter, except after Pearl Harbor,
    they were.
    They occupied those places.
    So they showed up, soldiers and what have you.
    In fact-- and this, I must say, I think I remember it,
    but it's hard to say whether I directly
    remember it at this point.
    But I was allowed free rein in the hotel.
    And, apparently, after the Japanese had occupied the city,
    some of the soldiers occupied the hotel or, at least,
    the lobby part of the hotel.
    And they stacked their rifles in the middle of the lobby.
    And my parents were getting ready for breakfast.
    They were all ready.
    They told me to go downstairs.
    So they didn't realize what was going on down there.
    And I went down there with my pop gun, a cork pop gun.
    And I got down there, and there were these Japanese soldiers
    sitting around with their rifles stacked.
    I came over, and I stacked my pop gun in there.
    [LAUGHTER]
    So they thought that was kind of funny.
    Funny.
    Here's this little blond kid.
    I was white blonde at the time.
    And they thought-- so my parents came down.
    And here I am, sitting on a Japanese soldier's lap
    with my pop gun, but it was OK.
    Now did the fact that your father
    worked for a company that had its headquarters in Kobe help?
    Did that have any impact?
    I think the fact that it was a Swiss firm
    is the thing that helped because they were allowed to operate
    right through the whole war.
    And I don't know that it was the fact
    that they had offices in Japan.
    Maybe that didn't hurt.
    In fact, again, this is my father's story, not mine,
    but, while he was being interviewed and then
    being allowed to move from Japan, get out of Japan
    and go to China, he was being interviewed
    by a Japanese woman who was a Nisei who had been in the United
    States and then went back to Japan
    and now was thoroughly Japanese, but spoke very good English.
    My father, by then, in Shanghai, tried very hard
    and somewhat successfully to learn English
    as well because he thought that may be useful, which it was.
    And she was asking him all sorts of questions,
    including, oh, I see you were from Czechoslovakia.
    Which part of Czechoslovakia were you from?
    Now this is 1941 by now, right?
    And, of course, the Germans had occupied not only
    Czechoslovakia, but much of Europe, Poland, and so on.
    And which part of Czechoslovakia?
    And, my father thinking, he said, oh, I'm
    from Slovakia because, at that point,
    Slovakia was like a puppet state.
    And she said, oh, OK, that's fine, boom,
    end of the conversation.
    So that's another instance.
    So it could have been that she could have
    informed her German friends?
    Yeah, and squelched the whole process maybe.
    I don't know.
    Yeah, but he had to be aware of these things.
    He not only realized what could have happened,
    but figured out how to deal with it right there on the spot.
    Yeah.
    Yeah, anyhow, back to Tientsin and the Japanese.
    And the Japanese and the soldiers, yeah.
    Yeah, and, my father, I started telling you my father had--
    my parents had enrolled me in this school.
    And my father realized what was going on that first day.
    He had already gotten me into the school,
    physically into the school.
    Now he wanted to go back in, by which time
    the Japanese soldiers had fully occupied the city,
    and they wouldn't let him in.
    Or, at least, first, he had to convince them
    that all he wanted to do was take me and get me out,
    which, somehow, he did.
    And so I got out.
    And, subsequently, they enrolled me
    in what they now realized was a Tientsin Jewish School that
    existed and was still operating just fine, thank you.
    So that's how I ended up at the Tientsin Jewish School.
    I can tell you more about that as we go forward.
    Yeah, and then--
    What was the Chinese power that was overrun by the Japanese?
    Was it the Kuomintang?
    Kuomintang, yes.
    Later on, during the war, there was a three-way war
    going on between the Japanese, the nationalists, Kuomintang,
    and the communist guerrillas.
    They were guerrillas at first and became much more an army
    eventually, but I can get into that as we go forward
    about our China experience.
    More about the Japanese occupation,
    they then put barriers along the borders of these concessions.
    And it was not like you could go back and forth anymore,
    as you were able to before and after the war, by the way,
    because, for a little while after the war,
    until the communists took over the country,
    the concessions still existed.
    Anyhow, yeah, to the point where,
    again, the passports my father had kept, the Czech passports,
    they were fine.
    In other words, we were-- according
    to Japanese, my father used to say, we weren't a big enemy.
    We were a little enemy.
    Plus, we were taken over by the Germans.
    So having Czech passports helped.
    In fact, being able to go from one concession to the other
    was possible because my parents had those passports.
    So it was--
    It was also possible for them, by the way,
    to go from Shanghai to Japan and into Tientsin
    because of the fact that they had Czech passports.
    Isn't that interesting?
    I mean, maybe it's the distance that the bureaucracy doesn't
    get that far.
    It would have-- if the Japanese are allies of the Germans,
    so you would think that they would be requiring
    German-issued identification papers, given
    that they're allies and so on, and it's now part of the Reich.
    The connection wasn't like they were part of the Reich.
    In fact, their attitude, for instance, towards Jewish people
    was nothing like the German attitude.
    What was it?
    What was the attitude?
    A combination, I think, of ignorance and who
    cares kind of an attitude.
    They, themselves, most of the Japanese
    are both Shinto and Buddhist.
    And I don't think that mattered to them too much.
    It wasn't something that was part of their world.
    That's right.
    Later on, a little more so because they
    got a little pressure, and I can tell you more about that
    later as we get into that.
    Anyhow, so here we were in Tientsin.
    my father had his position.
    He's just getting started doing what he needed to do.
    They found a nice place for us to live, eventually, not
    at the Talati House forever.
    And it was in the British concession.
    It was on a--
    not in the middle of the--
    they don't call it downtown, but that's
    what it boiled down to, the core of the British Concession,
    a little further out.
    And there was a nice, big house that was a European-style house.
    I was going to ask that.
    Yeah, it was a European-style house
    made of stone I remember, large enough so it was split
    by the owner into two with a barrier between the two,
    internal barrier.
    And we rented one part of it, and others
    rented the other part of it.
    And it was on [MANDARIN], which is the Chinese for 68th Road.
    [MANDARIN]
    [MANDARIN] is 60.
    [MANDARIN] is eight, 68 Street.
    The languages that you were exposed to, it's amazing.
    I spoke Chinese, Mandarin, but, still, I can count,
    and I can curse a little.
    Although I retain some of the other languages,
    Chinese has left me.
    I went back there, and I thought maybe it would come out,
    but it did not.
    It didn't.
    And, when I came here, I spoke the language, Mandarin, however.
    And I went to people, Chinese people,
    and started speaking to them, and they did not understand me
    because most of the people who were here spoke Cantonese.
    They came from the southern part of China.
    And they do not understand each other at all.
    It's like two different languages.
    The characters are the same.
    They can read and write to each other,
    but they cannot speak to each other.
    Well, and it could not be like Serb or Croatian
    for example, where you can understand.
    No, no, not at all.
    So I would walk up to people and speak in Mandarin,
    and they would look at me like, what, are you making fun of me
    or something like that.
    And the attitude was let me get out of here with few exceptions.
    I did have one case where I was on the Long Island
    Railroad coming back from my uncle's house.
    They had moved out of New York City and moved to Great Neck.
    Uncle Ruda?
    Uncle Ruda.
    I'm getting ahead of myself with this.
    It's a little part of the story and I overheard a young--
    they weren't young to me, but they were, apparently,
    a young couple speaking Mandarin on the train.
    And I went to them and started to speak.
    And they--
    They kind of thought, huh?
    They didn't know what to do about me,
    but we had a conversation.
    And, sometimes, you sit there, and you
    realize you're being watched.
    So I turn around and see this car
    full of people looking at me, this little blonde kid speaking
    Mandarin.
    So I tried, but, after a while, I wanted to be American.
    I didn't want to have all this stuff,
    and I couldn't find people to speak to anyhow.
    And so I forgot it.
    Well, you lose a language that way.
    You do, but I thought it might come back, but it has not.
    Anyhow, so we lived in [MANDARIN],
    but it was called by the English Dumbarton Road.
    Dumbarton Road, OK.
    Each of those streets had two names, the Chinese name
    and then the English name.
    Was it a single story building, or was it several stories?
    Well, a part of it was two stories, the bigger part,
    which we were not in.
    We were all in the single-story part I remember.
    And there was a nice like a terrace, veranda kind of a slate
    area outside.
    How many rooms?
    I can't tell you for sure, but I had my own bedroom,
    and it was a living room my parents had a bedroom.
    And so--
    Modern?
    --there was a kitchen.
    Relatively modern, yes.
    Electricity?
    Oh, yes.
    Indoor plumbing?
    Yes.
    Heat?
    As far as I remember, yes.
    I mean, I was never cold.
    Coal heating or some other kind?
    I can't tell you that.
    That's OK.
    That's OK.
    I'm not sure.
    That's OK.
    But it was heated for sure.
    I take it that, at this point, you didn't
    have monetary problems anymore.
    No, because my father had a good position,
    and he was paid in the equivalent of American dollars.
    And so it went a long way.
    He used to say that, to live well, well--
    we're talking with servants--
    before and during the war and after the war,
    a little bit after the war, you could live very nicely
    for $1 a day.
    Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, yeah.
    It was a poor country.
    Yeah.
    Which I was very well aware of in terms
    of the poverty and the fact that we were very well off.
    And, when we lived in that first place, we didn't have servants.
    Talati, you mean?
    No, no, no, in that--
    In that place that you're talking about?
    In that place that we're talking about in Dumbarton Road,
    we had someone who came in and did maybe a little cleaning,
    cooking, and that kind of thing, but they were not
    full-time servants.
    Later on, we had full-time servants.
    And it was a little out of town, not really,
    but it was a long walk to get, for instance, to my school.
    So I would have to take the rickshaw.
    And I would do that sometimes.
    It was a little bit like Uber these days.
    You put your hand up, and a three-wheeler rickshaw,
    [MANDARIN] I think, [MANDARIN], three wheels, three-wheeler,
    would take me.
    And my parents were OK with that.
    They let me go by myself after a little while, not right away
    because I was too young anyhow.
    Yeah, I was pretty independent.
    So how did you--
    how did that poverty make itself aware to you?
    How was it that--
    Well, it was not earlier because, first of all,
    I was too young but second of all,
    we, eventually, moved from there more to the core, central part
    of the British Concession on what was called [MANDARIN] Road.
    And, when we lived there, there was a lot of commerce going on.
    It was residential, but not all residential.
    And there was a warehouse nearby.
    And I'll give you just one example, first of all, dirty.
    The Chinese were not the most-- unlike the Japanese
    who every little spot got removed,
    not so with the Chinese, completely
    different personalities.
    And, everything that they wanted to do,
    if they wanted to throw out, they threw out.
    And it was really-- and poverty was
    obvious in that regard because of what some
    of the kind of things that were being thrown out or left,
    not always nice.
    And one particular thing I remember
    so vividly that impressed me and made me realize
    was this warehouse.
    They called it a go down because you
    had to go down a couple of steps to get into the warehouse.
    They were bringing donkey or mule train wagons full of big,
    big, probably 100-pound sacks of flour to store in that
    warehouse.
    And, two men-- they were called coolies--
    would take one on each end of the bag
    and carry them, heavy bags, into the warehouse.
    And an old lady--
    at least, she looked old to me--
    had made an arrangement apparently to stick around.
    And, as they were carrying the bags of flour,
    she had a little dustpan and a broom.
    And she'd skim off the top of the bag a tiny bit
    of flour just with her brush into her pan.
    And she had a little bag and dropped a few bits of flour
    in the bag.
    She would do this all day long.
    By the end of the day, she had a little bit of flour.
    Oh my goodness, that is hunger, you know?
    Probably fed some family doing that.
    Well, by then, I was more like seven or eight.
    So I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but that's OK.
    And it made a big impression on me.
    And right across the street from us
    was a nice Victoria Park that I played in, very English park.
    And, in the building we lived in,
    we had this very large apartment.
    I still have the Chinese rug-- we have it in our bedroom--
    that was in the living room, but there
    were two identical ones next to each other, butting up
    against each other, which didn't fill the living room,
    9 by 12 rugs.
    Wow, wow.
    So it was a large living room?
    Big, big, big apartment divided by sliding wooden doors
    to our dining room.
    And by that time--
    I'm jumping ahead of myself, but my father was doing quite well,
    and we were part of a European community.
    I'll talk about the school in a minute.
    And we had three servants--
    a cook full time, and it's an unfortunate term,
    you know, the boy who would clean up and so on,
    and an amah who would do the laundry.
    But that's pretty much all I didn't have a babysitter amah
    kind of person.
    I think we should break in a minute,
    but I wanted to ask a question before we do.
    And that has to do with the Japanese and the occupation
    of these concessions.
    As far as--
    I want to just repeat it back to make sure I understand.
    In Tientsin, when they occupy Tientsin,
    the result is that you have to have--
    there are difficulties going between one
    concession and another.
    They're walled off.
    They're--
    Barbed wired.
    Yeah.
    But, within each concession, people
    are fairly free to move around.
    That's true.
    OK, and, if you were a citizen of the enemy countries,
    are you taken out from these concessions
    and put into another kind of internment place?
    Yes.
    So because you were not citizens--
    Out of the city by the way.
    Out of the city.
    Not too far, but out of the city, closer--
    go ahead, I'm sorry.
    Yeah, if you were British, for example,
    there are no British people then left in the British area?
    Correct.
    OK.
    And it really became not a British area.
    It became a Japanese occupied area.
    OK.
    And it extended itself, eventually,
    quite a bit during the war.
    So which Western-- which Western citizens were left over?
    Mainly, the stateless ones, people
    who had been in Tientsin for a long time who
    had come from elsewhere with some exceptions,
    and I'll get to that in a second, mainly Russian people
    who had come from Siberia, Harbin, for instance,
    north of there, and had, for whatever their reasons, business
    reasons, family reasons, had emigrated to China
    and had been there for quite a long time
    and formed their own communities, including
    a group of Jewish people of that Russian background.
    There were also some people more like us, very few Czech people
    by the way.
    Even in Shanghai, there were a few, but not many.
    Czechoslovakia wasn't a big country
    compared to Germany in terms of population and so on.
    Mainly, those people were mainly of German Jewish background who
    found their way to Tientsin, a few, not many,
    but there were a few, mostly not, mostly,
    as I say, people who spoke Russian at home.
    And what about Germans then?
    They wouldn't have been taken out.
    Were there--
    There weren't that many Germans there.
    Although-- or, at least, I don't know of them.
    Let's put it that way.
    Oh, OK.
    Because I would have thought, I mean,
    from a friendly, allied power, they
    wouldn't have taken their citizens.
    No, I imagine not but I don't think there
    were too many of them at all.
    So they would--
    Although, there had been a German concession,
    but I'm not sure what happened about that during the war.
    OK, because my thought was that, if there were Germans, then
    it wouldn't have been very good for the Jews
    because they could have told the Japanese listen.
    Right, right.
    Well, apparently, that did not go on.
    OK, that wasn't--
    Or, if it did, it went over the Japanese.
    As I said before, they didn't seem
    to differentiate between us and other European people.
    OK.
    And there's did a little story you
    may have read about that you talked about those barriers.
    So my parents had befriended the fellow
    who was of German Jewish background who was there,
    and he owned a restaurant in the French Concession, but lived
    in the British Concession.
    Before the war, it was not a big deal.
    It was walking distance.
    It turned out to be quite a good restaurant I think.
    And he, obviously, wanted to go from home to his business
    and was stopped.
    And they wanted to see his passport.
    Well, he didn't have a passport because he
    had come from Europe without one because it was confiscated.
    And so he went home, and he figured out, well,
    what am I going to do.
    So he took one of his menus that he had from his restaurant,
    and he found every rubber stamp he could possibly find.
    And he stamped things all over the place, put
    a picture of himself on there.
    And then when he was asked for the [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH],
    he showed them this, and he was waved in.
    So that's a light side story.
    That's pretty cool.
    Anyhow, so--
    A menu, a menu.
    Yeah.
    Schnitzel.
    Right.
    Stamp, yeah.
    OK, so, before the break, we were talking about life
    under Japanese occupation and the concessions
    and the kind of restrictions that they imposed,
    the barbed wires around the various quarters
    that made up the concessions, and the citizens
    from enemy nations, the larger enemies, who were taken out.
    How did-- first of all, how old were you
    when you moved to Tientsin?
    OK, I was 4 and 1/2, something like that.
    And how many years did you stay there?
    About eight.
    So from 4 and 1/2 to 12 and 1/2?
    Well, actually, I'm off there a little bit.
    I must have been younger than 4 and 1/2 because we were--
    I was almost 12 when I arrived here.
    So maybe I was four when I got to Tientsin.
    OK, but, at any rate, your key childhood years
    were spent in Tientsin.
    That's true.
    And tell me a little bit about those childhood years.
    OK, as I mentioned before, there was no heavy weight
    on my shoulders.
    I was a kid, and I did what many kids do, most kids do.
    I went to school.
    The Jewish school?
    In the Tientsin Jewish School, which was,
    more or less, like an English grammar school
    except with some special aspects.
    So the curriculum was quite broad.
    Many of the-- it went through the high school years, and many
    of the students who went there, not many,
    but some ended up going to universities
    at places like Stanford and other places
    because it was a very fine education.
    Was it an old school?
    Had it been recently established?
    Well, that's a relative term, but it
    couldn't have been very old.
    It was sometime in the 20th century for sure and probably
    not more than a couple of decades old when we arrived,
    maybe even less.
    And the Jewish community there, as I mentioned earlier,
    was, primarily, made up of people who started out
    as Russians, but not entirely
    and it was a very close-knit, very self-contained, in a way,
    community.
    They had a hospital.
    They had a synagogue, which still exists,
    but not as a synagogue.
    They had the school and various charitable organizations
    and all kinds of organizations.
    The Kunst Club, which means art, Kunst, art club,
    is part of that with all kinds of activities going on
    and programs going on there.
    And people were pretty open.
    I mean, when we arrived--
    again, not from a child's perspective, but, looking back
    and from what I heard, we were open--
    brought in with open arms.
    What was the language of instruction?
    English.
    English?
    Yes.
    Oh, that's very helpful.
    Oh, yeah.
    OK, so you were picking up Chinese at home and sort
    of outside of school--
    In the street, basically.
    --in the street, yeah, and learning English in school.
    Yes.
    And, at home, what language?
    Did you still speak--
    Czech.
    Still Czech, OK.
    Yes, and I had to learn Russian because, first of all,
    many of my friends were from that background,
    but then they had, I remember, a nature studies course,
    which was taught by a man who spoke nothing but Russian.
    I didn't know Russian.
    Yeah.
    And I guess, as a young child, languages
    are much easier to pick up than when one gets older.
    But wonderful, just wonderful when a kid is in that
    environment--
    Yeah, well--
    --that you can
    --you know, I just absorbed it.
    And then I heard a lot of German at home
    and, also, my parents speaking to other people
    and that little child in Shanghai
    that I thought I was English.
    And so I could understand German very well,
    and I could speak it fairly well.
    Just by absorption?
    Yes.
    No formal instruction?
    That's true.
    English, I had more formal instruction in school.
    Chinese, I began to have.
    Just before we left, we started learning
    how to read and write characters,
    but that obviously stopped.
    But the other languages were more or less picked up.
    Although, there was a Russian course
    as well it was a part of the curriculum in the school
    and we had math of all kinds.
    It depends on the grade level.
    We had English dictation.
    We had grammar.
    We had writing, all the various components
    that you would think of.
    And we had Russian language.
    We had Jewish history.
    What about religious instruction?
    It was not really religious instruction.
    It was-- they were, by the way, not all Jewish children.
    They were mostly Jewish children,
    but there were some were not.
    [? Varya ?] [? Kagansky, ?] I remember.
    [? Varya ?] [? Hagansky? ?]
    [? Kagansky, ?] yeah.
    [? Kagansky. ?]
    She was not a Jewish child.
    Anyhow, and what else?
    The curriculum-- oh, and Hebrew we had, but it was not--
    it was Jewish history and Hebrew language, but not religion.
    That was left to being in the synagogue
    and in that aspect of it.
    OK, now I'm speaking to the adult, not the child
    at the time.
    Do you know if this community was established
    post-Bolshevik Revolution from emigres or people who
    had escaped from there or after that?
    It was a combination.
    There were people there from before,
    and there were quite a few people from after that.
    OK, because a lot of people who would have been religious,
    for example, might have left right
    after the Bolshevik Revolution.
    Right, I would-- this is a generality.
    It probably went from soup to nuts,
    as far as that subject is concerned,
    but I would think that, on a general, average kind of level,
    they were not all very religious.
    OK.
    It was a conservative synagogue and observed many
    of the holidays, Jewish holidays, most of them I guess.
    And we spent a lot of time, even as kids, at the synagogue.
    It was quite a nice building, relatively new at that time,
    and probably built in the late '30s.
    And I remember playing outside the synagogue, games
    of all kinds and what have you.
    It was near a stream, which is now a highway.
    And the synagogue is no longer used as a synagogue.
    It was then turned into a restaurant,
    I think, at one point.
    And then, interestingly enough, I
    think the Catholic Church owns it at this time.
    And so I spent quite a bit of time there,
    but it's mostly with my friends from school kind of thing.
    And I don't know.
    Does that answer?
    Yeah.
    Now, at home, were your neighbors also
    Westerners of some kind?
    Yes.
    So you were in a kind of an expatriate community?
    Yes, it's a bubble.
    It was a bubble, no question.
    And it was a lovely place for a child to grow up.
    We were relatively, compared to the most of the population,
    very well off.
    We, as I mentioned, had servants.
    I had to learn my lessons sometimes about that.
    I remember one occasion.
    I don't know how old I was, eight or nine.
    And I was sitting in this big living room,
    and I had put a glass of water over the other side.
    And I yelled for the boy to pick up that.
    I got slapped for that, lessons to be learned.
    Anyhow, that was one.
    And then the cook--
    well, maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself,
    but we got into the subject.
    Yeah, sure.
    During the war, there was a curfew the Japanese imposed.
    And, one New Year's, my parents went off,
    having a great time at a New Year's Eve party,
    and left me, basically, without a babysitter.
    That was fine.
    It was not unusual.
    And our cook lived in the back of our apartment.
    It was a big apartment.
    And his kitchen and his living quarters was way back there.
    He was trained by some British people in India
    who had lived in India, and then he learned a lot from my mother.
    Although, he would turn his-- literally,
    turn his back on her when she was telling him what to do,
    but he absorbed it and then used it.
    But, anyhow, this night, New Year's, they were,
    I guess, either feeling what they had to drink
    or playing the big shots, not just alone, the whole bunch
    of them.
    Curfew schmurfew, they were going
    to go out, out of wherever they were, and go home.
    And, PS, they got picked up by the authorities
    and put into jail just for the night.
    Well, I woke up in the middle of the night and no parents.
    I got a little concerned.
    And hours went by and still no parents.
    So I woke up the cook, poor guy, and he was very sympathetic.
    And he decided he would make me handmade potato chips
    in the middle of the night, sliced them paper thin,
    fried them up for me.
    And that made the time go by.
    And my parents--
    How sweet.
    Parents showed up, and that was the end of the story.
    So, yeah, and I had the run of the town,
    but more after the war than during the war
    because there were restrictions, but there
    were some very nice facilities.
    There was Racecourse Road, which was
    the English name for a road that went out
    to a racecourse they had a little further out of the city.
    And there was a beautiful country club--
    I can't think of any better word for it--
    which was active before and after the war,
    but not during the war because it was like an English, American
    country club.
    I can get to that later on, but, anyhow,
    so I was starting to tell about the school.
    I mean, do you want to hear about that a little bit more?
    Yeah, yeah.
    Yeah, well, most of my friends were from that school
    eventually.
    OK.
    And we played.
    We played in the schoolyard a lot.
    We played in-- there was a courtyard
    in the building, the apartment house next door to us.
    And we drove the neighbors crazy, I'm sure,
    playing in there.
    And we went to each other's homes just like normal children.
    So the war is far away.
    Well--
    Aside from the Japanese presence.
    That's right.
    There was no active warfare going on in the city.
    It was occupied, period, and controlled,
    but there was no fighting going on, not right in the city
    or the part of the city that we were in.
    Now there was a vast portion of the city
    that was mostly Chinese, which was also occupied.
    And they may not have been treated exactly the same way
    unfortunately.
    Well, that was one of my questions.
    Was there news of occupation policies, occupation activities?
    In general, I know nothing about the Japanese occupation of China
    during the war, but the little that I
    read is that it could have been-- it was, in some places,
    very brutal.
    It was.
    Fortunately, not where we were and I suppose
    it depended on the general in charge.
    I'm not sure of that, but that's the logical conclusion
    because there were parts of China where it was terrible.
    But our part of China happened-- as we were, again, very lucky,
    it was not so bad at all.
    There was no, at least not to our knowledge,
    atrocious acts going on.
    What about the people who were in charge?
    Were they Japanese?
    Or were they local Chinese who were working for the Japanese?
    In charge in what regard do you mean?
    Municipal things, the police, any sort of--
    They were under Japanese supervision.
    Let's put it that way.
    Now they didn't quit their jobs.
    They continued to make the city run as well as possible.
    And the Japanese, you know I'm sure, controlled that.
    OK, OK.
    Yeah.
    Was it corrupt at that point?
    I'm sure there was corruption.
    I don't know of any specific instances.
    I know more about that sort of after the war
    when the Marines came with all of their equipment
    that they gave to the nationalist government, which
    ended up not used, in the fields,
    being cannibalized and sold.
    So this is the US Marines?
    The US, no, the US Marines just provided this stuff.
    The nationalist, communist bigwigs or whoever--
    I don't know who they were--
    were the ones who then took advantage of the situation
    because you could buy--
    there was a black market.
    It was like a real market, and you could buy a Jeep.
    I mean, it was that open.
    And it didn't come just out of nowhere.
    No, of course not.
    It had to have blessings from on high in order to operate.
    That's right.
    That's right.
    But that's post-war you're saying?
    That is.
    OK, so, during the war--
    During the war, I don't know about it.
    Let's put it that way.
    I just don't know.
    I can't imagine there wasn't any.
    I can't imagine there wasn't some collusion.
    There must have been because that's always the case when
    you have an occupied force.
    Of course.
    Now what about news?
    Was there-- did you have a radio at home?
    Yes, we did, but I'm not sure there was much to listen to.
    I remember the cook's Chinese music
    on in the background, which could
    drive anyone nuts sometimes, but this high-pitched singing.
    So there was radio.
    We had radio, and I think my parents listened to it,
    but I'm not sure what they could listen to and what kind of news
    they got.
    I think most of the news that they got was by mail.
    OK, were there any--
    So it was always old news.
    OK, were there any letters that came from family members
    back in Europe?
    Early on and then, of course, not.
    There were some early on.
    And my parents wrote.
    And, whether they got there or not, I'm not sure.
    I know some of them did because they got responses.
    And I even have some of that correspondence.
    And then-- well, that's again after the war.
    So I'm getting ahead of myself.
    There was another piece of correspondence,
    which is key or very important for my family,
    and that was a letter from my aunt Kathy.
    When Carol was talking about aunts,
    she had one aunt, my uncle Ruda's wife, Hannelore.
    Whom he married in Brussels.
    Who he married in Brussels.
    And the other aunt, who was my aunt Katalin,
    who, when she found that piece of Nakashima,
    she was the the aunt, not the one who suggested Nakashima,
    but she came along with us.
    So, all of a sudden, her letter showed up.
    Hang on a second.
    Just to explain, off camera, we were
    talking about a piece of furniture
    in this home that is done by a Japanese artisan craftsman, very
    famous now.
    It's a sideboard.
    And his name is Nakashima.
    And it was your aunt Katalin who had gone through Auschwitz--
    That's correct.
    --who recommended him.
    No, no.
    No, oh.
    It was my aunt Hannelore who recommended him,
    but my aunt Katalin happened to be with us
    when we were buying things.
    Oh, that's right.
    And she saw that piece.
    And put her hand on it.
    Put her hand on it and purchased it, and now we have it.
    OK, OK.
    So let's talk about that piece of correspondence,
    even though it's going on a little bit.
    You say that she wrote to you, or she wrote to your father?
    Just after the war, she had been liberated by the Swedish Red
    Cross from a train that went all around Germany,
    getting away from Auschwitz and figuring out what to do.
    The people in charge, apparently,
    didn't know what to do.
    They went there.
    They went back.
    Anyhow, they finally ended up going
    to a place where the Swedish Red Cross was
    able to take the people on that train off and rescue them
    and took them to Sweden.
    And she was in Stockholm for a good portion of a year
    and doing pretty well, considering.
    And she wrote a letter addressed to Joseph Schulhof, Liebermann
    and Waelchli Company, Tientsin, China.
    That was it.
    And it got there.
    And here, by the way, if you don't have the apartment number,
    it gets sent back.
    Yeah, that's just a by the way.
    And this letter came and told my parents where she was
    and what had happened and so on.
    And my parents then got busy making arrangements
    to bring her to us in Tientsin.
    And did you?
    And which she did.
    She flew.
    And this was right after the war, 1946 I guess by then.
    She flew, had many, many hops of flights, eventually, getting
    to Beijing, and then got on the train to come to Tientsin.
    And that I remember very clearly.
    What did she look like?
    She's tiny.
    She is tough as nails on the outside
    because that was just her personality, not nasty tough,
    just resilient.
    That saved her life I'm sure.
    She was a lot softer on the inside.
    I called her the sabra, you know, thorny on the--
    sabra is a pear, which has prickles on the outside,
    and it's soft on the inside.
    Is that why Israelis are called sabras?
    Yes.
    Anyhow, so she came to us in Tientsin.
    And people there, our community, were very interested
    in her experience.
    And so she was convinced to write it down,
    which she did in German, but that wasn't useful
    because most of those people did not speak or understand German.
    So she then, one day, at the Kunst Club, the art
    club, literally, and read her very detailed description
    of what had happened to her in the time
    that she spent at Auschwitz and another concentration camp,
    a very tough-going reading.
    And there was a translator from German
    into Russian while she spoke so that everybody could understand.
    And that was part of our Facebook project by the way.
    It's there for people to read.
    And she stayed with us for several years
    until we got visas to come to the United States.
    I'll backtrack.
    But then she did not have a visa to come here
    and ended in Israel for several years.
    And then my mother convinced her to join us again here
    in the United States, which she did.
    She lived mostly in New York she was
    a seamstress by her profession.
    And Vogue picked her right up.
    So that was part of her career here.
    Story, yeah.
    Anyhow.
    So that's Katalin after the war, your mother's sister.
    Right.
    OK, and so she would have been taken in '44 because she
    was from Hungary, yes?
    Correct.
    All right, let's go back now before the war.
    And we're still in Tientsin.
    It still has Japanese occupation.
    Right, right.
    Does your father's business, working for the Swiss company,
    sort of develop and proceed, more or less, uneventfully,
    other than looking for materials and raw materials and things?
    It proceeded, more or less, normally.
    I guess everybody still needed welding electrodes and whatever.
    And so that did not stop.
    OK.
    And, because it was a Swiss firm, as we earlier discussed,
    and some portion of it located in Japan,
    I suppose that was helpful.
    Yeah, so life went on, so to speak, as usual,
    as far as that was concerned.
    Within this very strange circumstance.
    That's right.
    Yeah, how did your mother pass her days?
    I mean, what took up her activities?
    She was, basically, a housewife.
    She didn't work as a business.
    Later on, she began to do that, especially when it seemed
    like it was likely that we would come here to the United States.
    So she started gathering some Chinese artwork or vases
    and things like that and actually
    ended up opening a little shop here in New York for a while.
    Anyhow, no, she, basically, stayed at home
    and was in charge of the servants and the household
    and so on.
    And then she had a social life.
    Was your parents' social life pretty active?
    I would say so.
    Were they happy?
    Do you mean as a couple?
    Or--
    As a couple and at this time in their lives.
    I would say remarkably so, but, unlike me,
    with being a little kid, they had that weight
    on their shoulders of what was happening in Europe
    and what was happening to their families.
    And then, when they found out, especially, it
    was tough for them.
    But, locally, together, they were just fine.
    When did they find out?
    Not until after the war.
    OK, did they get newspapers of any kind?
    Well, there were newspapers, like The Peking Chronicle.
    English language?
    English language.
    But I don't know.
    During the war, I don't think those newspapers
    were in operation.
    So the information was slow to come and not very frequent.
    Do you remember where you were in May '45
    when the European war ended?
    Do you remember hearing about the war in Europe ending?
    Oh, yes.
    Oh, yes.
    OK, what were the circumstances of that?
    You know, I don't know exactly.
    In other words, I don't know who told us, how we found out.
    We just did.
    But what I do remember was when the Marines came.
    US Marines?
    US Marines.
    And when did they come?
    In '45.
    After August or before August?
    Because August is when the Pacific War ends,
    after the bomb.
    It must have been after.
    It was after, definitely after then.
    So do you remember news of the atomic bomb being dropped?
    I'm sure.
    I don't specifically remember that as a--
    You were eight.
    I was about eight, right.
    Yeah, so I don't--
    I don't specifically remember that
    and how we found out about it, but we
    did find out about it for sure.
    OK, and did the--
    By that time, it was after--
    the war just had ended or very close to being ended.
    And the Japanese were, more or less, in retreat.
    That's what I wanted to know.
    Yeah, in fact, the Japanese people
    who were part of the occupation were pretty much
    abandoned by Japan.
    And they were-- that's how--
    we can't see it here, but the kimono that's hanging there
    is one of the results of that.
    Those people were in dire straits,
    and they wanted to sell anything they
    owned that was of any value.
    And my parents bought some of those things, including that--
    That Japanese kimono?
    --kimono.
    There's another one we have elsewhere.
    And, you know, I guess it enabled them to survive.
    Others did the same kind of thing.
    And it wasn't just out of being nice.
    It was we were getting something for it, something of quite
    nice value, my parents were.
    But they were in bad-- finally, they
    ended up going back to Japan.
    And I don't know what happened to them of course, but--
    Was revenge taken on the Japanese occupying forces?
    I imagine so, at least, to some extent, because, during the war,
    there was actually a three-way war going
    on between the nationalists and the communists
    and the communists and the Japanese.
    And both the communists and nationalists
    banded together, to some extent, not very nicely, not very well,
    against the Japanese.
    So there was a three-way war going on.
    So this is-- you mentioned earlier about corruption.
    And you mentioned in one sentence the nationalists
    and the communists and corruption.
    And I thought, oh, but those are two different forces,
    but not necessarily.
    Well, there were-- they joined the effort,
    but they weren't necessarily melded.
    OK.
    And they fought against each other
    whenever the opportunity arose as well.
    So, getting off on a somewhat different tack
    because it's another subject, but associated,
    my parents and I, especially my mother and I,
    spent much of our summers during the war period
    and after in a small town northeast of Tientsin
    called Peitaiho.
    We used to call it "pay-tie-ho."
    And it was a resort town.
    On the water?
    On the water.
    OK.
    It used to be called the Gulf of Chili, C-H-I-L-I I think,
    but it was really just an arm of the Yellow Sea.
    It was a beautiful spot.
    There were hills on one side and the water on the other.
    And my parents and a friend had a home there that they owned,
    a small place.
    And my mother and I would go there for the summertime.
    And I had a ball, the beach, walking up
    in the hills, the donkeys.
    The donkeys were the mode of transportation there.
    You hailed a donkey.
    And, sometimes, the poor guy who owned the donkey would get
    scared because I'd run away with the donkey, but I'd come back.
    And I had a great time.
    I learned how to swim there.
    Actually, my father's boss' wife taught me how to swim.
    They were--
    In the ocean?
    Yes, but there were--
    some times of the day because of the tide, there were shallows.
    And so I learned how to swim in some of those shallows.
    And she helped me learn how to swim.
    It was a great place for a kid.
    But getting back and forth was not so easy.
    First of all, even if there was nothing going on,
    it was a good six-hour train ride
    Oh, wow.
    But it was a slow train.
    And then there were some not such great times
    because, towards the end of the war,
    the communists were getting more brave I guess or whatever.
    And they would blow up sections of the train-- of the tracks
    or bridges.
    And, sometimes, it would take us days to get back.
    I remember one time very clearly.
    We were in this town of Tangshan,
    which was devastated not that many years ago
    by a tremendous earthquake, basically, leveled.
    But it wasn't so at the time.
    And we were stuck, however, at the railroad
    station there because we couldn't go any further.
    Some bridge had been blown up or something.
    And we slept on a table in the railroad station.
    And my mother would go out to get some food,
    and she always-- and that was true all the time.
    She would never buy anything from the street vendors
    that she didn't see deep fried, bananas included, skin and all.
    And so we stayed there for a couple of days
    until they fixed whatever needed to be fixed to go on.
    And that was part of the landscape there.
    You just highlighted something that I wanted to ask about,
    and that was food.
    Two questions about food, was it plentiful during this occupation
    time, during war?
    Was there a shortage?
    And, second, what kind of food was it?
    Was it Chinese food, Western food?
    It was English, Czech, and Hungarian.
    That's what the cook made, huh?
    That's what the cook made because he learned how to do so.
    He had the English part.
    We got served curry, curry dinners.
    They were the formal curry thing,
    and they had little condiments of all kinds
    and then curry and so on.
    He would do that very nicely.
    He was an excellent cook.
    Anyhow, no, there was no shortage for us.
    I'm sure there were shortages elsewhere and for the Chinese
    but there was no shortage for us because we had enough money
    to afford it more than enough.
    And the cook would go out to do the shopping.
    Carol, my wife, mentioned I should say something
    about because it was maybe of interest.
    Yeah, the cook did not want my mother to come along with him.
    And she thinks she figured out why.
    First of all, he kept some of the money she gave him,
    but he spent a lot less than if it were my mother going out
    for the exact same food.
    So it was a win-win.
    So it was kind of his commission.
    His commission, he got paid
    Yeah.
    But, yeah, he got a little extra that way.
    And he always came back with whatever we wanted,
    whatever my mother wanted.
    And it didn't seem to be a problem if you
    had the right amount of money.
    And what about Chinese food?
    Did you get acquainted with it?
    Yeah, every once and a while, we went out for Chinese.
    Just like here.
    [LAUGHTER]
    That's true.
    It was terrific.
    I remember that.
    And some of our farewell dinners when we were leaving, finally,
    were given by my father's Chinese associates.
    So we were really good for a treat there.
    Yeah, no, the food was quite Western that we ate at home.
    It was not Chinese food necessarily.
    If it was, it was something special,
    on a special occasion or whatever, or maybe
    the cook's whim.
    I'm not sure.
    And, no, but it was Western food.
    What about Indians from India?
    Was there a presence of Indian people?
    A few, a few like that hotel owner.
    OK.
    Talati.
    Talati.
    Yeah, and there were a few entrepreneurs and what have you,
    but not many that I'm aware of.
    OK.
    Some Sikhs doing the traffic.
    Really?
    Yeah, yeah.
    Was it a pretty city, Tientsin?
    You know, I didn't have--
    I had free rein sort of within the area,
    particularly after the war, but even
    during the war within my area.
    My parents-- I don't know.
    Maybe it was the European way of bringing up children.
    They weren't helicopter parents by any means.
    And I did some things, which I don't think--
    which we ourselves don't let our granddaughter
    do at this point and her parents don't let.
    She's 10 years old.
    When I was 10, I was riding a bicycle
    all over Tientsin, all over my part of Tientsin at least.
    I wouldn't go out to the Chinese area,
    though, because it wasn't always safe.
    Drastic things may not have happened,
    but I got mugged once, even in the area.
    It's a sad story for me.
    I was presented with my first good watch at a birthday,
    and I wanted to show it off.
    And my parents said don't take it over
    to your friend who lived a little out on a farm.
    And I did
    And, sure enough, on the way back,
    two older boys saw me with my watch.
    And what they did is, basically, held me.
    They held my arms behind my back, took the watch and ran.
    So nothing happened, but my watch was gone.
    I had a little few things to explain to my parents.
    Anyhow, and there was a tension between European children
    and Chinese children because, thinking back now,
    you can't blame the Chinese for resenting us.
    Here we were in their land and then especially
    in the concessions where that's not even their laws that
    were prevailing in there.
    And they're not their people.
    Well, some people worked there.
    They didn't really live there.
    And so there was resentment, and it was felt. I mean,
    we had some bouts of rock throwing
    at each other and that kind of thing
    occasionally, not very often, but it did happen.
    Now let's go to when the Japanese retreat.
    And you say the US Marines arrive.
    Do you remember--
    Big deal, that was a big deal.
    Yeah, did you expect them to come?
    Were you surprised when they came?
    No, my parents knew ahead of time that they were coming.
    I'm not sure how they found out, but they were told.
    It was not some secret or surprise.
    Unfortunately, I was in bed with some kind of jaundice
    that day when they showed up because I really
    wanted to see this.
    I mean, they paraded into town.
    Yeah.
    And then, shortly after that, we moved from that house
    that I told you about to that apartment near to where
    the things were going on.
    And there's a canal that goes-- it's what makes Tientsin
    a port, the river.
    Really, it's a river, which connects from the Yellow Sea.
    And only a relatively small craft
    can come down there, but the LSTs--
    Landing Ship Transport I think it stands for--
    were able to do that.
    And some of the sailors came in that way,
    and the Marines came in that way and got off those ships
    and then occupied.
    And not in a--
    they just pushed the Japanese out, basically, and then
    stayed there for quite a while.
    So what happened with all all of people who had been interned
    in those Japanese camps?
    What happened with them?
    Well, they were released right away and either stayed on
    and became--
    the British came back and established.
    They still had their British concession
    and all the I'll call them governmental agencies and so on.
    And I'm sure our upstairs neighbor in the apartment house
    that we lived--
    I remember his first funny name that I
    thought was funny was Bunny.
    And he was part of that group.
    And they came back and picked up where
    they left off more or less.
    And some of them must have left.
    You know, they had enough.
    But some stayed.
    And, the Marines, I had good memories.
    I was a little gutsy boy.
    Tell us.
    So the LSTs were moored on the river, and it was--
    I don't know-- three, four blocks away from where we lived.
    So I would go over there, and I would wave
    at the sailors kind of thing.
    And they-- look at that blond kid.
    Hey, shorty.
    And I thought they were talking about my pants.
    Oh.
    [LAUGHTER]
    And they said come on up.
    You know, and I'd go up on the ship
    and climb all over the ships.
    Oh wow, what fun.
    Yeah, and they'd give me presents, a box of tools.
    I brought that home.
    My father said bring it right back.
    And I said I don't know even who to bring it back to.
    Anyhow, long story short, we kept them,
    and I still have that box.
    No kidding, no kidding.
    And why did he want you to--
    It's olive drab by the way.
    You what?
    It was painted olive drab, you know, the color.
    Anyhow, and I had a great time.
    I had a great time.
    And my parents befriended one of the officers, a Marine officer.
    His name was Joe Burke from the New York area.
    He loved coming to my parents' house.
    Did he?
    He could have a bath.
    He could have a great meal.
    And he became a good friend.
    We were still in that other first house.
    It had a-- it was a nice, nice spot.
    There was a big like alleyway, more than an alleyway,
    just a passageway to the back part of the house
    where we lived.
    And there was I told you like a patio there.
    I remember being sick one day, and it was winter.
    And my mother would put me out there in the sunshine.
    And there was something in the air, a winter day air.
    And it felt great.
    The sun was shining.
    But along that little alleyway was acacia trees.
    They had beautiful, white flowers when they kind of
    came out in the spring.
    They dropped all over.
    It looked like a carpet of snow.
    And there was a gate, a metal gate, one of those wrought iron,
    which was locked, but I would always climb over it.
    And he would park--
    Joe Burke would park his Jeep there,
    which was a big attraction for the neighborhood.
    You know, look at this Jeep.
    And I'd go into that Jeep, make believe I'm driving it.
    And I would step on the gas, and it would get flooded.
    And he would get so angry, but he was OK.
    Anyhow, when we came to New York,
    we met up with him again and his wife.
    And it was nice.
    He was a very interesting guy.
    He was an expert bonsai collector.
    Oh, really?
    He ended up being.
    Yeah, he was a teacher in a high school here.
    And there were others that they befriended.
    So it was a nice time.
    So when did your parents' sites turn to the US?
    When did they thinking--
    They had put in their name again and again.
    And, lo and behold, just a few months before the communists
    took over the area of China that we lived in, all of a sudden,
    our visas came through.
    You mean-- do you think it has anything
    to do with putting in those visas
    before leaving Czechoslovakia?
    It was a continuous effort.
    And the records were there.
    I don't know whether that was influential
    and finally getting them or whether the more recent
    applications were.
    I assume it's the more recent ones.
    OK.
    But we got visas.
    And so that's when we were able to come here.
    And then were they connected with the affidavits
    that relatives had sent earlier or on your own?
    I think it was pretty much on my own-- on our own,
    on my parents' own, because I don't know of any evidence that
    they had to re--
    maybe my uncle did so just because it was a good thing
    to do.
    I don't know if it was necessary because, at that point
    we had our own--
    my parents had their own assets.
    Assets, yeah.
    Had they owned the houses that you lived in?
    No, no.
    They had rented them?
    Rented.
    Even the one on the sea side?
    No, that one was owned.
    OK.
    That was by the way--
    a little more about that.
    It was-- we were there only during the summers.
    Right.
    My father would come there for his vacation and some weekends,
    but it was a long trip.
    So it was primarily my mother and I and a friend sometimes.
    And we had a caretaker there.
    It was called a Chinese term, [MANDARIN], I remember.
    And it looked like an older man and his wife.
    I remember his wife sitting outside their little home, which
    was on the one end of the property.
    She was sitting outside smoking this long pipe.
    And he would plant tobacco for her
    and for selling, I guess, and also sweet potatoes.
    And you have to turn the sweet potato--
    they were vines, and he'd be turning them
    with a special kind of instrument all day long.
    And he had a garden put up in front of us,
    a vegetable and flower garden, full of sunflowers
    and other kind of flowers and nice vegetables.
    And it was a typical, beautiful day.
    I'd go to the beach with my mother,
    spend the morning at the beach, and, when it's time for lunch,
    get up, walk up--
    it was not a very long walk to get to the house--
    walk through the garden, pick some cucumbers and tomatoes
    or whatever, and have them for lunch.
    Oh, gosh.
    Sounds like the southern part of France, doesn't it?
    Yeah, it sounds lovely.
    Yeah, it was.
    OK.
    Anyhow, so where were we?
    So did they sell that too when they were planning to leave?
    No, that was just abandoned.
    It was just abandoned.
    It turned out that Mao Zedong took over that whole area
    because he loved to swim there.
    And so the place got changed completely.
    All the Western houses were either
    absorbed or taken over or leveled or whatever.
    Did you fear one side or the other?
    Was there fear of the communists?
    Or was there fear of the Kuomintang I think it was,
    the nationalists?
    Not on our part in fact, sometimes,
    towards the end of the war, to be safe,
    the whole group of us from Tientsin traveled from the town
    to the railroad station, which was several kilometers away.
    And we traveled together in a caravan
    just for safety purposes.
    And we got cover by some of the communist guerrilla troops.
    It was weird.
    It was really weird in some ways.
    So who knows?
    OK, OK.
    Well, it sounds like chaos, and it sounds a bit confusing.
    Oh yeah, well, but there was no real fear
    because that was your question.
    Yes, that was my question, OK.
    So do you remember leaving?
    Yes, very much.
    I was almost 12.
    I was 11 and 1/2 or so.
    Tell me about that.
    Well, I looked forward to it very much.
    Boy, I wanted to be American.
    Strangely, I regretted not having freckles
    because I thought that was my image, you know,
    Tom Sawyer or something.
    I read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn,
    and I was really looking forward to it.
    So it wasn't so hard to say goodbye, but it was.
    And I corresponded.
    I wrote a letter to our school.
    I got an answer from one of them,
    a personal answer, that little girl, [? Varya, ?]
    who wrote to me.
    And, strangely enough, there are not that many people
    from in that path here.
    Although, a couple were.
    And we weren't close, but we kept in touch.
    As a matter of fact, in 1995, a whole group
    of us from all over the country came and had a little reunion,
    but they were mostly people who were four or five years older
    than me.
    So there were only three of us--
    I think three in that whole group who were my age
    and who knew each other at the time.
    One of them still lives here, and the other does not.
    She, strangely, went back to Russia for whatever her reasons.
    She was here she had been married here.
    She had children here and then went off to Russia.
    I never found out why.
    And then, another a little story about my friends
    from that period, we were going to go
    to Australia, my wife and I. And, in fact, we
    ended up doing that in 2001.
    Yeah, I think so, 2000.
    That sounds too far away.
    No, it wasn't-- whatever, it was not that long ago.
    And, just before that, out of the blue,
    I get this email from a fellow who
    was my classmate in Tientsin who lived in Sydney
    and he said he found out about me through a magazine that
    came out of Israel that my father corresponded with
    and wrote to them and so on.
    And he had written some little article that they'd published,
    and this fellow's mother had seen it and mentioned it.
    So he got in touch with me and said,
    you know, I'm living in Sydney and da da da.
    And we were going to go to Australia.
    So, long story made a little shorter, we went to Sydney,
    and he had arranged, first of all,
    to show us all around Sydney.
    Mind you, he and I were about 11 when we last saw each other.
    This was about--
    I think it was I said--
    I think it was 2011.
    I know there was a one involved.
    Yeah, that was more like it, 2011.
    And, that evening, there were several other people
    from my class who had come to Sydney also.
    So there were five of us in a Chinese restaurant.
    Talk about surreal.
    Wow.
    And those people, for the most part,
    were there longer than we because they just
    didn't have their luck and weren't
    able to come here or anywhere else for a while.
    And they were-- the communists by then had taken over.
    They did not like any Westerners in China.
    So they were, basically, pushed out eventually,
    some with some issues, like this fellow's--
    [RUMBLING]
    What is that I'm hearing?
    This fellow's father who was a dentist
    by the way, who was interned for some reason by the communists.
    Anyhow, he was finally let go, and they went to Australia.
    And, a number of them, we were sort of all over the place.
    Many of them came to Israel.
    Some of them came to Canada.
    Some of them came here to the United States, a few.
    And some of them went to Australia, some,
    I think, maybe even to South Africa.
    But, anyhow, they were kind of dispersed.
    I'd say the majority went to Israel.
    And so that was quite--
    Interesting to kind of find out the destinies
    of all of these classmates or many of them
    and really scattered from what you're saying, really
    all around the world.
    That's true.
    How did you-- what was your transport in leaving China?
    We flew Northwest Orient Airlines.
    There was a-- there was a strike, shipping strike,
    on the West Coast of the United States at that point.
    And that resulted in two things.
    First of all, we didn't want to wait around
    until who knows when that strike would be over,
    that kind of thing.
    And, secondly, unfortunately, that
    meant that my parents could only take so much along.
    Although, they took a few things with them.
    What we did was we flew from--
    and that was a little adventure.
    We flew from Tientsin to Shanghai on a DC-3.
    It was supposed to leave at some hour,
    and it didn't leave until like 12 hours later.
    And we were happy that it did.
    We flew over communist-held territory.
    We got to Shanghai.
    My father tells a story-- and I sort of wonder about it,
    but that's what he told me--
    that we were flying along, flying along.
    And, all of a sudden, he felt a little bump,
    and then there was silence.
    And he thought oh my god.
    Well, it turned out it was a beautiful landing.
    Anyhow, I wonder about that story,
    but, anyhow it's a good story.
    So here we were in Shanghai for a few days
    until we got our flight from Shanghai to Tokyo.
    And then, from Tokyo we stopped at one of the Aleutian Islands,
    Shemya, in the middle of the night, cold, dark.
    They had a little Quonset hut, basically,
    and they had a pool table.
    And I played pool alone, by myself, while waiting to be--
    to have I guess refueled and what have you.
    And then the next step was to Anchorage, Alaska.
    And that was our immigration point.
    We held up the whole planeload of people
    because we had to be checked out health-wise and paperwork
    and all of that stuff.
    But everybody was patient, and we then flew to Seattle
    where we met my uncle, Ruda.
    So were you the only immigrants on that flight?
    Yes.
    And the other people were military?
    No, I think there were business people mostly.
    I mean, there may have been some military
    dressed in civilian clothing.
    I don't know.
    But not tourists.
    I can't imagine that they would be tourists.
    No, no, I doubt very much there were any tourists at that point.
    And what year was this?
    That was 19-- end of 1948, November the 13th, to be exact,
    of 1948.
    '48.
    I know that because there were two of them.
    Oh, really?
    Yeah, two November 13ths because of the timeline.
    That's right.
    The date line.
    That's right.
    So you lived in China for three years post-war.
    Yes.
    And you were then 11 years old when you came to the US?
    Yeah, 11 and 1/2.
    11 and 1/2.
    It was November.
    My birthday is in June so yeah.
    Yeah, wow.
    So, yes, you had not only a good chunk
    of occupation time under the Japanese, but a solid chunk
    of the immediate post-war years.
    And I had a ball.
    I had a ball.
    It was like everything opened up.
    I rode my bicycle all over the place.
    I told you about our country club.
    It was great.
    It had tennis courts.
    It had a swimming pool indoors.
    It had-- oh, I learned about baseball there
    because there were a whole bunch of American people
    who were taking advantage of the country club.
    And I remember watching baseball.
    I even remember one of the big sluggers named--
    his last name was [? Coffey, ?] which I thought was interesting.
    [? Coffey. ?]
    Anyhow, yeah, I came here, and I was a Yankee fan
    before I even got here.
    Talk about being well integrated.
    Yeah, and we arrived.
    In Seattle?
    And then--
    In Seattle and then took some time
    to go down the coast to San Francisco and Los Angeles
    and took across-country trains across to Chicago and then
    from Chicago to New York.
    With your uncle Ruda?
    No, he was busy doing his business,
    and he met us in Seattle and then left us
    when we went to San Francisco.
    Now did he know of what had happened to all the family
    members--
    By then?
    --on your father's side?
    By then, yes, of course, because my father and he
    corresponded if nothing else, but he may have known before we.
    Yeah.
    And when is it that your father told you about these things,
    about the losses?
    You know, I can't say that I remembered
    one day, that bad day, and that's when it happened
    or that kind of thing.
    It just happened somewhere along the line.
    Did your father write a journal?
    Did he keep a journal?
    It wasn't like a daily diary or a journal.
    It was more an after-the-fact memoir, you know?
    That's what we based that Facebook post, those postings
    on.
    We took each paragraph of his memoir.
    Let's talk about that a little bit.
    OK.
    One of the ways that you came to our attention at the museum
    is through this really creative, unique project on Facebook.
    Please explain its genesis and how it came to be.
    Sure, it was actually our son who came up with the idea.
    Your son's name is?
    Paul, Paul Schulhof.
    And he is the architect you mentioned?
    He is the architect, right.
    OK.
    And he's into all that stuff.
    And he thought about the fact that he and my father
    got along very nicely.
    And he learned a lot from him.
    And he said, hey, you know--
    by that time, my father had passed away.
    He was over 101 when he passed away in 2005, in March of 2005.
    And my mother passed away three years later at the age of 98.
    So, anyhow, he had this idea that, hey,
    what if we used Facebook for something
    a little more serious than it's often
    used for with the purpose in mind, in his mind,
    that grandpa would be talking to us again.
    So we posted it in his name so that it--
    As if it's him speaking.
    As if it's him speaking.
    As if it's your father speaking.
    Right.
    OK.
    And we used, paragraph by paragraph, his memoir.
    And, as I mentioned I think earlier, he was a great--
    he was very organized, and he was a great keeper of documents
    that he thought were of interest or value and picked photos
    and so on.
    And he kept them in some albums, as well as in other places.
    And I inherited all of that.
    And he brought those, many of them, right from Prague
    so that they had a long journey.
    Yeah, they did, didn't they?
    And so we did that.
    And my thought was this is a great idea.
    And why?
    Because I felt it was a way of getting
    to a lot of people, especially young people who
    may be on Facebook, and having them
    know a little bit about this portion of history
    and, also, avoid the denial that occurred sometimes.
    And so we did that like week after week for several months.
    When did you start the project?
    What year was it?
    It was early 2016 in the last year.
    OK.
    And I think it was successful.
    I think-- I don't know.
    How many entries did you make?
    How many different--
    Oh, there must have been a good 15 I would say.
    And you and your son worked on it together?
    Well, so to speak.
    The way we actually did it was that he would rely on me to,
    OK, let's do the next paragraph.
    Now what's in that paragraph?
    I chose the photos and documents that
    went along with that paragraph, looking through all my father's
    things with some care.
    And then I scanned those and sent him those documents.
    And then he actually put them on Facebook.
    And then what about the writing?
    Would he choose the writing?
    Or had you chosen which part of your father's voice
    would be known?
    No, we went through the whole thing piece by piece, one
    after the other, almost entirely right from his writing.
    So we didn't make any of that up.
    He did.
    OK, so it was the writing--
    the writing was the generator of whatever
    documents would be used.
    Correct.
    So, whatever your father had written about this event,
    you would look for the corresponding relevant material,
    what you had.
    Exactly, exactly.
    OK.
    Now, in a couple of cases, I intervened a little bit
    by adding some things because either they weren't so obvious,
    or, for instance, when he came to my aunt's description of her
    experience in the concentrate camp,
    that was not part of my father's--
    Story.
    --story.
    So I intervened and explained who she was
    and what I thought about her.
    And we had that as a place that people, if they so chose,
    could click on to separately from the whole Facebook postings
    because we thought not everybody would
    be wanting to go through that.
    I think, as it turned out, I think most people did end up
    doing it.
    So there's a Facebook page called--
    Joseph Schulhof.
    And, if you look up Joseph Schulhof--
    and that would be spelled J-O-S-E--
    P-H.
    --P-H, the English way--
    Right.
    --and then Schulhof, S-C-H-U-L-H-O-F--
    F, one F, right.
    --one F, they'll come across this page.
    They should, yes.
    OK.
    And, yeah, the way they should do it,
    if they wanted to look at it, is to scroll all the way
    down to 1903, where you can see my picture--
    my picture, a picture of my father
    when he was probably one-year-old or less,
    and then chronologically go up from there.
    Click on places where the photographs maybe
    overlap to get the individual larger photographs.
    And you click on-- there are places
    where we just didn't have room for all the words we needed.
    So it says See More.
    Click on See More, and you'll see
    the rest of the explanations.
    What a cool idea.
    Yeah, I thought it was a great idea.
    And how much-- what kind of response have you had?
    Well, hard to say because we know of people who, quote,
    "liked it," funny expression for the subject.
    But, anyhow, that's what they use on Facebook.
    All that means is that they thought highly of it I guess.
    We know how many of those there were,
    and there were over 100 or so.
    But there are many, many more, I know,
    because these people then passed it
    on to other people who read it without saying anything.
    And I know that for a fact because I've
    heard it from friends who got the thing and read it
    and then sent it on to their children or whoever.
    So I hope it's spreading, the word is spread.
    That's the whole purpose of it.
    Yeah, did you ever go back to Prague?
    We've been back many times.
    OK, you've seen where your parents lived?
    And where I live with them, yes.
    Where you lived with them.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And we visited, early on, friends of my parents
    who were neighbors and who were still alive.
    We were there, the first time, in 1978.
    Oh, when it was still the good old days.
    Yeah, it was the 10th anniversary of the Soviet tank
    occupation of Prague.
    And so the place was relatively deserted because,
    all of a sudden, people were getting permission
    to go out of the city for the first time,
    even though they tried many times before.
    All of the sudden, they wanted them out
    because they didn't want any demonstrations I gather.
    People went on a, quote, "vacation."
    And it was a little bleak in 1978.
    Yeah, it would have been.
    It would have been Prague winter, not Prague spring.
    Yeah, right.
    I would have liked a scaffolding business in Prague at the time.
    And then we've been back.
    Why do you say that, the scaffolding?
    Because it was all over the place.
    They were just afraid things would fall down
    on people's heads.
    They weren't fixing it.
    Well, you see the other thing is that many people who
    had been protesters and dissidents during Prague Spring
    ended up being window washers on scaffolding.
    That was another--
    Yeah, oh yeah.
    Yeah
    Yeah, so '78 was interesting.
    I met up with a friend of my parents
    who was a neighbor, an older lady by then,
    who had children who, more or less, are my age and then also
    my nanny.
    No kidding, no kidding.
    Yeah, she apparently loved me.
    What was her name?
    [? Manya. ?]
    [? Manya, ?] OK.
    Yeah.
    And you had a relative still in Prague.
    Yes, and we met up with Vera, yes.
    OK, she was a cousin?
    She was a first cousin, yes.
    Well, I don't know how you would refer
    to her because she was the daughter of one
    of my step-uncles.
    Right.
    No, it's not step.
    It's whatever the term is.
    Half-brother or your father's half-brother.
    Right.
    Yeah.
    Right.
    So I don't know what--
    it's cousin, I guess, of some kind.
    It's cousin.
    It's cousin, yeah.
    Yeah, the war affected her, no question
    she was a beautiful young woman.
    She still was quite pretty, but it affected her, no question.
    How could it not?
    And she was needy.
    She married.
    Unfortunately, her husband passed away not too--
    not that long after.
    I'm not talking about one or two years, longer than that, but not
    that long.
    And she's buried with her husband
    at a grave site in the so-called New, which is not so
    new, Jewish Cemetery in Prague.
    Where is that?
    It's that the-- there is a huge, huge cemetery outside
    of the city center, Vinohrady, and then a little bit beyond it
    near--
    No, Vinohrady is in the other direction.
    OK, so it's--
    From the center of Prague, Vinohrady is--
    South?
    I'm looking at it.
    I'm not sure.
    Yeah, it's on the same side as what--
    Vaclavske Namesti.
    Va-- the old town.
    Right.
    And that's downriver-- or upriver, upriver.
    But the cemetery is in the other direction.
    Oh, then I don't know where it is.
    Yeah, it's near the [NON-ENGLISH] home that we had,
    not too far from there.
    We could walk, or it's a short ride from there.
    And it has-- it's a pretty big cemetery.
    But the grave of my grandparents is
    there and the names of all the other perished family members.
    And Vera and her husband are actually also buried there.
    There are famous people buried in that cemetery.
    What about-- did you go to see Terezin?
    Had you ever--
    No.
    No, I wasn't up to it.
    Maybe now I'm more used to the idea or something,
    but we saw the names of my family
    on the wall of the Pinkas Synagogue.
    And those synagogues were going to be museums.
    The Germans were organizing all sorts of Jewish--
    [CHIMES]
    Sorry.
    That's OK.
    OK, so, yeah, I mean, Prague was spared because somebody
    didn't want to bomb it.
    I think one of the major German--
    There was nothing to bomb there except the fact
    that the Germans had occupied it.
    And there were lots of other places
    that are more important to bomb.
    And, yeah, there was only one thing that happened.
    As the Germans left, they blew up the so-called city hall.
    Yeah.
    So that was the biggest damage to the entire building--
    city.
    We're coming to the end of our interview.
    And I wanted to ask this kind of a question.
    [CHIMES]
    Sorry.
    It's OK.
    Why don't we-- so, earlier, you said
    that your parents really sheltered you
    and protected you from this information
    and the fallout from that information, the consequences
    of it.
    And, yet, I sense that you feel it very deeply.
    There were some things that were not so
    easy to express and articulate.
    How did this affect you?
    How, in the end, have you been touched
    by what happened that you eventually learned about?
    I'm not sure exactly what the process was,
    but the end result has been some very deep feelings
    on my part, anger.
    And, for whatever reason, probably
    because of our similarity in age,
    Daisy always comes into mind.
    And it's just unbelievable what happened.
    These were vital, beautiful, young people.
    And for no reason--
    it's made me question religion, period.
    Did you ever have faith?
    Yes.
    Did you lose it?
    I'm in that process.
    Oh, oh, how sad.
    Yeah, I mean, most people get more religious
    as they get older.
    And I seem to be going the other way because I ask myself
    how can that be.
    How can there be the kind of God that people
    speak of who overlooks each individual,
    not possible for that to happen if that were the case.
    That's the way I feel about it.
    So that's my answer to your question.
    What about in your personality?
    Did it affect your personality?
    That's hard for me to know.
    I know.
    I know.
    I don't know.
    I suppose so.
    How could it not in some ways?
    I hope that I care about people.
    I think I do.
    I think, perhaps, that's, in large measure,
    a result of this which may be some silver lining.
    Your own parents did you see how this affected them?
    Sure, absolutely.
    My father tended to be a nervous wreck,
    except when it came to these crucial moments, which
    didn't happen very often after we came to the United States.
    How did he make his living here?
    He was an engineer.
    He worked for a utility upstate, Orange and Rockland Utilities.
    That's why they moved to Middletown, New York
    because that's where the engineering offices were.
    He joined the congregation there, a Jewish congregation.
    He was very active in all sorts of causes
    there in that area, very highly respected actually,
    huge crowd for his funeral, but there was a lot of respect.
    So he ended up, I think, feeling good about himself,
    but he was a nervous man, and it showed in many ways I'm sure.
    I mean, your nerves get frayed after going through all of that.
    And my mother was still relatively calm.
    Unfortunately, after he died, the next three years
    were really rough on her.
    And she had a--
    it was a bad time for her.
    Yeah, well, they had been together most of their lives.
    Right, through all sorts of stuff.
    Yeah, yeah.
    So it was understandable.
    Anyhow, it certainly affected them.
    He had some good memories, some bad memories, and some regrets,
    as all human beings do.
    Is there anything I haven't asked
    that you think would be important to include
    in your testimony today?
    Well, let me think for a minute.
    I think we've pretty well covered it.
    I'm trying to think of any small, personal things.
    There's some small things that I forgot to mention,
    which might be of a little interest.
    But, after the war, when the Marines came in,
    there were not many-- there was not much material and so on.
    You couldn't find much stuff in the shops yet.
    And I noticed, all of a sudden, these nice metal toys were
    showing up, nice, shiny metal toys,
    you know, little cars and so on.
    And they were of interest to me at the age of eight, nine.
    So I started looking in the shops
    and looking at them carefully.
    And I looked inside a truck.
    And there I saw Pabst.
    So what the Chinese had done is they took beer cans,
    flattened them, turned them inside out,
    and made toys out of them.
    How cool is that?
    Yeah, they're terrific when it comes to salvaging things.
    Then cigarettes were in big demand.
    In fact, we boys in school, you know the way
    they trade baseball cards here?
    We traded cigarette packages Chesterfields
    were worth two Lucky Strikes or something.
    [BOTH TALKING]
    Oh, really?
    Full packages or empty packages?
    No, no no, empty packages, just the package, just the outside.
    OK.
    And, for a while there, the streets
    were littered with cigarette butts that were thrown out
    by Marines and so on.
    And, the next thing you knew, they weren't very many of them.
    Then I saw why.
    There were people with long sticks
    with like a nail or a needle at the end
    who were picking these up.
    And, before you knew it, Chinese cigarettes were showing up.
    These were pre-filter days.
    [LAUGHTER]
    So a little bit of used tobacco goes a long way.
    Long way, yeah.
    These are a little lighter kind of things that come to mind.
    Yeah, but talk about thrifty.
    And, also, talk about need and demand.
    And you mentioned a black market.
    Oh, yeah.
    And, you know, cigarettes are the currencies
    of a black market.
    They were people to be contended with.
    Yeah, I love hearing about those things
    because it tells you volumes of what a place is
    like, what's going on in that place, what
    are the circumstances.
    Thank you.
    You're welcome.
    Thank you.
    Thank you very much.
    Thank you so much.
    OK, I will say then this concludes the United States
    Holocaust Memorial Museum interview with Mr. Peter
    Schulhof on May 1, 2017 in Brooklyn, New York.
    Thanks.
    Thank you again.
    [CLAPPING]

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Peter Schulhof was born on June 13, 1937 in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) to Charlotte (born born Sarolta Poras) and Joseph Schulhof. He discusses his parents meeting at a dance; the family speaking Czech; being assimilated Jews and attending services occasionally; his father working as an engineer and his mother being a homemaker; wanting to leave Czechoslovakia and Shanghai being the only option since a visa was not required for entry; emigrating from Europe via Genoa, Italy, and travelling through the Suez Canal, Manila, and Singapore before arriving in Shanghai in May 1940; his father travelling to Japan for an interview with Lieberman & Weichi, a Swiss firm, as an engineer in Tientsin, and getting the position; the family moving to the French Concession (division) of Tientsin; moving to the British Concession after Pearl Harbor; his father being able to save other Europeans interned by the Japanese because he worked for a Swiss company; his family having money for food because of his father’s job; attending a Jewish school where he studied English, Russian, Hebrew, Mandarin Chinese, math and Jewish history; living in a neighborhood with westerners and having servants; not learning about relatives who perished during the Holocaust until after the war; one relative joining them in Shanghai in 1946 before immigrating to Israel; his family immigrating to the United States on November 13, 1948; his mother selling Chinese art and vases in New York; a reunion in 1995 of those from his European community in China and another in Australia in 2011; and returning to Prague to see his old home and surviving friends and neighbors.
    Interviewee
    Peter Schulhof
    Interviewer
    Navazelskis, Ina
    Date
    interview:  2017 May 01
    Geography
    creation: Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Genre/Form
    Oral histories.
    Extent
    1 digital file : MPEG-4.

    Rights & Restrictions

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    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Ina Navazelskis, on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch, conducted the oral history interview with Peter Schulhof on May 1, 2017 in Brooklyn, NY.
    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 08:05:38
    This page:
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    Oral history interview with Nesse Galperin Godin

    Oral History

    Nesse Galperin Godin, born in 1928 in Siauliai, Lithuania, describes her family’s work in the dairy business; the German occupation of Lithuania in 1941 and the establishment of a ghetto in Siauliai; starting to do forced labor in 1943 when she was old enough to work; being deported with her mother and her brother to Stutthof in Danzig, Poland in 1944; working in various sub-camps of Stutthof until she was put on a death march in January 1945; her liberation by Russian soldiers in March 1945; and her immigration to the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Eddie Willner

    Oral history interview with Eddie Willner

    Oral History

    Eddie Willner, born on August 15, 1926 in Germany, describes how his father had felt that his family would be safe because he had fought in the German Army in World War I; being separated from his parents and sent on a train to Brussels, Belgium, where a Jewish refugee organization placed him with a Dutch family; his parents’ move to Belgium in 1939 and seeing them on weekends until the war broke out in May 1940; the arrest of his father and his deportation to an internment camp in France; remaining with his mother and tracking down his father in the Pyrenees Mountains; living in the house of a French priest; getting caught with false identification cards with his family and being sent to Drancy; his deportation out of France and toward the east on September 12, 1942; arriving in Auschwitz, where his mother was immediately gassed while he stayed with his father; his transfer to a work camp in Lazy, Poland, where he worked on reconstructing bombed-out railroads; enduring harsh conditions, especially in the winter months; losing his religious faith after the war; returning from his work detail one day to discover that his father had been selected for the gas chamber during the day; the bombing of the train on which he was being transported to Buchenwald, escaping, and being liberated by American troops; staying in the Frankfurt displaced persons camp and then searching for his family in Brussels after the war; and immigrating to the United States in December 1947.

    Oral history interview with Lisa Dawidowicz Murik

    Oral history interview with Lisa Dawidowicz Murik

    Oral History

    Lisa Dawidowicz Murik, born on November 5, 1925 in Ostroh, Poland (Ukraine), describes her family; attending public school until the outbreak of war in 1939; the German occupation of Poland and having to endure forced labor; working on a labor detail to construct a railroad station; by 1942 having built a shelter in her family’s basement to hide from the Nazis who were rounding up Jews in the ghetto; later fleeing into the Polish countryside, where a poor Polish farm woman gave them refuge hiding in the potato bin of her barn for sixteen months; surviving on a daily ration of a quart of water and one potato each; finding out that they were liberated in 1944; returning to Ostroh and then going to Łódź, where she met her future husband, a refugee from the Soviet Union, during her stay; leaving for Germany, where she and her future husband spent time in German displaced persons camps in Berlin and Eschwege; and immigrating in 1949 to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Ernst Weihs

    Oral history interview with Ernst Weihs

    Oral History

    Ernst Weihs, born in 1908 in Vienna, Austria and describes his family; his father’s participation in World War I and returning to ask for a divorce from his mother; moving out to the country with his mother and having a difficult life; getting baptized and attending church at the age of 11; finding a job as a gardener to support himself; returning to Vienna in 1928 and living near his father and stepmother; being declared Jewish, having to wear the star, and quitting his gardening job; working for a summer with a Jewish Agency to train for living in Palestine; living in a Swedish mission house associated with the Lutheran church and managing its gardens; working with a Guildemester organization that brought food to people until 1942 when the Germans closed it; being deported to a ghetto in Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia and then to Auschwitz; his transfer to the Kaufering labor camp, where he worked farming nearby fields; remaining in Kaufering until the spring of 1945, when he had to evacuate toward Dachau; being liberated during the march to Dachau by American troops; getting married and having a baby after the war; and immigrating to the United States and raising his daughter as a Lutheran.

    Oral history interview with Agnes Vogel

    Oral history interview with Agnes Vogel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dora Goldstein Roth

    Oral history interview with Dora Goldstein Roth

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yocheved Arie

    Oral history interview with Yocheved Arie

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leo Hanin

    Oral history interview with Leo Hanin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Walter Schnell

    Oral history interview with Walter Schnell

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erna Tebel Stern

    Oral history interview with Erna Tebel Stern

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gerda Blachmann Wilchfort

    Oral history interview with Gerda Blachmann Wilchfort

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gidon Arye

    Oral history interview with Gidon Arye

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carl Knuemann

    Oral history interview with Carl Knuemann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Vogel

    Oral history interview with Michael Vogel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nina Schuster Merrick

    Oral history interview with Nina Schuster Merrick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Rozencwajig Stock

    Oral history interview with Eva Rozencwajig Stock

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ivo Herzer

    Oral history interview with Ivo Herzer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Brodecki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irene Weber

    Oral history interview with Irene Weber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Josef

    Oral history interview with Josef

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Stanislaw Soszynski

    Oral history interview with Stanislaw Soszynski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Lewent

    Oral history interview with Abraham Lewent

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Miriam Storch Lewent

    Oral history interview with Miriam Storch Lewent

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Preben Munch-Nielsen

    Oral history interview with Preben Munch-Nielsen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anny Rubinstein Kast

    Oral history interview with Anny Rubinstein Kast

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Waterford

    Oral history interview with Helen Waterford

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Ward

    Oral history interview with Thomas Ward

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred R. Wohl

    Oral history interview with Fred R. Wohl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Raya Markon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jacob Vogel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Philip Vock

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Gatenio

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mariette Moscovici

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jack Moss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mel London

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gisela Feldman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bert Fleming and Irene Fleming

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Haim Shmueli

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Itka Zygmuntowicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Granirer Flor

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renee Scheuer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carl Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herma Barber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral History

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

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