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Oral history interview with Paul Bojko

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2017.316.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.0945

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    Oral history interview with Paul Bojko
    Transcript
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Mr. Paul Bojko on August 24, 2017,
    in Trap Maryland.
    Thank you, Mr. Bojko, for agreeing to meet with us today,
    to share your story, to share your experiences during World
    War II, and to give us a glimpse into the kinds of experiences
    that were also common for those who were around you, including
    your own family.
    I'm going to start our interview with the most
    basic of questions.
    The first one is, can you tell me, what was your name at birth.
    When you were born, what was your name?
    Well, in Ukraine, Pawlo.
    Pawlo.
    It was P-a-w-l-o.
    That's the way that it was pronounced.
    And that's the way it was spelled.
    Bojko, I never changed it.
    That's still the same.
    It's still the same.
    Yeah, but was Pawlo, and I changed it to Paul.
    OK.
    And Pawlo is the Ukrainian version of Paul?
    Yes.
    OK.
    Yes.
    And what's the date of your birth?
    I was born on July 31, 1937.
    Ah, OK.
    And where were you born?
    I was born in [?
    Chyparivka , ?] Ukraine.
    [?
    Chyparivka ? ?]
    [? Chyparivka, ?] Ukraine, yes.
    Tell me, where is [?
    Chyparivka ? ?]
    It's on-- Poltava is the county.
    OK.
    Or the state, rather, is Poltava.
    And it's not too far--
    it's probably about a two-hour drive to Kyiv, which
    is the capital of Ukraine.
    And it's also not too far from the Dnepr.
    The Dnepr is a big river that starts in Russia
    and runs all the way to Black Sea.
    Would this be, then, central Ukraine?
    Yes, it was.
    Central Ukraine, yes, yes.
    And did you grow up in this place?
    How do you pronounce the village again, where you were born?
    [?
    Chyparivka . ?]
    [?
    Chyparivka ? ?]
    Yes.
    And did you grow up there?
    No.
    I was six years old when--
    we lived on a farm.
    OK, excuse me.
    I should back up a little bit.
    By growing up, I meant not from 6 years old onwards,
    but until 6 years old.
    Did your family always live the place you were born?
    Or did they move afterwards to someplace else?
    No, they lived right down at the farm where we lived.
    OK.
    So had your family lived there for many generations?
    Well, yes, two generations anyway that I know of.
    Now, before that, I'm not sure.
    It could have been.
    OK.
    Now, was this the part of Ukraine
    that was part of the Soviet Union at the time
    when you were born?
    Or was this part of Poland?
    No, it was Soviet Union.
    It was the Soviet Union.
    Soviet Union.
    Anything across the Dnieper, the river, across the river,
    was under Soviet jurisdiction.
    Anything on this side of the river, that
    was under Polish jurisdiction.
    I see.
    But Germany, they attacked Poland.
    We'll come to that.
    We'll come to that.
    I'm talking now a little bit even before 1937,
    your date of birth.
    I'm going to want to get a sense of who your parents were, how
    did they come there, how did they-- you know,
    were they from this area, and so on.
    So let me start asking this way.
    What was your father's name, his first name?
    Hryhoriy.
    Hryhoriy?
    Hryhoriy Bojko.
    And is that spelled with an H?
    H, yes.
    And does it translate into English for a G?
    Yes.
    So he would be, in English, Gregory.
    Gregory, yes.
    Gregory.
    Gregory.
    But we called him Hryhoriy.
    Hryhoriy.
    Hryhoriy.
    And did he have many brothers and sisters?
    Yes, he did.
    He had two brothers.
    And as far as I know, he did not have any sisters.
    Did you know your uncles?
    I knew both of the uncles, yes.
    OK, from the village?
    Yes, from a village, and the one of them from--
    Later.
    --later, yes.
    OK.
    And did you know your grandparents, his parents?
    Yes, I knew his parents.
    And I knew my mother's parents.
    OK.
    His parents, do you know their names?
    No, I don't know their names.
    But we lived on a farm, one-room house.
    And we all made out just fine.
    Sleeping quarters for all the kids over top of the stove.
    Oh, that was so common.
    Like a balcony.
    We went up there.
    And that was sleeping for the kids.
    The adults, they slept on sofas or on the floor, any place
    at all.
    The house was made out of stucco on the outside.
    Oh, stucco.
    Stucco.
    And the roof was out of straw.
    Straw roof, yes.
    So like a thatched roof.
    Yes.
    I have some pictures.
    Oh, we'd like to see them later.
    Over there on that table, there's some pictures there.
    I can show them to you.
    You can record them if you want to.
    Or you can take them with you if you want to.
    OK.
    We'll be very much interested in seeing the pictures
    and probably we'll film them.
    Yes.
    You can have the pictures and film them.
    And also I have the property which used to be our property
    and the pasture for the animals.
    Now, because your village was in the Soviet Union,
    were you able to have personal property?
    Or was it part of a collective farm?
    How was it set up there?
    It was private property.
    It belonged to my parents.
    That's who it belonged to.
    And it was ran by brothers and grandparents.
    Grandparents used to babysit all the time.
    And then your parents and the others worked, the other--
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    Yeah.
    The other worked, yes.
    They worked on a farm, whatever had to be done.
    How many hectares was there.
    How many what?
    Hectares or acres.
    About how large was the farm.
    Oh, probably, I would say close to 200 acres.
    That's a lot.
    That's a lot, yeah.
    That's including the lake.
    It's a pond.
    I shouldn't call it a lake.
    It's a pond.
    And the pastures for the animals.
    And what was grown?
    What did you mostly grow there?
    Well, wheat, a lot of wheat.
    And I threshed it by hand.
    And I made flour out of it.
    And then they make bread out of it,
    or buns, or anything like that.
    My mother made that and grandmothers made that.
    Yes, that was their job.
    But a lot of potatoes.
    A lot of potatoes?
    A lot of potatoes.
    In fact, we were harvesting potatoes--
    I don't know whether I should go this far--
    Tell me, tell me, tell me.
    Yes, I'm asking.
    --when we heard like fireworks going off.
    And that was the war.
    Germans were shooting at Russians.
    And the Russians were shooting over top of our heads
    at the Germans, back and forth.
    They were fighting.
    Well, you know, we'll talk more in detail later.
    But this is an important moment.
    So thank you for bringing it up to.
    To go back, so you had a lot of potatoes that you farmed.
    Yes, yes.
    You had wheat.
    Did you grow anything else?
    There was a big garden, a huge garden, probably an acre
    or maybe even better for the garden.
    And we had sweet corn, of course potatoes,
    right out there in the field, and zucchinis and anything
    like that, peas.
    Well, you know, there's this belief
    that the Ukraine was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union.
    Yes, yes.
    And so this sounds very much like the agricultural heart.
    It's the soil.
    The soil was black.
    It was very rich soil.
    In fact, while I was in Auschwitz,
    I have seen trains go by.
    And some of them were sitting in the train
    station loaded with soil.
    They were going for Germany.
    So it was not only the people, they were taking the soil.
    Yes, and sending it to Germany.
    And Germany were using it on the farmlands
    and using it in gardens.
    Now, did you have neighbors?
    Not very close neighbors, no, we did not.
    So about how far would the closest neighbor be from you?
    I would say maybe a quarter of a mile or something like that.
    The farthest would be about a quarter of a mile.
    OK.
    And on your farm itself, in addition to
    the one-room stucco house, did you have
    any other kinds of buildings?
    Yes, we did.
    We had a huge barn that was built approximately the same way
    as what the house.
    It was stucco.
    And a straw roof.
    A straw roof.
    Straw roof.
    And inside, for the animals, it was divided like a barn.
    OK.
    And what kind of animals did you have?
    We had horses that we farmed with.
    And we had cows--
    we had beef cows, milking cows.
    Usually my mother goes out there or grandmother goes out there,
    ties a cow up to a post, and milks it,
    and gets maybe a gallon of milk in the morning, gallon of milk
    at nighttime.
    Was that enough for the family?
    Oh, yeah, that was enough.
    Yeah, a gallon-- and they also skimmed the fat, the cream, off
    of the top, and used that for baking and making various bread,
    buns, and stuff like that.
    We had a huge cellar outside that we--
    the men, they cut the ice during the wintertime
    and put the ice inside.
    And it stayed?
    And it stayed there during wintertime and into summertime.
    And that kept the milk in there, kept the butter in there.
    It's like a refrigerator, a huge refrigerator.
    Yes.
    Sort of like a homemade refrigerator.
    Yes, homemade refrigerator, that's what it was.
    But it was large, filled with ice, cubes of ice.
    They were maybe 100 pound to a cube, something like that.
    Oh, wow.
    Yeah.
    Oh, wow.
    And whatever melted, it soaked into the soil.
    And were the walls also of Earth in this--
    Yeah, it was dug into the earth.
    It was dug in there.
    And the dirt that was dug out of there was put on top.
    Boards and logs and stuff like that.
    They covered it up.
    And then earth on top.
    Covered it up, yeah.
    And inside they put shelves in there.
    And they carried the ice cubes with--
    they had special tongs for carrying ice cubes.
    It's like sharp, two forks that dig into the ice cube.
    And the men would carry 100 pounds at a time.
    No, that's not light.
    It's not light.
    No, 100 pounds is not bad.
    For me, as a kid, at that time, no, I
    did not carry it, not that big an ice cube.
    But it worked.
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    For the summertime, it kept--
    milk, butter, and things like that.
    Yes.
    Did you have chickens?
    We had chickens, ducks, and--
    let's see, that's all I remember that we had.
    That's about it, yeah.
    Was the farm kind of self-sufficient?
    What you had on the farm, where you would be able to eat--
    Oh, yes, yes.
    It fed everybody.
    Yeah, definitely.
    We fed everybody that was there.
    And some of that was traded.
    Meat was traded for fruits.
    We didn't have much fruit trees on the farm.
    We had maybe a couple apple trees or something like that.
    But the animals, they got to the apples before we did.
    So we traded some of the meat for fruits and stuff like that.
    Were there market days?
    There was a marketplace in town.
    We did not go to the marketplace.
    I think mom and grandmother, they went to the marketplace.
    But as a, kid I did not go to the marketplace.
    I remember going to the church a couple different times.
    Well, this is what I wanted to also ask about.
    The closest town-- you were born on the farm or you--
    On the farm, yes.
    On the farm.
    And the town's name was--
    [? Chyparivka ?]
    [?
    Chyparivka . ?]
    Yes.
    I'm sorry that I keep forgetting.
    It's all right.
    About how large was the town, do you think?
    The town maybe had, at most, maybe 20 homes at the most.
    Oh, so small.
    Small town.
    It was very small.
    Was there a church there?
    Yes, it was a church there.
    And the church is still standing there today.
    There's a graveyard still there.
    In Ukraine, in the graveyard, whoever is buried
    there has a description written on the stone
    and also the picture of that person is on the stone.
    And I have some pictures here of my great-great-parents
    that were buried in the church lot.
    And I remember going to church.
    We walked to church.
    It was maybe close to a mile, something like that.
    So not far.
    No, that wasn't far.
    But we walked to church and we walked back home again.
    Now, the church in Ukraine is right long.
    You stand up the whole time.
    And it's right long.
    It's probably two hours, 2 and 1/2 hours long.
    Ooh, wow, the church service.
    Yeah, the service itself.
    Tell me the denomination.
    Was this--
    Orthodox.
    Orthodox.
    Orthodox, yes.
    Was there anybody in this small place that was not orthodox?
    Not that I know of, no.
    Everybody that I know of who come to church was Orthodox.
    As far as I know, that's what they were, yes.
    OK.
    And was there a school?
    There was a school.
    But I was too young to go to the school yet.
    I had to be 6 years old or 7 years old--
    I forget now what it was-- to go to school.
    And it was a one-room schoolhouse
    where you have three, four, or five grades in one school.
    And then you had the rest of the grades
    in another school or another room.
    Was most everybody in the town also a farmer?
    Most everybody was a farmer, yes.
    If they were not farmers they were shoemakers or barbers
    or something like that.
    And they were there too.
    That was in town.
    But they also had to have another job.
    Like a barber, he would not be sufficient.
    He would not make enough money to feed his family off a barber
    shop.
    So he had to do something else on the side.
    Yeah.
    So I mean, with 20 families, that's not much.
    No, that's not much for 20 families, no.
    Did anybody have a car in this village, in this town?
    I don't remember any cars.
    Mostly horses and buggies.
    It's just like today, when you go to Pennsylvania
    and you see the Dutch people.
    The Amish.
    The Amish people.
    OK.
    So it was something similar to that.
    Similar to that.
    Everything that we did on the farm was done with horses.
    We didn't have electricity or anything like it.
    We cooked with firewood.
    At nighttime we had a lantern that we
    lit for light in the house.
    And how did it burn?
    Was it a candle?
    Was it kerosene?
    Kerosene.
    Kerosene.
    Kerosene, yeah.
    OK.
    And was there well outside?
    Or where did you get water?
    It was a hand-dug well.
    And you throw a bucket down there with a rope tied in it,
    and pull up, get some water.
    I don't know.
    I would say it's 40, 50 feet deep, something like that.
    It was like 4' by 4', 5' by 5', something like that,
    40 to 50 feet deep.
    And it was a crank or else you pulled a rope up by hand,
    whatever you wanted to do.
    Mm-hmm.
    Let's turn to your mother.
    I didn't ask much about her.
    What was her first name?
    Charytyna.
    Charytyna.
    Charytyna, yes.
    And what was her maiden name?
    Zelynska.
    Zelynska.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    And was she also from the town?
    From that area, yeah.
    From that area.
    From that area.
    And did she have brothers and sisters?
    She had a brother and one sister as far as I know.
    OK.
    Did you know them when you were little?
    I don't recall them, no.
    You don't recall them.
    No.
    OK.
    Now, particularly in Soviet Ukraine, the 1930s,
    before you were born, was a very tough place because there was
    the famine, the induced famine, by Stalin.
    Did that touch your village at all?
    No, not that I know of, from what I can remember.
    I was probably 3 years old, 3 and 1/2 years old--
    I can start remembering that far back--
    up till 6 years old.
    But I'm saying, did your parents talk about this?
    No.
    Nobody talked about a famine?
    No.
    Not that you remember.
    Not in front of me.
    It's just like the fight, back and forth,
    with Germans and Russians.
    My parents did not talk about that either.
    But I could hear it.
    And I started asking questions.
    And then my father finally opened up and told me--
    we were out in the field digging potatoes
    or working in a potato field.
    And this cannons, and hand grenades, and everything else
    that was going on in the fight between Russians
    and Germans going off.
    And there was a lot of--
    especially at nighttime, the whole skies light up.
    That must have been terrifying for a little kid.
    Yeah.
    I didn't know what it was until my father finally told me
    that there was a fight going on between Russian and--
    German.
    --the Germans.
    Had you ever seen any Russians up until that point?
    No, I don't recall seeing any soldiers
    or anything like that, no.
    And had you seen any Germans?
    No, I had not, no.
    Now, in your village, was there any political presence?
    Like was there a Communist Party official,
    or a little headquarters, or something like that?
    No.
    There might have been, but I was not involved in that.
    Of course.
    You were a child.
    I was a child.
    So I don't know about that.
    OK.
    So it sounds like you were in a very remote place.
    Yes.
    Remote, and small, and kind of forgotten, if I could say so.
    Because that famine, which I think occurred in '32, '33--
    1932 or '33, in the Ukraine, was devastating.
    And millions starved to death.
    Mm-hmm.
    So I can't imagine it wouldn't have touched you or touched
    where you were in your area.
    But maybe because it was so small
    it wasn't as noticeable or not so
    much attention was paid to it.
    In your first years, did your grandparents
    ever tell you stories about their lives,
    about growing up there?
    Did you did you learn anything about who they were?
    Well, they did talk somewhat-- what they used to do,
    going to school, what they did for a living, like farm.
    One or the grandparents, he was a butcher on the side.
    He butchered calf, cows, steers, and stuff like that.
    Mother's father or father's father?
    Mother's father.
    I don't remember too much about my father's father.
    He was there at times.
    In fact, he is the one--
    my father's father and my father's mother, both of them
    went with us.
    [EXHALES SHARPLY] When you were taken.
    When we were taken, yes.
    And which-- was it your father's parents who lived with you or--
    Yes.
    --your mother's?
    OK.
    Father's.
    So your mother's parents lived somewhere else?
    They lived someplace in town, yes.
    OK.
    Would you visit them?
    No, not that I recall visiting them.
    No, not at all.
    Did you know all of the people?
    I knew some of the people.
    The reason I knew some of the people, I met them in church
    or else I knew them because they were out on the farm
    helping us doing something.
    Like men, a lot of times they get together, wintertime,
    to get the ice off of the pond.
    And for threshing the wheat, they had a threshing machine
    that they divided between the different families
    and used the threshing machine.
    And what it was, it was all done by horses.
    Horses used to go around in a circle.
    It had a harness on it and just went around in circles
    and turned this one big shaft.
    And the shaft turned the belts and turned a threshing machine
    on.
    So everything is manual.
    Everything was manual, yes.
    It was done-- little bundles of wheat.
    And you just take a rope off, and throw the wheat inside,
    and you thrash it.
    Or else, before that, before the machine came,
    I remember they were using like paddles.
    It was a stick about five foot long.
    And on an end, there was a stick maybe two feet long,
    something like that.
    And they beat the wheat to get it out of--
    The kernels out?
    Yeah.
    Yes, wheat, so they can have just the wheat itself, in a bag.
    And then they used to grind the wheat.
    It was a big churn.
    They turned it and turned it, put some more in there,
    and kept on turning it and turning it.
    And the flour would dump it out then into a bag,
    and put some more kernels in there, and turn it again.
    To me it sounds like a fascinating world
    for a little boy.
    Yes, it was very fascinating.
    And for me, just getting started,
    I wasn't doing much help.
    But I was asking a lot of questions.
    And it was interesting for me to learn everything
    that was being done, how it was being done,
    especially when this big threshing machine came in.
    That was really something else-- belt-driven threshing machine
    ran by horses.
    Mm-hmm.
    And what comes out?
    What goes in, and then what comes out at the end?
    What goes in was the wheat.
    We'd cut the wheat.
    It goes in there.
    And what comes out was in a bag of wheat.
    And then you had to make flour out of the kernels.
    And then use the flour for baking and anything
    that you want to use the flour for.
    Were you ever hungry?
    I don't recall being hungry while I was in Ukraine.
    No, I was never hungry.
    When I was hungry, I'd just go in the house and get a bun,
    get something to eat, in other words.
    There was always something there.
    Always something there.
    Yes, always, day and night.
    As a kid-- you know, kids, they do get hungry.
    Yeah, sure.
    So I went in the house, and just grabbed something to eat,
    and went back out again.
    Sometimes the grandparents were in the house,
    or sometimes they weren't.
    So one thing I do remember very clear is, after a meal,
    the kids were babysitting some other kids.
    They were all taking a nap.
    And I was around 6 years old, maybe not quite 6.
    I didn't want to take a nap.
    I wanted to go out and see what the men were doing.
    So I would climb out the window or something like that.
    Or sometimes I would tell my grandmother or something
    that I was going out.
    And I went out and see what the men were doing,
    and tried to learn something, ask questions.
    And I remember mainly working in the garden
    or working in a field.
    A lot of the fields were just pasture for the animals.
    We just turn animals loose at nighttime.
    There was no fence or anything going on.
    And the animals had a piece of rope.
    It was like a [INAUDIBLE].
    You put one in, put the other one in about 18 inches apart,
    16 inches apart, and put it on front legs on a horse or a cow.
    And we only did that with the main ones, the one
    that the rest would follow it.
    There's always a leader.
    So you would put the rope around the legs?
    Around the legs, all the way down by the ankle,
    so that it cannot run.
    They cannot get away.
    It just walked and ate, and laid down
    if it wants to lay down to go to sleep and rest.
    What a life.
    Yes, what a life.
    But the animals, they were doing a job.
    Without the animals it would have
    been very difficult to get the work done on a farm.
    Were there any woods around, any forests around where you were?
    Yes, in a distance, but--
    Not near you.
    --not in a close view for me to see or anything like it.
    But yeah, in the distance, there was some woods around.
    Did you ever go into those woods?
    No, not that I can recall, I didn't, no.
    Did you ever travel beyond the village, beyond the town?
    No, not much.
    The most traveling I done was when we were picked up.
    OK.
    So before then, your world really
    was your own farm and then sometimes going into town--
    Into town, yes.
    To church and--
    --church and so.
    And describe the town for me a little bit.
    Can you paint a picture of what it looked like?
    Well, it was like homes in the town,
    they were maybe a couple hundred feet apart in town itself.
    And there were like, I would say, 20 homes,
    something like that.
    Were they wooden?
    Or were they also stucco.
    They were stucco.
    All the homes, they were stucco.
    And I have a picture to show you.
    They were stucco with a straw roof.
    Straw roof.
    Straw roof, yeah.
    All the homes, the barns, and all the buildings,
    they were straw roof.
    OK.
    Did you ever know or see anybody-- earlier
    I asked about Russian soldiers.
    But was everybody in the town Ukrainian?
    As far as I know, they were all Ukrainian, yes.
    Were there any Jews who lived in the town?
    Not that I know of, no.
    OK.
    So there was no other different kinds of people.
    It was all, you know, Ukrainian people, and all orthodox.
    Yes.
    As far as I know, yes.
    And some of them, could they have been your relatives
    who lived in town?
    Because your mother was from around there and she
    had siblings.
    It could have been some relatives, yeah.
    But I did not known them.
    You didn't know them.
    No.
    OK.
    Were your parents-- had they gone to school?
    Yeah, they went to school, either in town or someplace
    else.
    I don't know what school they went to.
    I think my father, he did say one time that he went to school
    in [?
    Chyparivka , ?] in the town.
    And all the schools, they were one room
    with about three grades in it, three or four grades,
    five grades, in that one room.
    And the kids, different ages, they
    learned arithmetic, history, and maybe, I don't know,
    they might have had some other language I'm not sure of.
    He didn't say.
    Do you know about how many grades he finished?
    No, I don't.
    I don't have no idea, no.
    And what about your mother?
    I don't know much about her history, about her schooling.
    I know she went to school right in town.
    Of course she was from town, [?
    Chyparivka . ?] And she went to the same school.
    In fact, they might have met right there in school.
    I'm not sure.
    Because they didn't say.
    They didn't talk about that.
    Were your parents-- did they have time for you
    when you were little?
    Or were they busy working all the time?
    Well, most of the time they were working.
    I got a chance to talk to them in the evening
    or when I was helping them, when I was working with them.
    Did you have a favorite task you liked to do with them?
    You know, little children like to help their parents.
    My father, mainly, with the animals.
    I took care of the horses.
    In fact, a lot of times, I led the horses to whatever
    he was doing out in the field.
    He was either plowing, or hoeing, or disking,
    or whatever he was doing in the field.
    I was working with the animals.
    And when they stopped, you know, I used to pet the animals,
    and give them water, and stuff like that.
    And he tells me, that's enough.
    That's enough of that.
    Let's get the job done.
    Did you have any siblings?
    Yeah, there were some--
    you mean in the family?
    Yeah.
    Did you have any brothers--
    I don't know in the family, no.
    I don't know--
    I meant, did you have any brothers and sisters?
    No.
    I just had one brother.
    One brother.
    One brother.
    Younger or older?
    He was younger, two years younger.
    OK.
    So you were 6 and he was 4 when you were taken away.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And what's his name?
    Victor.
    And did he follow you around like the younger brothers do?
    Yes, he followed me around some.
    But a lot of times he spent with his mother
    when we were on the farm.
    He just like lived in other places.
    I mean, he was with house parents or something like that.
    He always wanted to be with elders.
    Yeah.
    Well, he was a little boy.
    He was little, little boy.
    Yes, yes.
    Well, you know, just like my friend says,
    well, you never had a childhood, did you?
    I said, well, come to think of it,
    I never thought of it that way.
    I had a childhood, but it didn't last very long.
    It only lasted for maybe six months or something
    like that that I can remember.
    And that's about the only childhood that I had.
    Well, this is in--
    for the six months that you've had,
    you've really painted a picture for me
    of what was part of that world.
    You know, when there wasn't any war going on, of what you grew,
    how you fed yourselves, what the place looked like.
    Do you have a sense of your parents' personalities?
    You know, were they outgoing?
    Were they more reserved?
    Were they shy?
    Were they storytellers?
    I don't remember too much about my parents,
    because once we left the farm, my father
    was gone most of the time.
    I saw him maybe five, six times.
    That's about all I saw him.
    The rest of the time he was gone.
    Because my mother, she was working either in a factory
    or cleaning houses.
    And this is after you're taking away.
    After we are taken away, yes.
    On the farm I didn't spend too much time with my mother.
    I was out with my father, with the animals and all that,
    working.
    But my brother, he spent most of the time
    with my mother and grandmother.
    OK.
    Of the four adults--
    your mother, your father, your grandmother, your grandfather--
    was there one that you were particularly close to?
    I was close to my father and one of my uncles, my father's
    brother.
    What was his name?
    Ivan.
    Ivan.
    Ivan.
    OK.
    And did you have a sense--
    before you heard those guns in the distance,
    did you have a sense that there's a war going on?
    No, I didn't know what war was.
    I didn't know anything about fighting or anything like it.
    Because being on a farm, you try to learn to make a livelihood.
    You didn't worry about--
    Of course not.
    --what was going on.
    Of course, of course.
    But it didn't touch you.
    No, it didn't touch me.
    But once we got into it, then I found out
    what it was all about, yes.
    So I'm trying to place, in my mind-- of course as a little boy
    you wouldn't know this-- but about what time of year
    it was that you heard those guns.
    Was this in June?
    It was summertime.
    We were digging the potatoes.
    So yes, it had to be in June--
    late June, maybe early July, something like that.
    1941.
    No, '43.
    '43.
    '43.
    '43, OK.
    1943.
    June in 1943, and you're digging the potatoes.
    And then what happens after that?
    Well, with the potatoes, when it was dinner time,
    we used to make a fire right out in the field
    and throw a potato in.
    And then Mom, she used to bring butter out
    or grandmother used to bring butter out.
    And we'd just put it on there and eat right out there
    in the field.
    Delicious.
    And the war was getting closer and closer
    and getting louder and louder.
    And I started asking more questions
    because I wanted to know what was happening.
    And then I found out-- my father finally told me
    that the Russians and the Germans, they didn't get along.
    They were fighting for land, who has more land.
    Germans wanted all the land.
    And Russia wanted to keep what they had or a little bit more.
    So I guess, even today, Russia, they're fighting with Ukraine,
    trying to get more land, more property.
    They got some, but right now United Nations, I guess,
    is stepping in and stopping them from getting
    more property, more land.
    Did that satisfy you as an explanation?
    Well, somewhat.
    It satisfied me for what was happening
    at that particular day.
    But then once the soldiers got us and all that,
    then I started asking more questions--
    why?
    And my father's explanation--
    should I go into it?
    Well, let's first step back a little bit.
    After you hear those guns, did you still have your potato meal
    out in the fields?
    Oh yeah, yeah.
    OK.
    How long did this fighting last, do you think?
    Well, we were digging potatoes, I mean, with a horse
    and like a plow with rails in the back.
    You go underneath the potatoes, and you dig them up.
    And they would come up.
    And then you had to go pick them up in a bag,
    throw them in a bag.
    I was picking them up, but I put them in a bag.
    I didn't handle a bag.
    Either one of the men handled it, or mom, or grandmother,
    somebody like that.
    They would take a bag and put the potatoes in.
    And they would take some potatoes into town.
    And some potatoes would stay there on a farm for our use.
    And here, again, it's the refrigerator
    that come in handy, very handy.
    Because potatoes, they lasted all way till--
    The next year.
    --next year, yes.
    So in that point, when you're digging those potatoes,
    how soon was it before a soldier appeared-- any soldier appeared?
    Probably a week digging the potatoes.
    We were digging potatoes for one week.
    And some they would take into town, and some of them
    we would keep in the bags, putting them
    inside our refrigerator.
    And then, after a week, then soldiers showed up.
    Whose soldiers, Russian or German?
    German soldiers.
    OK.
    And whether many of them?
    Well, I think there was like three trucks, big trucks,
    like a two-ton truck, and a Jeep.
    The head man, he was in a Jeep.
    And then the soldiers, they were in trucks.
    OK.
    And did they pass through or did they stop?
    What happened?
    They came right into the farm like they
    knew where they were going.
    They turned in.
    Because I watched them come on the road.
    And then they turned in the driveway,
    came right up to the house.
    And they were yelling in German for everybody
    to come to the trucks.
    And next thing you know--
    we didn't know what they were talking about.
    And my father, he started talking to I'm
    assuming it was the officer.
    He was in a Jeep--
    like a Jeep.
    And my father talked to him.
    And then he found out that we had to go with him.
    Didn't say where.
    So everybody that was there got in the truck.
    And who was there?
    My mother was there and my grandparents
    were there, my father's father and mother, they were there.
    And your younger brother?
    And my younger brother and Uncle Ivan, he was there.
    OK.
    And did you know your other uncle,
    your other father's brother?
    Oh yeah, I knew him.
    But--
    He wasn't there.
    --e was not there.
    What was his name?
    I don't remember, to tell you the truth.
    I don't know.
    I did know, but I don't remember now.
    OK, OK.
    And it was your small family and your grandparents and uncle.
    Yeah.
    I think there was like four, six--
    I think it was like eight of us had to get in the trucks.
    Were there other people in the trucks?
    No, there was nobody, just the soldiers.
    Just the soldiers.
    But later on, we found out that they--
    another day, they went farther into town,
    get some more from town.
    Because we saw them in Auschwitz.
    I'm going to go back.
    I interrupted you as you were saying something.
    And that was did you have to take something with you,
    or were you allowed to take anything with you?
    My parents, they took some clothes.
    That's about all.
    And all the potatoes were left.
    Everything was left behind, yes.
    And when we were leaving, everybody was in trucks.
    Then I heard a lot of shooting.
    And I saw they were torching the house.
    And they were also torching the barn.
    And the shooting, I find out later on, was for the animals.
    They shot all the animals that they could get a hold of.
    I can't imagine what that was like for a little boy.
    Oh, for me, because I was very much in love with animals--
    it's just like today.
    I like animals.
    I remember crying and crying and crying.
    But I had to stop crying because it was upsetting
    my parents, my grandparents.
    And so I just did the best I could.
    But it really hurt.
    It hurt a lot.
    Because I had names for all the animals, and like the horses
    especially, and cows.
    I had names for all of them.
    And I was in love with them.
    I liked them.
    Yeah.
    How did those soldiers treat everybody?
    They made us stay in the trucks.
    They stopped one time, in the woods,
    for us to relieve ourselves.
    Just go in the woods while they were watching us the whole time.
    And you couldn't get away.
    And I asked the question, why did they have to shoot animals?
    Why did they have to burn everything?
    And their reply was, so you don't try to escape and go back.
    They figured that if you didn't have a place to go to,
    you wouldn't escape.
    That's the way they looked at it.
    And maybe that's true, maybe not.
    I don't know.
    But nobody tried to escape.
    Nobody escaped.
    They took us right straight to Auschwitz.
    Incredible.
    Your father, did he speak any other language besides--
    Not that I know of, he did not, no.
    He might said "nein" or something like that,
    once we were in Auschwitz.
    Because he was like a carpenter, working on buildings.
    And some of them were digging ditches and some things--
    But the first interaction-- so the first time you
    see German soldiers is when you are taken away from your home.
    Yes, that's the first time.
    You didn't see any soldiers of any army before then.
    No.
    No, that's first time I've seen them.
    And I didn't know what was making that noise.
    But then I find out, later on, it
    was cannons that they were shooting.
    As you were doing the potatoes.
    As we were doing the potatoes, yes.
    And that's what's lighting up the skies and making that noise.
    Now, in the truck, how did you get that answer?
    Did somebody of the German soldiers
    speak some Ukrainian or some Russian?
    I don't know.
    I asked my mother, why did they--
    Do this.
    --have to shoot the animals?
    And that's what she told me.
    So I'm assuming that she got it from the soldiers somehow.
    I don't know.
    One of them-- somebody must have spoke a different language
    to communicate.
    Mm-hmm.
    Were you in the truck the whole time on the way to Auschwitz?
    Except for stopping to relieve myself one time, yes.
    So the minute you were in Kirichenko?
    What's the name of the village again when you were born?
    [? Chyparivka ?]
    [?
    Chyparivka . ?]
    Yeah.
    That was the other direction.
    Right.
    Yeah, but [? Chyparivka ?] is the area--
    the town.
    Yeah.
    OK, the town.
    And your farm is about a mile away from there.
    So you're in this Poltava region.
    You're picked up one day in summertime, early July,
    late June, something like that, 1943.
    And you're taken by truck, from there all the way to Auschwitz--
    Auschwitz, yes.
    --without any change of transport, completely--
    do you remember what you saw on the way?
    Well, it was a canvas top, canvas sides.
    And in the back--
    I mean, I could look out the back sometimes.
    And that's all I could see, what was in the back.
    What was in the back?
    Most of the time it was dust.
    Of course.
    You know, the trucks made dust.
    They made dust, yes.
    These were dirt roads.
    Dirt roads, yes.
    And what about-- were there trucks behind your truck?
    Yes.
    We had three trucks.
    German soldiers-- we had one German soldier.
    He was sitting in the back with us.
    And the rest of them were in the other truck.
    So more people from [?
    Chyparivka ? ?]
    They must have had more people in them, yeah.
    I didn't know.
    At that time, I wasn't sure.
    And I was too upset, because of the animals,
    to find out what was going on with the other people.
    Yeah, of course.
    Do you remember how this German soldier behaved?
    Well, he was very strange.
    I didn't know how a soldier should behave.
    But I know that he was sitting there, holding a rifle.
    And I kept on watching his belt. He
    had big, round gas mask on his belt.
    He had some bullets in a pouch on the other side of him.
    And he had this bayonet.
    And he was just sitting there.
    But he didn't say anything the whole time that I can remember.
    As a kid, I might have fallen asleep there for maybe a couple
    of minutes or so.
    But I remember coming to the gate in Auschwitz.
    And I remember we had to dismount, unload the truck.
    And they kept on yelling, "aus, aus, aus, ausrasen."
    And we got out of the trucks.
    And then they separated the men and the boys--
    I mean the men and women, they separated, male and females.
    All the males go in one line and females go in the other line.
    And there were tables set up on both sides of the road,
    white tablecloth on them.
    And we had to take our clothes off, except for our underwear,
    and get a haircut.
    And then they use some kind of white powder, sprayed us
    with a white powder, sprayed the head.
    Sounds like delousing.
    I guess that's what it was, delousing.
    I guess that's what it was.
    And they did the same thing to women.
    They cut all the hair off.
    And all the women had to undress too.
    They had to undress too.
    And they got the haircuts, all the hair.
    And they got sprayed.
    And then they threw shirts out, or clothes we had to put on.
    For a man, it was a shirt and a pair of pants.
    Do you know about how long it took to get to Auschwitz?
    I know I was very hungry by the time we got there.
    That much I do remember.
    It was probably--
    It's not so close.
    No, it's not so close it.
    I mean, it took like 24 hours or something
    like that, probably, a day and a night.
    So they drove all night.
    They didn't stop.
    No, they didn't stop.
    They changed drivers.
    I guess that's what they did.
    I don't know.
    I didn't pay too much attention.
    And got into Auschwitz.
    And--
    Had you ever--
    I mean, how could you even know that such a place exists?
    I didn't.
    I didn't have no idea what that was.
    I had no idea whatsoever of what Auschwitz was.
    Or even your father-- how would your father know?
    I don't know if my father knew what it was.
    I really don't.
    The only thing I know, that as days went on,
    other kids in that area, they kept
    on yelling not to take a shower.
    If you go in to take a shower, you're
    not going to come out alive.
    You were getting gassed--
    gas, instead of water, comes out of a line.
    So other kids would say that?
    The other kids told us that, yes.
    And that saved our lives really.
    Because if it wouldn't be for the other kids--
    they were about the same age as I was, maybe a little bit older.
    Were they in barracks?
    How did you-- well, let me step back a little bit.
    When the men and the women were separated,
    your little brother came with you.
    Mm-hmm.
    And your father.
    Mm-hmm.
    And your Uncle Ivan.
    Yes.
    And your grandfather.
    My grandfather, yes.
    So only your mother and your grandmother
    were in the other line.
    Yes.
    And did you see them after that, your mother
    and your grandmother?
    Yeah, we got together after that, yes, with the parents.
    But then mother, her job was, after that,
    to clean the barracks.
    So my question is, were you in a barracks as a family?
    As a family in the barracks, yes.
    OK.
    And these barracks, can you describe them to me?
    Can you describe how many families--
    were there hundreds of people, or tens of people,
    or were they very small places?
    Can you describe to me what they looked like.
    Some barracks were one floor, some barracks were two floors.
    And my father, his job was to build barracks.
    Your barracks, the ones that you stayed in.
    No, new barracks.
    OK.
    But I want to know about the one you were in.
    OK.
    We were in-- there might have been, I don't know,
    50 people, something like that, and I
    don't know how many families.
    That much I don't know.
    But as far as the headcount, it might have been about 50 people.
    Were they all Ukrainian?
    No.
    There were some Polish.
    The reason I say Polish, because of the language
    that they were speaking.
    And I did not know what Polish language was.
    But I asked my mother, and she told me they were Polish.
    So you had never heard--
    did you know that there were such people as Polish people
    until then?
    No, I did not.
    No, I didn't know.
    But I found out.
    I learned real fast that there's other people that
    exist besides us, and different languages.
    I want to stop here and cut the camera for a minute.
    Is it time--
    OK, so you found out real fast that--
    Yes, I learned real fast what it was
    all about, the different people, different languages.
    And the kids that were telling us,
    they were telling us in different languages.
    Some language might have been German.
    I'm not sure.
    Some were Polish, and some were Ukrainian language.
    And they told us not to take a shower.
    Because if you go in that, turn on a spigot,
    we're going to be gassed.
    We're going to die.
    And I didn't see anyone--
    I saw people being carried out.
    They were covered up, being carried out.
    Of the barracks.
    Out of a barracks and out of a shower room, and put in a ditch.
    That ditch was for burying people.
    I saw them digging the ditches just
    on the opposite end of where the barracks was.
    And our barracks was in the middle.
    They were building on the left-hand side.
    That's where my father was working.
    And the ditch that they were burying in
    was on the right-hand side, away from a barracks.
    And did you recall, was there a sea of barracks?
    That is, where there many barracks buildings
    where you were?
    Were you in the middle of them?
    Were you--
    We were on one end of it.
    Because there was fence on the right-hand side.
    And they were digging the ditches outside the fence.
    That's where they were digging, in the field.
    They were digging the ditches.
    And that's where they were burying the dead people.
    When was the first time you got something
    to eat after you were taken away from your home?
    That night, once we got to Auschwitz.
    We got there in the late afternoon.
    And once we went through, got haircuts and got sprayed,
    and they took us to the barracks,
    then we got a bowl of soup and a piece of bread.
    That's what we got.
    And that was already dished out.
    And piece of bread was laying alongside the dish.
    And a spoon was laying there.
    And you just sit down and eat the potato soup.
    What that was famous, potato soup, peels and all.
    Peels and all.
    Peels and all.
    And a slice of bread.
    And the bread that you got was entirely different from what
    we used to have on our farm.
    How?
    How was it different?
    It was dark and it was hard--
    dark bread, and it was hard.
    And the whole time we were in Germany, that's what we had.
    It was potato soup.
    Sometimes it was just different, to potato soup.
    Some was thin, some was thick.
    And a slice of bread that's all the same.
    If you get a heel, you get more of a bread than you do--
    When it's the middle slice.
    Yeah.
    And--
    Was it enough to satisfy hunger?
    Well, it had to because you didn't get no seconds.
    So it had to be enough.
    For me, yes.
    For my father, my uncle?
    No, I'm sure it wasn't enough.
    Because they got the same amount as what I did.
    I keep going back to it-- you're 6 years old.
    Yes.
    And I can't imagine what it's like for a 6-year-old in this
    situation.
    Did you have questions that you asked
    or did you have questions that you couldn't ask?
    I had questions that I asked.
    And sometimes I was afraid to ask a question.
    But I got answers every time I asked a question,
    either my father or my mother.
    I asked questions.
    And at that time they always gave me an answer.
    So what were some of those questions?
    Well, about what that place was, what we were doing there,
    why we were there.
    And my parents, they already talked to somebody else there.
    And they found out they were going to Germany
    to work in factories.
    Right now we were just being there, waiting for more people
    to come so that they fill the train up.
    That's what was-- we were in the staging area.
    And they were keeping my father busy.
    And some other people, they're keeping
    them busy by digging a ditch.
    And--
    And so they would share with you what they knew.
    Oh, yes.
    My father and mother, yes, they always did.
    If they could tell me, they would tell me.
    If, for some reason, they couldn't tell me,
    then they would say so.
    Well, that's comforting for a child.
    It is, it is.
    And I was satisfied with the answer.
    But later on, I wasn't satisfied because of what was going on.
    And my parents couldn't tell me really what was happening.
    We were staying in different places
    once we left to Auschwitz.
    We'll come to that.
    Let's stay in Auschwitz for a while.
    OK.
    So there were other children in the barracks?
    Oh yes, yes.
    And were the children put to work too?
    No, not to a certain [INAUDIBLE].
    I mean, I wasn't put to work.
    Maybe 12, 13, something like that, maybe they
    were put to work.
    I don't know.
    I didn't see any kids working.
    I did see my father working.
    And I was with my father, and I was helping him.
    And I asked him what I can do.
    He says, you can make me some nails for me.
    And I said, well, how do I make the nails?
    And he had a roll of wire there that he made the nails from.
    He had a pair of cutters.
    And he showed me how to make the nails, how to straighten them,
    and how long to make them, measuring.
    And I made the nails for him just to keep myself busy--
    Of course.
    --give myself something to do.
    And you were with him.
    I was with him, yes.
    You were with him.
    That's so important.
    It was getting colder and colder as the time went on.
    And then probably sometime in September we had the first snow.
    And once you don't have the proper gear, you're cold.
    You're very uncomfortable.
    Now, I was uncomfortable for a good while.
    In fact, I was uncomfortable until I got inside the boxcar.
    Then it was so tight in there that you were just body to body.
    And you kept yourself warm.
    Until you got inside what?
    Boxcar, Cattle car, to travel from Auschwitz, Poland,
    to Germany.
    So tell me, how long were you in Auschwitz?
    We were in Auschwitz probably about between four and six
    months.
    That's a long time.
    That's a long time, yes.
    We were there the whole time.
    We got there-- it was summertime.
    And we didn't leave till--
    actually I'm going by what the weather was
    doing, how cold it was.
    Because I didn't know.
    We didn't have no holidays.
    I couldn't go by the holiday.
    I could ask my parents, but I didn't for some reason.
    But I do know that we were there for a right good while.
    And it was cold the whole time.
    I think I finally got another shirt
    to put on to go outside and help my father.
    Did your parents' physical appearance change?
    By what they had to do?
    Yes, definitely.
    They had to-- like my father worked outside,
    building new barracks.
    They were two-story barracks what he was building.
    Some were one story, some were two stories.
    And I guess maybe, later on, might have had three stories,
    I don't know.
    But some places that we went to in Nuremberg they
    had three stories.
    Mm-hmm.
    But in Auschwitz, your mother was cleaning the barracks.
    She was cleaning the barracks.
    She was sleeping the floors.
    And anything that was on the floor, she was picking up
    and laid them on the bed.
    And who was minding your little brother?
    He was with my mother or grandmother.
    The grandmother was still with us,
    and grandfather was still with us, and our uncle,
    until we got in the boxcars.
    I call them cattle cars is what I call them.
    Might have had 100 people in there.
    I'm not sure how many people were in there.
    But I know, once we got into the cattle car,
    we didn't have room to lay down, or sit down,
    or anything like that.
    You had to stand up.
    And was this everybody who was in your barracks was
    taken to that boxcar?
    Yeah, again, I'm not sure.
    But everybody out of our barracks.
    I think most everybody was in there.
    And there were some other people in there
    from different barracks.
    Now, I want to ask something.
    The kids who were left, the little kids
    who were in the barracks who were left there,
    the kind who told you don't go take a shower, what
    did they do during the day?
    Was anybody playing?
    Was there any kind--
    There was no games going on, not that I never seen, no.
    I don't know what they were doing-- sitting around,
    looking at each other, talking.
    But I was outside with my father most of the time.
    So I really didn't see anybody playing any games.
    And for me, I wasn't very happy being there.
    And we were forced to do that.
    So we had to do it.
    We had to be there.
    We didn't have any choice.
    I mean, I seen the guards--
    some of the guards, they were not
    very friendly with the people.
    In what way?
    Somebody doesn't do as fast as what
    they want them to do getting someplace,
    they would take a butt of a rifle
    and hit him, or push him with a rifle, or something like that.
    In fact, one time, I even saw an officer take his pistol
    and shoot a man, right there in front of all the people.
    I don't know for what reason.
    I wasn't there.
    I was in the distance.
    And I saw him pulling the pistol out.
    And bang, he was gone.
    And then of course other guards showed up there
    with a stretcher.
    And they carried that one fellow off--
    covered him up, and carried him off, and put him in that ditch
    that they dug.
    I know it's a strange question that I asked,
    would children be playing in a place like Auschwitz?
    But I wondered, when children are idle,
    and they're allowed to live, whether or not
    they block the rest of the world out.
    And what you're telling me is that there
    is no way to block that out.
    No, not really.
    There's no way to block it out because it's not
    a very happy place to be.
    And even the kids, they sensed that there's
    something wrong here.
    I don't belong here.
    I don't want to play games.
    I want to get out of here.
    But you couldn't, because of the guards.
    And they meant business.
    Were there people who died in the barracks, naturally?
    That is, I mean, not naturally in the sense
    they might have starved to death.
    They might have gotten sick.
    But that weren't shot.
    Did you see anything like that?
    No, I didn't see anybody die naturally.
    No, I just saw people that took a shower
    and were killed in the shower room with gas.
    And they were being carried out, and put in a ditch,
    and covered up.
    So you saw live people going in and--
    I saw people going in and not coming back out again.
    They were carried out.
    At least I saw people being carried out.
    I don't know that it's the same ones or not.
    I'm assuming that it was the same people.
    Was this close to your barracks or further away?
    It was attached to our barracks on one end.
    Really, that close?
    That close, yes.
    Yep.
    It was actually a shower for our barracks.
    And you go in.
    If you turn the gas on, turn the spigot on to get water,
    you get gas instead of water.
    And I'm just amazed that it was that close.
    Was it a small kind of building or a large kind of building?
    It was a barracks, holds--
    well, we were maybe 100 people in there, downstairs.
    So does that mean that, in all the time you were there,
    nobody took a shower.
    Nobody took a shower.
    No, we just washed up.
    Because we didn't trust.
    We wanted to stay alive.
    If you take a shower, you wouldn't come out of there.
    So are you thinking it's probably around December,
    January, that you were--
    I would say so, January, that we left.
    They made us get back in the boxcars.
    And they took us to Nuremberg, Germany.
    That's where we went to.
    And that means the whole family--
    grandpa, grandma.
    Grandma, no, they didn't come with us.
    And uncle didn't come with us.
    It was just my father, mother, and my brother and I.
    And what about Grandpa?
    He didn't come with us.
    He stayed behind.
    So three stayed behind.
    Yes.
    What happens to those three?
    OK, we are assuming that because grandparents, they were older--
    they were 70s, 80s, something like that--
    they were probably killed.
    Now, uncle, later on, uncle was discovered.
    And I'll get to the story--
    We'll talk about that later.
    --later on.
    So he survives.
    He survived.
    I don't know how, but he survived.
    OK.
    But your grandparents disappear from sight.
    They disappeared.
    We never seen them again, never heard from them again.
    And we don't know what happened to them.
    We assume that they were killed right.
    Because we seen other people getting killed.
    Their names-- do you remember your grandparents' names?
    No, I don't, no.
    It was Bojko, but--
    Yeah, it was Bojko, but I don't know what the first name was.
    I remember seeing, someplace, like Ivan something.
    But I know that Uncle Ivan, he is the one
    that, later on, we found him.
    OK.
    So you don't know that your grandfather was also Ivan.
    He might have been, he might not have been.
    That's right, yeah.
    I'm not sure.
    So you were taken from Auschwitz, after half a year,
    to Nuremberg.
    Nuremberg, yes.
    OK.
    Nuremberg, the famous city, where the trials
    were held after the war?
    That's correct.
    That one.
    And you were taken by cattle car.
    Train-- cattle car on train, yes.
    OK.
    And do you remember about how long it took to get there?
    Well, I know we were fed twice.
    So I'm assuming like about 36 to 48 hours to get there.
    Interesting.
    Longer than it took from Ukraine.
    Oh, yes.
    Oh, yes.
    Yeah, longer to Nuremberg-- from Poland to get to Nuremberg, yes.
    We stopped, I don't know, three times or four times.
    Either three or four times we stopped
    twice to eat, and then twice to relieve ourselves.
    And so now we're talking probably December 1943,
    January 1944.
    Yes.
    Something about then.
    That's correct.
    OK.
    So you're taken to Nuremberg.
    And what happens then?
    OK, my father, he had to register us in Nuremberg.
    Once a month, the head of a family
    had to register the whole family, every month,
    to the police department, police station.
    And then he had to go to work.
    And he worked in a station factory.
    That's where he worked.
    In a factory.
    In a factory.
    I don't know what he did in the factory.
    All I know is, a lot of times, his hands smelled.
    And mother's hands, they were the same way.
    They smelled.
    Yeah.
    They smelled.
    Did she work in the same factory?
    She worked in the same factory, yes.
    And she also cleaned on the side, and to get paid.
    And my father, he--
    later on, not right away, not the first day or second day,
    but I think like first week, maybe second week--
    he had some kind of injections in his stomach.
    I don't know what kind of injections they were.
    I don't know whether it's to help him or to kill him.
    I don't know what kind of injections they were.
    And he didn't know it neither.
    He couldn't tell me what they were.
    But later on we found out that it's experimental injections.
    That's what they were.
    And we were in a barracks.
    I was going to ask where were you living.
    We were living in a barracks with maybe,
    I don't know, whatever, 300, 400 people.
    Huge.
    Three-story barracks.
    Three stories.
    It was huge.
    And you had a gate.
    You go in and out.
    But you had to sign in, sign out.
    So you were able to leave.
    You were able to leave, yes.
    My parents, they worked in the factory.
    They leave in the morning.
    They had to sign out.
    We walk with them up to the gate.
    At the gate, we had to turn around and go back in again.
    So then it's you and your brother and no one to mind you.
    That's right, just the two of us.
    And you're 6 and 1/2 and he is 4.
    6 and 1/2 and he was 4 and 1/2.
    Yeah, that's what it was.
    And it wasn't so bad until the air raids started.
    And they started probably maybe three,
    four months after we got there, they started.
    Air raids started night and day, night and day.
    And if mom was home, we would run to the air-raid shelter,
    it wasn't so bad.
    But if they weren't home, if it was
    during the day, if they were at the factory, or a cleaning job,
    or something like that, I took care of my brother.
    So I grab him, and we would run for air-raid shelter.
    And some of the air-raid shelters weren't so bad,
    but some of them were terrible air-raid shelters.
    It was just a ditch dug, with railroad ties
    of wood, telephone poles, laying on top, covered up with dirt.
    And a bomb goes off someplace, a half a mile away,
    everything shook.
    And the dirt would come down, fall down on top of you.
    And many times we come out of there full
    of dust and dirty-looking if we had
    to go into it that kind of air-raid shelter.
    But we always tried to pick the best air-raid shelter
    that they had there.
    And what was the best like?
    The best was outside the gate.
    Did they let you go?
    When the air-raid shelter siren goes off, the guards would run.
    We didn't have no guards.
    So we could go out, go into the professional air-raid shelter,
    which was down in the basement of the house.
    And there were all brick, block, whatever.
    There was cement.
    And--
    These were residential houses?
    Were these residential houses?
    They were residential houses, yes.
    And we got into the basement of the residential houses.
    And that was the best.
    And these air-raid shelters--
    well, I guess the whole barracks,
    the whole compound-- was it in the city center of Nuremberg
    or on the outskirts?
    On the outskirts.
    It was on the outskirts.
    Yes, on the outskirts.
    The reason I know, because some days
    we would walk into the city.
    And I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
    Parades were going on in the city.
    The banners were flying in the city.
    The people, dignitaries, standing on the balconies,
    waving to people down below.
    Things like that were going on.
    I didn't know where we were.
    All I know, we were in the big city.
    And I knew how to get home, how to get back to the barracks.
    I knew where we walked out of there.
    And it was quite an experience, not knowing
    where you were, what you were doing there, why you were there.
    You had so many questions and no answers.
    But then, later on, once my parents were there,
    I find out from our parents why we were there,
    who was holding us there.
    So tell me, why were you there?
    We were there for our parents.
    Because our parents were healthy.
    And they needed healthy people to work in the factories.
    That's why we were there.
    That's what they were told.
    And my mother, she was working on the side
    in residential areas, whatever she could,
    to make some money to give us some clothes,
    give us something to wear, and something extra to eat.
    Sometimes we were so hungry we were eating out of garbage cans
    because we didn't have no food.
    So if air raid goes off, let's say, 3:00, 4:00,
    5 o'clock in the afternoon, that's dinnertime.
    And if you don't get the dinner, you
    might as well forget the next day before you get something
    to eat.
    And my mother, if she had some money,
    she could get something, get some bread or something
    like that, and bring it home so we
    have something to eat so we wouldn't have
    to eat out of garbage cans.
    But many times, my brother and I, we ate out of a garbage
    can because we didn't have nothing else to eat.
    And we were just lucky we were alive.
    You know, the picture you paint is so bizarre in some ways.
    You live in one world, which is not a very nice-looking world,
    which is a scary world, which is life-threatening, where you have
    more questions than you have answers
    and you know that there is danger.
    And then yet you are allowed out to go into another world that
    could be on a different planet even, where people have parades
    and they have dignitaries.
    Oh yeah, I found that out, yes.
    But the whole time we were there in Nuremberg, I was scared,
    I was hungry, and I was cold.
    That was three factors that were the most serious factors of all.
    So the hungry, scared, and cold.
    And for myself and for my brother.
    And same thing for my parents.
    [INAUDIBLE] sometimes I knew where they were
    or I knew where they were supposed to be.
    But I don't know whether they're dead or not.
    Because it was British bombing during the day and Americans
    were bombing at nighttime.
    That's what I found out later on.
    I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what I heard.
    But when the air raid goes off, the only thing I say
    is, you better run to get a good air-raid shelter.
    Because them bombs, they come falling down.
    And when then they start falling down, the buildings fall.
    They start burning.
    So you got fire.
    And you couldn't get the fire engine to the fire
    because a building collapsed.
    It was quite a serious mess.
    And I didn't know whether we were going to survive it or not.
    But Nuremberg-- I know towards the end, close to '45,
    early '45, every building was collapsed.
    As far as you can see to the naked eye,
    the buildings are collapsed.
    Were bombed.
    Yeah, where they found the buildings
    for the trial, Nuremberg trial, I
    don't know how they were standing there,
    not being touched.
    But the buildings where we were, on that side, we
    were there where the factories were.
    So naturally that's where the bombs were falling.
    Did you ever find out what kind of factory
    your parents worked in?
    No, I never found out.
    The only thing I found out was--
    and I got them papers from Red Cross--
    [PHONE RINGS]
    Hang on a second.
    She got it now.
    She got it.
    OK.
    You found out--
    The buildings that they were in, that my father also
    was taken and shown how to dismantle a machine gun
    and how to shoot the machine gun.
    Yeah.
    That's so bizarre.
    He was trained.
    He was trained.
    That's not his job.
    He was not a soldier.
    But he was shown how to dismantle it, take it
    apart, machine gun, how to clean it
    and how to put it back together.
    He told you this?
    No, I saw it on a paper, on the papers
    that I got from Red Cross.
    I don't know whether you had a copy or not.
    But I have a copy from Red Cross.
    It was shown that he had to go someplace, to some town,
    to learn how to handle a machine gun.
    That's dangerous to take a forced laborer and do that.
    He had never used it.
    He never had to use it.
    But he was shown how to do it in case.
    And he was also a firefighter.
    He had to fight the fires.
    If a building's on fire or a whole block's
    on fire, which a lot of cases that was the case, he had to--
    You found this out through Red Cross papers?
    Yes.
    Now, the fire, he told me that.
    Ah, I see.
    As far as the Red Cross papers, the machine gun,
    that's what I find out about that.
    I didn't know that.
    But you might have the same copies.
    I don't know.
    But in one of the copies, it stated
    that he was taken to such and such a place.
    The names are given, who was taken
    to learn how to dismantle and clean a machine gun
    and how to shoot it.
    So that's what was on the paper there.
    And they had, like, swimming pools made out of brick.
    Every block had one of them.
    Let's say there were 30 feet wide, maybe 50, 60 feet long,
    about four or five feet deep.
    And they had a pump right there.
    And that was for the fire.
    If in case a building's on fire, they
    hooked a hose up to the pump, turn the pump on,
    and squirt water.
    Drew the water right out of a--
    Swimming pool.
    Well, I call it a swimming pool.
    It looked like a swimming pool.
    But when I first saw it, that's first impression
    that came to my mind--
    oh, that's a nice place to go swimming.
    But I found out different what the water was for.
    And of course, as the time went on, a lot of them
    filled up with brick and stuff from a building
    when a building fell down when the bombs [INAUDIBLE].
    So I can think--
    I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth.
    But if I were a 6-year-old, and there's the siren going off that
    a bombing mission is happening, and my parents work
    in a factory, I'd be wondering whether they're going to come
    home.
    I was wondering.
    Yeah?
    Many times I was wondering what they were
    doing, where they were at--
    Whether they'll come back.
    --if I'll see them again.
    That's huge.
    Yes.
    For a little boy, that's huge.
    Well, I had to grow up fast.
    And my mother was talking about changing my--
    of course, at that time, we did not
    know that the war was going to come to an end in '45.
    But--
    Excuse us.
    Let's cut for a second.
    That's probably our sandwiches.
    OK, I'm sorry for the interruption.
    You were saying something about your mother had some thoughts
    of what needs to happen.
    OK.
    But she found out that when I get to be 8 years old,
    I had to sign up for "Hitler-Junger."
    Jugend.
    I had to sign up for "Hitler-Junger."
    And that was like--
    "Hitler-Junger" was like Boy Scouts,
    but they were 8 years old.
    And they were taken away.
    They were given a uniform.
    And I seen a bunch of little kids marching up and down.
    But I didn't know what they were.
    But then I found out, later on, they were "Hitler-Junger."
    And about the age of 10, they were
    taught how to shoot a rifle, how to shoot a pistol.
    And she was thinking maybe she should change my age.
    Because we didn't have any paperwork at all.
    Everything that we had was taken away from us in Auschwitz.
    So we did not have anything.
    We had to sign in every month, my father did.
    He had to sign every month.
    And that was easy enough to put it differently.
    So what would have been the advantage for you
    joining the Hitler-Jugend?
    "Hitler-Junger?"
    Yeah-- Jugend, Jugend.
    Jugend?
    Well, it's--
    What would have been the advantage, in her mind,
    for you to join it?
    I had to do it.
    It wasn't that we voluntary had to go.
    We had to do it.
    All the kids--
    It was compulsory.
    Compulsory.
    It's just like, right now, for military,
    when you get to be 18 years of age-- used to be, not anymore,
    that you had to--
    But why would she want to change your age to make you older?
    Or did she want to make you younger.
    Younger, make me younger, so I didn't have to sign up for it.
    Ah.
    So I don't know.
    She never said anything more about it.
    I don't know whether my age was ever changed or not.
    I'm assuming it's still the same.
    Like everywhere?
    OK, OK.
    I didn't understand.
    OK, now I understand.
    Yeah, she didn't want you to be part of it.
    Exactly, exactly.
    And I really didn't want to be a part of it myself.
    Because I saw what they were doing.
    And then I heard more stories about it--
    where they were going, what they were doing, they enjoyed it.
    Well, being a boy scout, you know, going for a hike,
    going in the mountains.
    Well, those are very attractive aspects of being a scout.
    Yes.
    But there was all the other stuff that was involved as well.
    That was involved that was not.
    That's correct.
    And that's what I didn't like.
    So I didn't have to do it because war was over.
    When the war was over, I don't know what happened to me.
    But I was picked up someplace.
    Hang on a second.
    OK.
    I think I'd like to break now and we'll come back later.
    But we're breaking at the point where you're still in Nuremberg.
    Your parents are working in this factory.
    You have the British and American bombers,
    one at daytime, one at nighttime, coming.
    And you're in this environment.
    And when we come back to your story later on then
    we'll start from there and we'll go forward.
    OK?
    Yeah.
    Thank you very much.
    OK.
    OK, before the break, we were talking
    about where you were in Nuremberg
    in these barracks, the air raid shelters, the good ones,
    the bad ones, the fear that you don't know what's
    happening to your parents as the bombs are dropping,
    and things like that.
    I want to circle back to a question
    I had about your hometown.
    I believe it was at the very beginning of our conversation.
    It might have been on camera or off camera,
    you said you can't find it on the map today.
    Why is that?
    Does it not exist anymore?
    That's what I assume.
    Have you been back there?
    No, I have not personally.
    I have not been back there.
    But my brother's been back there with an interpreter
    and a chauffeur.
    And they cannot locate it.
    Oh.
    Cannot locate it.
    And did you learn from anybody, later,
    was there more houses set on fire besides your own farm?
    Was the entire--
    The whole village was burned from what I hear--
    The whole village was burned.
    --from different ones that the whole village was burned, yes.
    In other words, all 20 homes plus.
    So the church would have been burned too?
    No, the church was not burned.
    The church was made out of stucco.
    And evidently the roof was tin roof or something like that.
    It would not burn.
    So they did not bother the church.
    There was nobody in the church.
    OK.
    But the rest of the village was torched.
    Yes.
    The village was torched.
    That's correct.
    That's what I hear.
    OK, so I just wanted to clarify that.
    OK, so let's go back, now, to Nuremberg.
    How long did your family stay in Nuremberg?
    You arrive in around January '44.
    '44.
    '44.
    We stayed there until the war was over.
    Oh, so almost a year and a half.
    Yes.
    And when the war was over, we were
    running around looking for something to eat.
    And it was hand-to-hand combat.
    OK, let me back up then.
    If you were there over a year, almost a year and a half,
    did your life change?
    Did you stay in the same barracks?
    Did your parents keep working at the factory?
    Did your circumstances change at all during that year and a half?
    Well, change was made in where we stayed.
    We were moved around all the time.
    The whole time we were in Nuremberg, we were moved around.
    We did not stay in one location.
    And the other thing that changed was the food.
    We had a hard time finding something to eat.
    We got to a point where we were eating dog food one time.
    And that was--
    Does that mean, when you were in the barracks,
    were you fed there?
    Was there a regular meal time?
    The food was available to eat if there was no air raid.
    Yes, if there was no air raid, the food was served.
    We can go in into cafeteria--
    Canteen or something, yeah.
    --and get something to eat, which was a bowl of soup
    and a piece of bread.
    So the same potato soup you were talking about.
    Yes.
    But that's always potato soup, or the other thing was--
    what was it?
    Oh, horses like it.
    Corn?
    No, not corn.
    Carrots?
    Huh?
    Carrots?
    No, not carrots.
    It grows in the fall.
    It grows in the fall.
    It's like a beet.
    Turnips?
    Turnips.
    Turnips.
    Turnip soup.
    You cut it up, slice it.
    OK.
    So it was either potato soup or turnip soup.
    One or the other.
    That's all that we had, nothing else.
    When you were moved around, were you moved to different barracks?
    No, not necessarily barracks.
    We were moved sometimes to residential areas,
    and stayed in residential areas for six months, maybe a couple
    months, something like that.
    So in an apartment or in a house?
    In a house, in a house.
    And would you be working still?
    Were your parents still working in the factory?
    Yes, yes, still working in the factory.
    And mother was still cleaning--
    working in a factory and cleaning.
    So how did they control your parents movements
    when they were no longer behind a gate that had a guard
    and that they sign in and sign out from?
    I don't know, but they moved us.
    They moved you.
    So since they moved us, my father
    had to go to the police station and--
    Register.
    --register once a month, to give them
    the new address where we were located, what we were doing,
    what they were doing.
    Did you have contact, then, with the local German population,
    when you were moving in apartments and houses
    rather than in barracks?
    Sometimes we did, sometimes we didn't.
    It all depends.
    And not necessarily German population.
    It was any--
    Polish, Ukrainian--
    So other forced laborers.
    Other forced laborers that were living in the same home
    development.
    I see, I see.
    Were you learning any other languages?
    Oh, yes.
    I was learning other languages, a few words now and then,
    especially German.
    Do you remember the first words in German that you learned?
    Nein or schnell, jawohl.
    [CHUCKLES] Yeah.
    That I learned fast.
    Yeah, I can imagine.
    I can imagine.
    So you move around in different places.
    And did you stay in any one place
    for longer than a couple of months?
    Might have been six months, at the longest, in some locations.
    Right before the war was over, I think that last location,
    we were there for maybe six months, five months, something
    like that.
    OK, OK.
    And I take it there was nothing like school for you.
    No schooling at all, no, no school.
    What about other kids?
    Were there other kids with parents
    who were forced laborers?
    Or were you the only--
    Oh, yeah.
    No, there were some other ones there too.
    But they were in the same situation, same boat,
    as we were in.
    There was no school for them kids.
    Well, you really couldn't have a school.
    Yeah.
    OK, yeah, no, but it was that sort of situation.
    You're half-prisoners.
    Yeah, yeah.
    So you say that, as time went on, did the food situation--
    when you lived in private residential places,
    was there someone who supplied meals for you
    from the administration?
    No, not really.
    It was up to us to get our own food.
    OK.
    So that's when it became difficult?
    It became very difficult to get food.
    Because we didn't have money.
    And sometimes mom couldn't clean,
    or didn't get paid, or something.
    So she didn't have no money.
    So it was one of them situations where,
    if you don't have the money, you can't buy food.
    That's right.
    And if that was the case then we didn't have the food.
    So you went hungry.
    So we went hungry.
    That's right.
    And there was dog food.
    And we ate dog food one time, I remember.
    And my brother just reminded me of that,
    I think the last time we were together or something.
    He said to me, in so many words, you
    remember when we were so hungry that we ate dog food?
    Well, how can I forget something like that, you know?
    You can't really.
    And your parents, they didn't have anything, then, either.
    No, they didn't, unless they had something
    in the factory or the work.
    I don't know.
    Somebody else might have had something they gave them.
    Or else they didn't have anything.
    I don't know.
    But I noticed that my father lost a lot of weight.
    And I think--
    I can't say for sure, but I think
    that the injections that he had had something
    to do with him getting sick and dying just as soon as the war
    was over.
    So he gets sick, weaker and weaker and weaker.
    Yes, he was weaker and weaker.
    Lost a lot of weight.
    And same thing with mother.
    She lost a lot of weight too.
    And she was singing in church choir and passed out.
    Really?
    And that's when she fainted.
    And they took her to a hospital.
    And she was paralyzed.
    And this is after the war ends?
    Yes, after the war ended, yeah.
    Let's go back a little bit to before the war ends.
    The picture that I'm getting from you
    is that your parents continue working in the same place
    as they were before even though your residence changes.
    Yes.
    And the more that time goes on, the less food there is.
    And there's no way that you get fed by some administrative body
    like you had in the barracks if there's no air raid going on.
    However, if you're walking the streets at all,
    from what you told me before, there
    was not a building that was left standing.
    Very few buildings.
    There were just ruins and ruins and ruins.
    So was there fighting going on in Nuremberg?
    Did you experience anything like that?
    For hand-to-hand combat, yes.
    Hand-to-hand combat.
    Towards the end-- it was in '45 already,
    I don't know, March, April, May, something like that.
    I don't know when it was.
    And the streets-- you can see the soldiers running back
    and forth, and sometimes running,
    flop down, get shot, or sometimes come
    running out from behind a corner there
    with a rifle and the bayonet on the end,
    and to fight until one of them goes down.
    And you would be in your--
    I would be hiding someplace.
    Or else I'd be in the house, looking out the window.
    By the time this happens, are your parents
    still going to work every day?
    Oh, yes, they had to go to work.
    I was surprised that the factory did not get hit.
    Yeah.
    You know, I was waiting for the factory to get hit.
    But from what I hear from my parents and other ones
    that the factory was hit, but on the outskirts.
    And the factory was so big that, what they were doing,
    it didn't bother it.
    They still had to do it.
    And who were they fighting against?
    If this was Nuremberg, what armies were the enemy armies.
    It was Germany and Americans.
    Oh, so it was the US.
    Oh yes, US.
    US, OK.
    Because US are the ones that picked me up.
    And I wound up in the field hospital.
    OK, tell me about--
    did they pick you up before the end of the war?
    Before the end of the war.
    So tell me what happened.
    What happened?
    How is it that you saw your first American?
    I was looking for food with my brother.
    And I don't know what happened, but I was passed out.
    I was down.
    And an American soldier picked me up
    and put me in the ambulance.
    And they took me to the field hospital.
    And when I was in the service, I tried
    to locate people that were involved to thank them
    for saving my life.
    But I could not locate them.
    If I knew the unit number or something like that,
    it might have helped.
    But I did not know anything.
    Aw.
    All I know that I was picked up.
    With your brother or by yourself?
    By myself.
    I was picked up.
    And I was taken to the field hospital.
    And I stayed in field hospital for, I don't know,
    maybe a couple of weeks.
    I really don't know.
    And I do remember this much.
    I was getting penicillin shot.
    I had to roll over, and in my butt, get a penicillin shot.
    But after penicillin shot there comes the good part
    that I really like.
    I got a candy bar or a stick of gum.
    [CHUCKLES]
    Yes, every time-- every time I got a penicillin shot,
    I also got a piece of gum, or chewing, or a chocolate bar,
    or something like that.
    And that's the first time you had anything
    like that in almost two years.
    Yes.
    I didn't even know what it was.
    They had to show it to me what to do with it.
    Really?
    Yeah.
    I'd like truly, but I never had chewing gum before.
    Had you had chocolate?
    I had chocolate, but not chewing gum.
    OK, OK.
    Chocolate, you eat, and chew it up, and swallow it.
    That's right.
    The gum, you just chew on it.
    And it has a flavor.
    And It Has a flavor until you spit it out.
    So you lose consciousness somewhere
    while you're searching for food.
    You don't know who picks you up.
    You're out.
    You're not conscious.
    And they bring you to a field hospital.
    And when you wake up, there are all these strangers around you.
    Yes.
    Do you remember that sense of, oh my God, where am I?
    Yes, until they start giving me some goodies.
    When they start giving me goodies,
    I knew they were friends.
    They couldn't be enemies and giving me all them goodies--
    chocolate bars, and sticks of gum, and stuff like that,
    and made me well.
    And was there any--
    And I had something to eat in my stomach, belly.
    I had something to eat.
    And I was warm.
    I was in the tents.
    Yeah.
    And was there someone who spoke a language you
    were able to communicate in?
    German.
    They spoke German.
    And by that time, I could pick up a few words.
    I could understand a few words in German.
    It's just like, well, right now, I can do quite a bit.
    I can do some good right now.
    But then, just being there for a year or so,
    I could just barely pick it up.
    So I'm wondering whether these soldiers realized
    you weren't a young German boy, but the boy of a forced laborer.
    Oh, they realized that because the Red Cross
    was looking for me.
    They came over and got me there.
    After I got well, Red Cross got me and took me to Weisenberg,
    to DP camp, and got me reunited with my brother and my parents.
    Ah, OK.
    My parents were already there.
    So this was March or April?
    When was this?
    I don't know.
    It was starting to get warm.
    That's all I can tell you.
    OK, so it was probably April.
    Because we did not have a stove or anything inside the tent.
    And it was right warm.
    Of course, nighttime, you had a blanket.
    And they covered me up nighttime.
    And I was in with the soldiers in the tent.
    OK.
    And so with regular army soldiers,
    you were sleeping in the same tent.
    Yes, yes.
    Field hospital for army soldiers, yes.
    OK.
    And so after two weeks the Red Cross finds you.
    I don't know how I was located.
    But they located me and they came over to pick me up.
    The doctors there already knew who I was.
    And I guess same thing with Red Cross.
    They knew where I was.
    How that was done, I don't know.
    Of course, of course.
    It must have been your parents, through some way, found a way
    to put inquiries out.
    Well, could have been my brother too.
    I don't know.
    You know, they were looking for my body someplace.
    And they couldn't find my body.
    So next thing you know, it was out
    that I was in a hospital, field hospital.
    And I remember small planes taking off and landing.
    And I remember how the soldiers, later, made a runway.
    I remember that.
    It was 10, maybe 18, 20 inches wide.
    It had holes in it.
    And that's what the plane landed and took off on.
    So even then, in the hospital, you're
    a curious little boy who sees what's going on around.
    Oh, I could see what was going on right outside.
    Because the door, they left it open during the day.
    It was daylight coming in.
    And I could see what was happening out there.
    Small airplanes, like a single engine,
    they were landing and taking off.
    OK.
    So when you are brought back, you
    were brought to what place you said?
    Weisenberg.
    Weisenberg.
    And was that a DP camp?
    DP camp in Weisenberg.
    Yes, they created a DP camp in Weisenberg.
    Different towns-- they created a DP camp
    for different nationalities.
    Each nationality had their own DP camp.
    And in Weisenberg it was Ukrainians?
    Weisenberg was Ukrainian, yes.
    Anybody else?
    Was there any Poles there?
    Any--
    I don't know.
    Not that I know of.
    As far as I know, they were all Ukrainians in there.
    But maybe--
    I'm just asking.
    I have a picture of different ones
    that were in DP camp in Weisenberg.
    But I don't know if you can make anything out from a picture
    or not.
    Yeah, probably not.
    My father's in a picture, and my mother,
    and my brother's in a picture.
    Are you in the picture?
    I am in a picture too, yes.
    So when your parents--
    your parents knew you were alive.
    Yes.
    And you come back to them.
    And you're restored by that point?
    Are you healthy again?
    Well, I guess I was better than I was before.
    But I don't know if I was up to the same weight
    as I was when I left Ukraine.
    Maybe I lost some weight, something
    like that, because of food--
    undernourished.
    Yeah, yeah.
    Now what was the living situation at Weisenberg?
    What kind of place did you live in, sleep in?
    Well, in Weisenberg we had our own room
    for a family, which was done by prisoners of war or something
    like that.
    It was different groups--
    United Nations, Red Cross, UNRA, all different kind
    of nationalities, different groups, that were helping out.
    And that's when they tell me they cannot locate my father,
    for that reason.
    Ah, we also talked off camera that you've been trying
    to locate your father's grave.
    Mm-hmm.
    But at that point your father is still alive.
    Yes.
    When he's there, he's still alive.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And were you were you fed as a family?
    Was there somebody who was then taking responsibility
    for feeding all of the people?
    It was given us, for a family, that they give us food.
    We had to fix it ourselves the way that we want to.
    But the we did get food for the first couple of months
    or something like that.
    What kind of food was it?
    Well, potatoes, bread, milk, butter.
    So milk and butter, you hadn't had for a while.
    No, we hadn't.
    I didn't even know what it was--
    [CHUCKLES] till I got it.
    Then my mom, she knew what it was.
    So she took care of that, and fixed some meals.
    And how was she-- so your parents were then
    no longer working anywhere.
    No, they were not.
    No, not for a while.
    Because the first year--
    and let's say this is--
    1940--
    '45.
    --'45.
    And my mother, she was singing in the church choir.
    So there was a church choir, a Ukrainian Orthodox church
    choir that was established.
    Yes.
    And she was singing in the choir, and she fainted.
    When she fainted, they took her to the hospital
    and found out that she was paralyzed.
    And that was the end of that.
    And our father, he was hospitalized not too long
    after that.
    And Richter, my brother, and I, we were out without--
    Parents.
    --anybody taking care of us.
    So we stayed with some friends for a while
    till the Red Cross came, and picked us up, and took us
    to Prien.
    Prim?
    Prien, Chiemsee.
    Chiemsee was a big lake.
    And Prien was the name of the town next to that huge lake.
    And there was a hotel right in the middle of the town,
    next to a railroad station, that was for children
    under 18 years of age.
    But was this in '45, '46?
    '45.
    No, I'm wrong, '46.
    So '46.
    So the rest of '45 you were together with your parents
    and part of '46 you were together with your parents.
    Yes.
    Do you know about what time of year your mother fainted?
    Was it spring or summer?
    We were putting in garden.
    So it was spring.
    OK.
    It was springtime.
    She faints, and then your father gets sick,
    and then you're taken.
    He got sick.
    And he was hospitalized.
    And he was in the hospital then--
    well, he was in the hospital until he died.
    Did you ever see him in the hospital?
    Oh, yes.
    Yeah, we went to see him.
    We got a ride from Weisenberg DP camp.
    We got a ride to the hospital.
    I think, at that time, he was in either Weisenberg hospital
    or Regensburg Hospital, one of them two.
    And we got a ride to see him.
    And then we got a ride back.
    So we did see him.
    We saw our mother.
    And then--
    Excuse me.
    Were they in the same hospital?
    Yes, they were in the same hospital for a while.
    And they were conscious?
    Oh, yeah.
    My mother didn't know what she--
    who it was that was talking to her.
    She was just laying there like a log.
    She didn't understand what you were saying to her.
    She couldn't talk.
    She couldn't do anything.
    She was just-- like she was out of it.
    My father, well, he could talk, understand.
    But he had, I think, three, four, or five operations
    on his stomach.
    Wow.
    So that injection that you talked about really
    sounds like it did have something to do--
    Well, I told the doctor about the injections.
    And he says, well, we're going to consider that,
    that that's what's causing the problem.
    But we don't know for sure.
    We haven't got that far yet.
    And then my brother and I, we went to Prien.
    So we never did see the doctor again.
    And then from Prien we went to Bad Aibling.
    And this is in 1946.
    This is '46, maybe going into '47.
    OK.
    It's '46, late '46.
    So about half a year you're in Prien.
    Yeah.
    Something like that.
    Yeah, something like that, yeah.
    OK.
    And what was it?
    Was it an orphanage in Prien?
    Yeah.
    Oh, yeah, it was an orphanage, a hotel right
    in the middle of Main Street, across from a railroad station.
    And it was a huge hotel.
    And it was an orphanage.
    I remember climbing a tree, getting my first walnut.
    I didn't know what walnut was till, I don't know,
    some Czechoslovakian boy or some boy from some other country,
    he climbed the tree and he got a walnut,
    and showed me what to do with it.
    And then another boy, I remember he was on crutches.
    I don't know how old he was.
    But he could play the piano.
    Oh, I'll tell you, he could play the piano.
    Right now, when I hear "The Pennsylvania Polka"
    or something like that, I can think back to him playing
    the piano.
    Oh, wow.
    That's how good he was.
    Wow.
    The piano was sitting right in the hallway on the first floor.
    As you go up the steps, you could get in the hallway.
    There was a piano.
    And almost any time of the day you go in there,
    he'll be sitting there next to the piano.
    And if you listen, he'll play the piano for you.
    Anything you want to hear, he'll play.
    Wow, what a talented kid.
    Yeah, he was.
    I don't know--
    I'm just trying to think what country he was from.
    He was either from Czechoslovakia, or Poland,
    or one of them countries, that much I do remember.
    So were you getting to be familiar, then,
    with kids from all over the place?
    Oh, yeah, from other countries, yes.
    We were making friends, like kids usually do.
    And we go to the lake.
    And we get a rowboat and row around the lake.
    And some other kids showed us how to fish.
    There was a little stick, maybe a foot long,
    with little fish on it about two, three inches long.
    And they were smoked.
    And they were delicious.
    I don't know what kind of fish there were.
    I couldn't do it again if I had to.
    But we got them little fish, just scoop them up, bring them
    in, put them on a stick.
    And you got to have a fire to smoke them and all that.
    But originally, from what I understand,
    they smoke them in an oven--
    an oven, with the heat.
    And you put him in there.
    And they--
    So they were still delicious the way you were doing it.
    Oh, yeah, they're still good.
    Because we were doing it ourselves, I guess.
    And we were there for about six months, something like that.
    It was cold-- getting cold.
    And--
    Were you well-fed there?
    Were you well-fed there?
    Oh yeah, in Prien, yes, we were fed very well, clothed
    very well.
    When it was starting to get cold,
    we got additional clothes to wear.
    Who was running the place?
    Well, different agencies were running it.
    It was ran under United--
    UNRA?
    --Nations, UN.
    It was Red Cross.
    It was UNRA.
    All three agencies?
    Well, there was more agencies that that.
    There was also agency from Australia.
    Because we had visitors from Australia.
    And they told us that they are taking care of us.
    So they're taking care of us.
    OK, fine.
    Well, thank you very much.
    And they were a couple well-dressed dudes--
    heavy overcoat, with a hat on, that came in on the tour.
    I guess they saw what they wanted to see.
    And they told us if we needed anything, to let them know.
    So who were the people you met day to day?
    Were they Germans?
    Were they foreign workers?
    Were they-- [COUGHS] excuse me.
    [COUGHS] Excuse me.
    You know, the ones that you would interact with.
    No, they were just kids like me from different countries.
    Most of them were Polacks, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakians.
    Any Jewish kids?
    Yeah, I imagine there were a few Jewish kids there, yeah.
    Because we started going to church.
    Every Sunday, they had a church service--
    different religion had a service.
    One Sunday we would have Catholic.
    Next Sunday we would have Protestant.
    The next Sunday we would have Jewish.
    And all the kids went to every single service.
    Yes, yes, yes.
    Oh, that's interesting.
    Whoever goes to church would be there, yes.
    And not necessarily that everybody went to church.
    But my brother and I, we went to church.
    Because they started using my brother and I in church,
    in the Orthodox Church, preacher's helpers--
    or the priest helpers.
    They made gowns for us.
    Like altar boys?
    Yeah, like altar boys, yeah.
    We would light the candles.
    And we carry--
    Incense.
    --incense for the priest.
    And we load the incense up in them for the priest,
    and light it.
    And whatever is necessary, just the helpers.
    And where would these church services be held?
    In the same facility?
    The largest facility that they could possibly get.
    And in Prien, it was held downstairs in the basement.
    Of your hotel?
    Of the hotel.
    That was the largest building that they had,
    the largest room that they had.
    And of course there was no sitting.
    Everybody had to stand.
    And once we moved, then there was bigger rooms.
    But still, churches that we had, like Orthodox church,
    there was no sitting down.
    You stand there for a couple hours.
    OK.
    But if you went the next week, for example,
    to a Catholic service, would you be sitting down?
    Would they put chairs--
    No.
    OK.
    No.
    OK.
    No, we never got to sit down.
    We always--
    Stood.
    --stood up, yeah.
    And my brother and I, during the Orthodox Church we went to,
    we always helped the priest out.
    Whatever he needed, we helped him.
    And a couple times, he traveled.
    He went to different DP camps.
    And he requested that my brother and I
    go with him to help him out.
    And would you?
    Oh yeah, we did, yeah.
    And so did you go to services that weren't orthodox as well?
    Oh yeah, went to other services, sure.
    So you got an introduction.
    But we did not help the priest out.
    We just went to other services to go to church and pray.
    And were they very different?
    No, it was not that different.
    Some were somewhat differ.
    But the Catholic and Protestant, it's not that much difference.
    I didn't see that much difference myself.
    Well, I didn't know of this.
    But it's an unusual way for children to get exposure
    to other religions.
    It wouldn't normally have happened.
    Had you stayed in your own home, you might not have ever--
    if the war hadn't been there, these things
    wouldn't have happened.
    But once they did, you get to meet
    kids who are from Czechoslovakia, from Poland.
    You see-- there's a bit of the wider world that is open to you.
    Even though the reason for it is chaos,
    and terrible things, and tragedy, at this end,
    you're seeing more than you would have otherwise seen.
    Sure.
    What else did I want to ask about this?
    While you were in Prien, did you have a chance
    to visit your father in the hospital?
    Yeah, we visited him one time.
    One time.
    One time, yeah.
    And then when we moved to Bad Aibling, then
    I think when we-- at Bad Aibling,
    we didn't visit him at all because that was too far.
    Yeah, we went by train, one time, from Prien to Regensburg,
    and visited him one time.
    Was this the last time you saw him?
    Yeah, that's the last time we saw him, yeah.
    And my mother was still in the hospital too.
    So we also went to visit her.
    But now when we were in Bad Aibling, she was Rosenheim.
    Every Sunday we went to see her by train.
    Was this after your father passed away?
    After the father passed away, yes.
    How did you find out about that?
    How what?
    How did you find out that your father had passed away?
    We got a phone call to the barracks that he passed away.
    So one of the house parents--
    well, I never did find out who it was.
    But somebody took us to Regensburg, to the funeral.
    That was my next question.
    So you were able to attend the funeral?
    Yeah, we attended the funeral, yes.
    I'm not sure what town it was.
    I think it was Regensburg.
    I have a handwritten death certificate
    from a doctor that got if from the Red Cross.
    And I think it's got a town on there.
    I think it's Regensburg-- doctor's name and signature.
    And were you given a cause of death why--
    No, no.
    And did you follow the casket to the graveyard?
    Yes.
    So did you see the place where he would be buried at that time?
    Yes and no.
    There were a lot of people there.
    And they carried him to the grave
    and put the casket in the grave.
    And of course I was beside myself.
    So was my brother and my mother.
    Was she there?
    She was there too, yes.
    They brought her in the wheelchair, yes.
    That's what makes me thinks she must
    have been in the same hospital at that time.
    But then, later on, she was in different hospitals.
    After father died, then she was in [? Weinstadt ?] Hospital.
    I think she was there in Regensburg when father died.
    And then she was in--
    Eichstadt did you say?
    No, [? Weinstadt. ?] And then they moved her to--
    not too far away from Bad Aibling.
    Rosenheim.
    Rosenheim.
    Moved her to Rosenheim.
    And Victor and I, we could go every Sunday
    by catching a train.
    We walked into town, catch a train, then go to Rosenheim,
    then walked up to the hospital.
    Still little boys on their own in post-war Germany.
    We had to do it.
    That's the only way we could have done anything
    at all-- on our own.
    Who-- you said there were a lot of people
    at your father's funeral.
    There were a lot of people from Weisenberg.
    And from the DP camp.
    DP camp, yeah, Weisenberg.
    So other Ukrainians who he had gotten to know and--
    Mm-hmm.
    What had happened to your uncle Ivan?
    Has he come into the picture again?
    Yes.
    He comes into the picture later on,
    after Red Cross, when they were looking for my father's grave.
    They located that he left Auschwitz.
    And he was in the German army.
    And then, when the war was over, he went back to Ukraine
    and got married, and got himself in trouble,
    and I don't know what else.
    But anyway, he died.
    So I never did get to see him.
    But I did get to see his family.
    Well, pictures.
    I got to see his family in pictures.
    His wife died by the time we located him.
    And his son and daughter married.
    We were sending, back and forth, letters and things like that.
    And we got to see their pictures.
    They sent us pictures.
    They were in Black Sea, in a boat.
    On vacation?
    Like vacation pictures?
    Well, that's where they lived.
    That's where they lived.
    I guess on vacation, yeah.
    But that's where they lived.
    Like they lived in Odessa or someplace?
    Well, it's right on the outskirts of Odessa, yeah.
    Not too far from there is that Russian submarine.
    Do you know what kind of trouble your uncle got himself into?
    [EXHALES SHARPLY] Drinking.
    Ah, so not political trouble.
    Not political, no, no, drinking.
    And he died something like in '86 or something like that.
    And of course Red Cross didn't locate him until 2009
    or '10 before Red Cross located him, whenever--
    So for well over 50 years, you didn't
    know what had happened to him.
    No.
    We were sure that he was killed.
    Like we were sure that same thing
    happened to our grandparents, that they
    were killed because of age.
    I see.
    But evidently he survived the war.
    And he made it, and he got married, he got in trouble,
    and then he died.
    Yeah.
    But there was nobody in your family
    who made it to the Western part of Europe, into the DP camps,
    aside from your two parents.
    And your father dies, and then your mother, who is sick,
    and the two of you.
    Yeah.
    He does not figure in there.
    Uncle Ivan.
    Is not in the picture.
    No.
    OK.
    Did you see any progress in your mother
    as you would go to visit her?
    Would she start getting better?
    Yeah, somewhat.
    Somewhat.
    We could see when she could walk.
    I think it was the left side that she was paralyzed.
    She could move her hand somewhat.
    No, the right side-- right side.
    Because she's right-handed.
    And she couldn't write your name.
    She could move her hand up and down.
    And she could walk with a big limp and things like that.
    And of course biggest increase in her problem
    was when she came over to America.
    That was the biggest increase.
    She had more problems when she came over to--
    Oh no, she didn't have problems.
    Biggest increase in her condition.
    Oh, I see.
    In betterment.
    Better, yeah.
    OK, improvement.
    Improvement, yeah.
    OK.
    We'll come to that.
    So she's in Rosenheim.
    And you are in Bad Aibling.
    Bad Aibling, yes.
    And do you know about how far the distance
    is between the two places.
    I would say about 20 miles, roughly, I would say.
    I don't know right off hand.
    I would say 20 miles.
    So let's talk about Bad Aibling now.
    OK.
    You're moved from Prien to Bad Aibling.
    And was that a different kind of situation,
    or was it also an orphanage?
    Orphanage, same as-- it's just a different place.
    And more room, more space, and a different kind
    of food because they had different cooks.
    They fed us, like, I don't know, five, six times a day
    they fed us.
    Wow.
    They tried to-- we were so skinny.
    I mean, you could count every rib on my chest.
    You could see the bones on my fingers.
    That's how skinny we were.
    And they're trying to fatten us up.
    Nighttime, before we go to bed, they
    give us a little glass of milk and a couple of cookies.
    That was the last thing that we had.
    That was one time.
    We had dinner.
    That was two times.
    The afternoon, middle of the day,
    we had a cookie or something to drink.
    That was four times.
    Lunchtime-- six times, five times.
    So six times a day they fed us.
    And that was good--
    good food.
    I was satisfied.
    Now, in that book that you have, that you
    read that was in a library or something--
    homeless, in that book, a lot of kids
    were not satisfied with the food.
    I was tickled to death with that food.
    I was satisfied.
    When you have nothing to eat, when you're starving,
    when you're eating out of a trash can,
    anything's better than eating out of a trash can.
    And that food was good that we had.
    I was happy.
    But some kids were not satisfied.
    Now, where they come from, I don't know.
    What they were doing there, I don't know.
    I can't answer that question.
    But I read that book.
    And I found out that some were not satisfied.
    And I was surprised.
    I was really surprised.
    Was there any schooling going on?
    Schooling, OK.
    Because you hadn't been to school at all.
    No, till now, we had not.
    But in Bad Aibling, in 1949, let's say--
    You're 12 years old.
    I was, yeah, 12 years old.
    And I still have not been to school.
    But they started English.
    Everybody had to take English for one hour a day.
    And then you get German, then you get a history,
    then you get arithmetic.
    And then, for the rest of the day, in the afternoon,
    usually you get like shop work.
    Ah, some sort of vocational training.
    Some kind of vocational school, yes.
    Now, I had shoe repair, shoe-making.
    I can make a pair of shoes in no time at all.
    Because--
    People needed food.
    We had good teachers.
    Yeah.
    And they needed to have something to wear.
    I had a good teacher.
    And they showed us how to do it.
    He had all the patterns.
    So size 9 and 1/2, size 10, size 11, 11 and 1/2.
    Could you still make a pair of shoes today?
    No, I don't think so.
    [CHUCKLES]
    I might be able to repair a pair of shoes, put a patch on a heel
    or someplace like that, or put a heel on, or half soles.
    I might be able to do that.
    Make a pair of shoes is a little bit more difficult.
    But yeah, he told us how to do it.
    And he was a German ex-Nazi.
    He showed us a lot of stuff.
    We learned a lot from him.
    How did he get to work there with you
    in this orphanage, somebody who was an ex-Nazi?
    Oh, him?
    Yeah.
    I don't know how he got there.
    But he was there every day.
    He might have stayed--
    How did you know he was a Nazi?
    He told us.
    He told you.
    Yeah, he told us.
    I mean, when you're sitting in a workshop watching somebody
    do something, or like him instructing something,
    you pay attention to what he's saying.
    And then you ask questions.
    And that's how we found out.
    And he was a right big character.
    I can tell you that right now.
    He was a character.
    But he was a good guy.
    He knew his business.
    And of course, over there, a pair of shoes,
    you might have it-- as long as the exterior is OK,
    you have your souls, your heels, repaired for a couple of dollars
    instead of buying a new pair of shoes.
    And it was-- all was well.
    But here in America, you just throw it out
    and get a new pair of shoes.
    Yeah.
    Well, shoes were important.
    Yes, shoes were important.
    If you don't wear the right shoes, you can ruin your feet.
    And I have been to doctors quite a few times
    because I did not wear a right pair of shoes.
    Now, during the time that was the hard time, when
    you were taken from your home to Auschwitz and so on,
    did you have a pair of shoes that you
    had had on when you were taken?
    I think I did.
    I'm not sure.
    I know I was cold in Auschwitz.
    I can tell you that right now.
    It was cold when the cold snap started coming in, in the fall.
    It started snowing in September and all that.
    I was cold, working outside, helping my father.
    I'm not sure what I had for shoes.
    I must have had something.
    I know in Prien I had a pair of shoes.
    I remember that.
    A pair of shoes were given to me.
    And they were my size.
    And same thing in Bad Aibling.
    They had a birthday party every month
    for somebody that has a birthday during that month.
    And in July, it was my birthday.
    Now, there were, I don't know, two or three other kids
    that had birthday in July, out of 200 kids, something
    like that.
    And I got a pair of shoes, tennis shoes.
    They were maybe two inches too big for me, something like that.
    But I was tickled to death with them shoes.
    I walked him shoes until they were completely worn out.
    I just put paper in the toe and they fit.
    It sounds like you weren't very fussy.
    No, I wasn't.
    I'm not hard to please.
    But if somebody is wasteful, wasting food or something
    like that, that bothers me.
    I mean, a lot of people, you go see in a restaurant,
    they order something, no, they just throw it out.
    I don't like it.
    It doesn't taste right or something like that.
    To me, if I get something, I go ahead and eat it
    whether I like it or not.
    If I got it, I eat it.
    Was there any talk at that time, when you were in Bad Aibling,
    about going back to the Ukraine, about returning back
    to where you had come from?
    No, not a word.
    Because we lost our father.
    Mother was in the hospital, ill.
    We didn't know what was going to happen with her.
    So nothing was said.
    I did find out, from the papers that we got from Red Cross,
    that our father, before he died, some of them
    papers that he filled out for police department
    before the war was over, he put on there, well,
    we want to migrate to Canada.
    "Winnypool--"
    Winnipeg.
    Winnipeg, Canada.
    That's where we want to go.
    Now, that was news to me.
    I never heard about that.
    He never said anything.
    Of course I guess he probably knew that it was just a dream.
    So that was never going to happen.
    I don't know whether he did or he didn't.
    Well, this brings me to another point.
    You have gotten your papers from the Red Cross.
    That is, you did a search through the Red Cross
    to get documents about your post-war years.
    And we found some of them through
    the international tracing service at the museum.
    And it seems they're the same documents.
    Now, in those documents, the place of your birth is given not
    as "Chirichenko--" how is it that your real town,
    what is it called, in Poltava region, where you're born.
    It's right there at the top of that paper there.
    OK, take a look.
    For some reason, I just can't remember how to pronounce it.
    [?
    Chyparivka . ?]
    [? Chyparivka, ?] all right.
    Not [?
    Chyparivka , ?] in the Poltava region,
    but a place called Stavok in the region of Lviv,
    in the Lviv region, Rivne and Lviv and so on.
    Why is that?
    OK, that was done--
    my father, he did that.
    Nazis, they we're looking for different people
    from certain areas.
    And that was an area that we were in.
    They were looking for those people.
    So my father, he just put on there that we
    from Poland instead of Ukraine.
    Nazis were looking for such people or Soviets
    were looking for such people?
    Nazis were looking for those people before the war was over.
    Before the war was over.
    Oh yeah, when he first filled out paperwork
    for police department.
    You know, once a month, he had to fill out the papers?
    Yeah.
    That's when he filled that out, that we were from Poland,
    we were not from Ukraine.
    And what was the advantage in doing that?
    So we wouldn't be in any trouble.
    Because of people that were from that particular area--
    In Ukraine.
    --in Ukraine, they were in trouble.
    And they would be in trouble.
    If they would have got a hold of us,
    they would have probably killed us.
    How interesting.
    See, I made an assumption that it was a post-war type of thing
    because of repatriation, that if you
    came from the Soviet part of Ukraine,
    there was more a greater chance that you would be repatriated
    to the Soviet part of Ukraine, whereas if you had said
    you came from the Polish part, what was Poland before the war,
    you might not be repatriated.
    That was my assumption.
    And you're saying that's not the case.
    Well, my father said it was not the case.
    [CHUCKLES]
    OK, so this is a pre-war thing.
    Yeah.
    But it stays on all of those documents from post-war time
    too.
    Post-war, yes.
    So he didn't change it.
    No, I didn't change it.
    It's changed now.
    Because it's changed from the time that we came to America.
    It's changed.
    But before that it's not changed, no.
    Because I didn't even know that there were so many different
    documents.
    I didn't know that he had to fill it out once a month.
    I didn't know that.
    I found that out.
    And then I started getting all these papers from Red Cross,
    and then I found out some more.
    And when did this start happening?
    When did you first start getting documents
    that you didn't even know the existence of?
    Well, when I asked the Red Cross to look into--
    see if I can find my father's grave.
    And that was in 2003, '04--
    either '03 or '04.
    So we're talking almost 60 years-- not
    quite 60 years after he dies.
    Like 57 years, something like that.
    That's when you start looking for your father's grave
    and you start getting documents.
    Mm-hmm.
    And that's when you see these different forms that he
    filled out and that were--
    OK.
    Yeah.
    I didn't know that something like that existed.
    But he had told you that--
    how did you know that--
    did he tell you when he was still alive
    that he was saying you were all from Poland because the Nazis
    were looking for people from the Soviet part of Ukraine?
    No, he didn't tell us that.
    So how did you know why this was--
    Our mother told us that.
    Ah, OK.
    Because he was already dead when she told us.
    Oh, I see.
    I see.
    OK, OK.
    OK.
    OK, back to Bad Aibling.
    Who was running Bad Aibling?
    It was Americans, United Nations, Australians,
    different countries that were involved.
    Were the Quakers involved?
    Different countries.
    Yeah, Italy was involved, France was involved.
    They were like about five different countries that
    were involved, and different organizations
    were involved in running Bad Aibling.
    Because they had inspections.
    Once a week they had inspections.
    They come around.
    They start asking questions.
    They might be there for breakfast or lunch,
    or dinner they might be there.
    Start asking questions about the food--
    how do you like it, what do you need, and things like that.
    And was Bad Aibling also in a-- were you in a hotel
    like you had been in Prien?
    No.
    No, Bad Aibling was a military installation.
    German army air force.
    So it was the old military installation
    of the German air force.
    Mm-hmm.
    OK.
    And so you lived in those barracks?
    Yes.
    OK.
    We were the first ones there, in 1948, till '51.
    You were there three years.
    And about--
    Might have been four years.
    I'm not sure now.
    Might have been from '47.
    Might have been '47.
    I'm not sure.
    That's a good chunk of time.
    Oh yeah, yeah, definitely.
    And we were well taken care of-- well taken care of, with food,
    clothing, everything we need, education.
    In '49.
    '49-- that's when it started--
    '50, and '51, for three years.
    And I mean, did you have any adults there
    who actually took a personal interest in you as children?
    Well, yes.
    House parents, they're supposed to take personal interest.
    And they did.
    Natalie-- Mr. And Mrs. Kent is what I call them.
    I have pictures of them over here.
    I'll show them to you.
    They took special interest in Victor and I.
    And they wanted to adopt this.
    But they couldn't adopt us because we still
    had a mother that was alive.
    And she was getting better.
    Did you want to be adopted?
    At that time, I didn't know anything.
    I didn't know anything about the adoption
    until 1998 either '98 or '99.
    That's when I found out about it.
    Diana and I, we went to see Natalie, Mrs. Kent.
    Mrs. Natalie Kent?
    We went to see her.
    And Diana is your wife?
    In Maine.
    In Maine.
    In what year?
    1998 or '99.
    I'm not sure.
    One of them two years.
    OK, so she had been your house parent.
    After I retired.
    I retired in '98.
    And we had a motor home.
    We packed up the motor home.
    And we went to see her.
    And we stayed with her for a week,
    10 days, something like that.
    And that's when she asked me if I knew.
    I didn't.
    That was the first time I heard of it.
    But to answer your question, if I didn't have a mother,
    yes, I would have gone with her.
    Because she was nice to us.
    She was really nice to us.
    Her and the caseworkers, they were
    supposed to take extra-special interest in you.
    And Joan Atkins, she did.
    And I'll show you a picture of her.
    I think she was then, early '50s or late '40s, she was just
    straight out of school.
    And she came over to help us out.
    So in the 1940s and '50s, she was just a young woman who had
    finished school.
    Very young, yeah.
    Same thing with Natalie.
    I mean, Mr. and Mrs. Kent, they just got married.
    And they were over there, helping us out.
    They were young.
    Were they Quakers?
    They were Quakers, yes.
    So was there Quaker involvement in running the place?
    Oh yeah, oh yeah.
    Yeah, there were a lot of Quakers there.
    In fact, Mr. and Mrs. Kent were Quakers.
    I'm not positive, but I think that Joan Atkins was Quaker.
    We had some house parents that were Quakers.
    There were quite a few Quakers there, quite a few.
    And they took extra care of us.
    Like for example, Joan Atkins, she
    had a place that she bought in the mountains.
    One year, in I don't know, '51--
    no, couldn't have been '51--
    had to have been '49 or '50, we had like two feet
    of snow on the ground.
    And it was great for skiing, especially at her lodge which
    she had up in the mountains.
    So she took Nicky, his brother, me
    and my brother, the four of us, and I don't know,
    and somebody else.
    I think there was somebody else there.
    Oh, I think she took--
    well, I'm not sure now who it was.
    But anyway there was somebody else.
    And took us up to [INAUDIBLE] that place up in the mountains,
    and let us ski the whole afternoon.
    That must have been a treat.
    Up and down the hill.
    In Germany-- well, not now, but then--
    when you ski, you enjoy going down the hill.
    Now, you think about good exercise going up a hill.
    Oh my goodness.
    [CHUCKLES]
    I was thinking, boy, you were tired out
    by the end of that day.
    Yes, we were.
    But we were kids.
    We didn't mind it.
    Yeah, of course not.
    We didn't mind it at all.
    We enjoyed it.
    And we were very grateful for it.
    And yeah, what else can you say for somebody
    that does that for you?
    They really care.
    And they did that for us.
    How many kids were there in Bad Aibling?
    Any given time, there were at least between 250 to 300 kids,
    any given time.
    But at some timers there were as many as 500.
    Wow.
    And you were there from the very beginning.
    We were there from the time that-- we opened the place up.
    There was a stream running through the middle
    of the military installation.
    One half of it was for orphanage,
    the other half was for families, a DP camp for families.
    And I don't know what nationality, maybe
    any nationality.
    I'm not sure.
    Just like orphanage, it was for any nationality at all.
    As long as you're under 18 years of age,
    you qualify to be in there.
    And we had some Czechoslovakian kids that came across the border
    to Bad Aibling to be in the camp because they
    were under 18 years of age.
    And they needed help to get started.
    So they came across the border.
    So was Bad Aibling close to the Czechoslovak border?
    Yeah, right across the border there it was Czechoslovakia.
    So it was Bavaria, probably, to Czechoslovakia.
    Right, right.
    And your mother was slowly getting better.
    She was slowly getting better, yes.
    And she finally-- well, she got better when--
    we talked to her by telephone right after Queen of England.
    That year, 1951, they finally agreed-- the doctors--
    that they were going to release her to come to America.
    And a year or so after that she was here in America.
    She came to Philadelphia, a Philadelphia nursing home.
    Then, from there, she went to New Windsor.
    She stayed in New Windsor for a while.
    Connecticut, yeah.
    No, Maryland.
    Maryland.
    Carroll County, just outside of Westminster.
    And from there, then everything was OK then.
    She was getting better.
    And she came here.
    So we were--
    Did you ever live with her again?
    No, we never lived with her again.
    Victor, he worked on a farm.
    We're talking about the United States now.
    Yes, on a farm, yeah.
    OK, so I'll get back, still, to Bad Aibling.
    What was the language that you spoke with one
    another, the kids?
    German.
    Or if they had just arrived, they
    didn't know enough German to speak,
    then we spoke their own language.
    And like I said, I could speak seven different languages
    when I came over here.
    I learned that from the kids, speaking to the kids.
    So what were the seven?
    Tell me.
    OK, Ukrainian, Russian, Poland--
    "jak sie masz" and so on, you know--
    Czechoslovakian--
    German.
    Well, German, yes, Yugoslavian, and Bulgarian.
    There you have it.
    But they're so close together.
    You know, they're similar.
    Aside from German, they're--
    No, German is little different.
    German is a little different.
    But they're all Slavic.
    Yeah, Slavic, that's the ones I'm talking about.
    So close together.
    You know, it's just--
    Did you make best friends there?
    Did you have any close friends?
    Yes, I made all kinds of friends with--
    I'll show you the pictures.
    Boy Scouts-- we had a Boy Scout group.
    And we made a lot of friends.
    We went camping almost every weekend or every other weekend
    up in the Alps.
    And we went there without taking a bite of food with us.
    And we survived.
    We learned how to fish.
    And we learned how to fix the fish.
    We learned how to do everything for us, ourselves,
    so that we can survive.
    And that's what w did.
    Well, it sounds like it was a relief after all that
    you had been through.
    Oh, definitely, a big relief, big relief.
    And if I asked before that awful question,
    were there children in Auschwitz could play?
    And you said, no, there weren't.
    They didn't.
    They were too upset and too scared.
    They were.
    Then, at this point, it looks like you could relax.
    And even though some of the children truly were orphans,
    you could play.
    You could have fun.
    It was different, yes.
    Bad Aibling was entirely different than Auschwitz.
    [CHUCKLES]
    Auschwitz, you knew what Auschwitz stood for.
    And of course I didn't because I was just a dumb farmer just
    came there.
    You were a little boy.
    Yeah, I didn't know that.
    But I learned that Auschwitz is nothing to mess with.
    Although Auschwitz was one place.
    And there was another place that we were--
    no, I don't know whether that was a death camp or not.
    There was one place that we stopped in,
    going by train from Auschwitz to Nuremberg, we stopped by--
    Buchenwald?
    No, it starts with a D.
    Dachau?
    Yeah, I think that's what it was.
    Outside of Munich?
    Yeah, Dachau.
    OK, that's it.
    We stopped there.
    But we didn't stay.
    We couldn't get off of the train.
    They told us to stay on a train.
    And they did something there and changed something.
    And then we went on to Nuremberg from there.
    OK.
    So you learned these different languages from the different--
    from the kids from these countries.
    You were there from the beginning till at least 1951.
    What happened?
    Why is it that you didn't stay?
    Were they closing the place?
    They were closing the place, yes.
    I have pictures right there, the closing ceremonies.
    And they had parties with all the Quakers
    and the house parents that--
    parties.
    Did most of the kids--
    were most of them really orphans?
    As far as I know, yes, but I can't say for sure.
    They didn't have no parents.
    The ones that I know, Nicky and Alex, the two brothers that they
    thought they were Ukrainians, and then they found out
    that they were Russians, they definitely are--
    Orphans.
    --orphans.
    And they were adopted.
    When they came to America, they were adopted.
    And let's see, who else?
    Mitka-- oh with Mitka, that's different story with Mitka.
    He is a fella that's living in Reno, Nevada.
    And he's got a huge family.
    I have pictures of him.
    When he goes on vacation, he has to have a--
    I think it's a 40-foot motorhome or something like that to go
    on vacation with his family because it's so big.
    And also I don't know what happened with him,
    but Natalie, the house mother that we had,
    she told me to watch out for him because he doesn't always
    tell the truth.
    [CHUCKLES]
    So I don't know.
    I socialized with Mitka when he was in Bad Aibling.
    And I know that he was different from anybody else.
    He spoke differently, he acted differently.
    But I did know that there was something wrong with him.
    And he also ran away from Bad Aibling.
    And they picked him up someplace in Rosenheim
    or someplace they picked him up.
    Then they kept him in the hospital
    for three or four days, trying to find out if there's
    something wrong with him.
    And I never did find out whether there is or isn't.
    And he tells a story that, well--
    Well, if you don't think that it may be true, then let's not--
    I don't know.
    I don't know, so I'm not going to say.
    OK, so yeah, from this, I get a sense that, yes,
    you did have friends there.
    Oh yeah.
    And that they were real orphans.
    Yes.
    Your situation might have been one
    that was a little bit more unusual that you
    had your mother still around.
    And when they closed the camp, what
    was going to happen with you and your brother?
    Where were you going to go?
    Had that already been arranged?
    Well, that was arranged to come to America.
    Through what organization?
    United Nations.
    UNRA?
    UNRA.
    As far as I know, that's what was arranged.
    But they didn't ask us any questions.
    But they told us, you're going to America-- fine.
    What's going to happen to mother?
    Well, she's going stay behind.
    She's signed the papers to release us to come by ourselves.
    And if she gets better, than she was going to come later.
    That's the way it was arranged.
    And she did get better.
    And she came later.
    And then she had that accident where she burned herself.
    When was this?
    In 1963.
    And what happened to her?
    She was working, helping somebody
    do some cooking on the outside grill or something.
    And she had them long clothes on.
    And I don't know, they had a fire going.
    And her skirt caught on fire.
    And of course, with her being handicapped--
    It was hard for her to put it out.
    Yeah.
    She burned herself.
    She was something like 70% burnt, through the whole body.
    And they took her to the Lancaster Hospital.
    And she lived for almost a week, 10 days, something like that.
    And then she died.
    So you lost her when you were a young man.
    Yeah.
    I remember that was September 1963.
    Sounds like she had a hard life.
    Well, take the good with the bad, I guess.
    So what else are you going to do?
    Yeah.
    So when you were told that you were
    coming to the United States, did you know where you were going?
    No.
    So tell me, what was it like coming over?
    How did you get over here?
    OK, when we left there were 13 of us.
    I have the names over there and all.
    And I have a copy of that C. C. Ballou, the ship that--
    C. C. Ballou, mm-hmm.
    --that brought us over here, and the write-up.
    But it's all in German.
    Once everybody was OKed to come over here,
    caseworkers took us all to train station in Munich,
    put us on the train, and told the conductor, these 13 kids,
    they don't get off until they get to Bremerhaven.
    That's all the way across Germany.
    That's right.
    So we stayed on the train all day
    long until we got to Bremerhaven.
    Bremerhaven, we get off.
    And they took us to a barracks.
    Somebody was there looking for us.
    And once we got there, they took us to a barracks.
    And we waited, I think, another week or so.
    And then they put us on a boat.
    And the boat, one week, seven days, from Bremerhaven
    to New York City.
    And in New York City, we came one afternoon, late afternoon.
    And we just couldn't believe--
    we were close to New York City.
    And we just couldn't believe how dirty it was.
    Paper flying all over the place.
    It was windy.
    We left Germany.
    It's so nice and clean.
    And New York City is just like a dump.
    Well, anyway, we stayed--
    I have the address over there--
    at a Jewish settlement in New York City.
    And we stayed there for two weeks.
    And they treated us great, gave us a quarter
    a week for helping them wash the dishes and things like that.
    And I think it took us like $0.10 to go to a movie
    and a nickel to buy a candy bar or something like that.
    It was OK, nice.
    And we stayed there until Family and Children's Society
    showed up.
    And they took my brother and me to Grand Central Station.
    And we came to Baltimore.
    And then they put us on a farm with Mr. and Mrs. Cole
    in Parkton.
    And everything was fine.
    I helped Mr. Cole as much as I could with whatever I could.
    We stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Cole.
    She was a schoolteacher and he was a farmer.
    And then, next thing you know, a couple weeks later, he dies.
    Oh.
    I don't know why.
    No reason at all that I know of.
    But he died.
    And Family and Children's Society
    says, well, you can't stay with two women
    then, because her daughter was living with her.
    So they found us another place in Woodbine, Carroll County.
    So but while we stayed with Mrs. Cole,
    I went to school in Baltimore City,
    Vocational School 298, on North Avenue and Broadway.
    I'll remember that as long as I live because that
    was a vocational school.
    And this is what I needed, what I wanted.
    And that was nice.
    And then they find us a place in Woodbine with Mr and Mrs. Crumb,
    on a farm.
    And he has a dairy farm, a huge dairy farm, 250 acres
    or something like that.
    Oh, that was great.
    We went there right away and started working.
    And then--
    Were you taken as foster children there?
    Yes.
    Was that the idea?
    You're foster children.
    Yes, yes.
    OK.
    Well, Family and Children's Society,
    that's the only way you can go.
    And they took care of us.
    He had dairy cows.
    We got up-- at least I got up 3 o'clock every morning.
    Go back down to the barn.
    Fed the cows.
    And then he would show up by 6 o'clock.
    And Victor would show up by 6 o'clock.
    And we milked the cows.
    I forget now.
    It was 70 cows or something like that.
    They had to be milked.
    Same way as in the Ukraine?
    No, no, no, no, no.
    Ukraine, did it by hand.
    Yeah?
    Here, you had milkers.
    He had Surge Milkers.
    Put the milkers--
    OK, let's cut.
    Yeah, wait till she gets the phone.
    So this was a different way of doing it.
    This was mechanized.
    Oh yeah.
    He had Allis-Chalmers tractors.
    And I worked quite a few nights, late,
    plowing a field with two-bottom plows or three-bottom
    plows, whatever he had there, Allis-Chalmers WD tractor.
    And what else was it?
    Oh, and I was going to school at that time, in Mt Airy.
    He also-- Mr. Crumb had a son that was--
    let's see, I was 16 at that time.
    He had a son that was, I think, 10 or 12.
    I'm not sure.
    Younger than Victor.
    Anyway, but he was a little bit on the lazy side, so to speak.
    The son.
    His son.
    He wasn't too encouraged about working or anything like that.
    He wanted somebody else to do the work.
    So that's fine.
    We did the work for him.
    And then Victor was hurt one time.
    Victor went to get the cows and water the cows and a calf.
    And he got a little friendly with the calf--
    And the mother didn't like it.
    And the mother didn't like it.
    You got that right.
    And ran him down.
    And he fell over.
    And the cows, they take out the horns
    so that they couldn't hurt you.
    But she just knocked him down and then ran across him.
    And hind leg--
    I don't know, the hind leg, one of the legs,
    got him someplace here on the muscle.
    And it was nasty-looking.
    And they had to take him to the doctors or the hospital
    and make sure it's cleaned out, didn't get infected.
    But within a couple days he was OK.
    And we stayed there-- at least I stayed there--
    for maybe a year or so.
    And then Family and Children's Society came to him,
    wanted him to pay me more money.
    And he was--
    I don't know, I was satisfied but they were not satisfied.
    They wanted me to do a little bit more for my mother.
    She was ill.
    And he said, no, he's not going to pay any more.
    Because I was still just a young kid, 16 years old.
    So he said if I was a little bit older then
    it would have been OK--
    and get my driver's license.
    I didn't have a driver's license.
    Well, you see, we talk about-- one
    of the reasons I asked, you went there as foster children,
    to me it sounds like you went as unpaid workers, or more
    as workers than as children to be taken care of.
    Well, I thought the same thing.
    You know, they say one thing, but they do something different.
    So I don't know.
    One way or the other, I don't know.
    I was just, whatever they told me to do, I did it.
    But they wanted him to pay me more money so I
    could take care of my mother.
    And I was satisfied.
    I didn't say a word.
    So they said, OK, we're going to find you another place.
    Well, they probably saw you were being taken advantage of.
    Yeah, well, maybe so.
    I don't know.
    But they found another place with CP [? Hackman ?]
    in Parkton.
    He had a farm, had black Angus beef cattle.
    And he also delivered Eastern States feed.
    And of course he needed somebody with a driver's license.
    And I didn't have a driver's license.
    And he said, well, you're going to have a driver's license.
    OK.
    So he got me a driver's license.
    He put a ton of feed on the back of a pickup truck,
    and said, come on, let's go.
    I said, where are we going?
    He said, to get your driver's license.
    He took me to Westminster with a ton of feed
    on the back of a pickup truck.
    He said, you're going to get your driver's license.
    I said OK.
    So yeah, I got my driver's license.
    I filled out everything that I had to fill out,
    and took it out on a road, went around the block, parked it.
    OK.
    I said, did I pass?
    Yeah, you passed.
    So then I delivered feed for him.
    He had a--
    I forgot now what it was--
    100 tons of feed come from St. Louis, Missouri
    to Parkton, Maryland, in a freight car.
    And he had to unload it.
    Was Victor with you too?
    No, no.
    Victor stayed behind.
    And then Victor, from Crumbs, he went to Pennsylvania
    and lived with our mother in Pennsylvania for a while.
    Yeah, he lived for a while in Pennsylvania.
    And--
    Can we cut for a second?
    Do you want to take a break?
    So we were talking about your brother
    went to stay with your mother a little bit in Pennsylvania.
    Yes.
    Do you know about how long he stayed with her?
    Well, he stayed with her until she died.
    But--
    I see.
    --also he went to school.
    And he worked on a farm, same farm where she worked on.
    She helped carry the milk.
    Dumped out of the milker into a bucket.
    And she carried bucket of milk into the dairy room.
    And in the dairy room, she put it through a strainer and so on.
    And Victor did the milking.
    And they both stayed there for a good while, maybe
    a couple of years, until Victor finished school.
    And then Victor, he got married.
    And your mom stayed in the same place?
    Yeah, she stayed in the same place.
    And then Mom, she found somebody else
    that needed a cleaning lady.
    And she could clean.
    So she went for an interview.
    And she got the job.
    So she moved over to this one couple
    that needed a cleaning lady.
    And she worked over there until she had the accident.
    Yeah, until she had an accident in '63--
    yeah, in 1963.
    But you say she was disabled too.
    Yeah, she was disabled.
    She was walking with a limp.
    She didn't have full strength in her right hand.
    She could hold a paper in her right hand or something
    like that, or hold a pencil.
    But she could not sign her name with her right hand.
    OK.
    So it was not such a disability that she
    couldn't do some manual labor.
    Because clearly, carrying those milk cans, you were doing that.
    She used her left hand.
    And then she used her right hand to get the bottle
    and dump the bucket.
    I see.
    But it was not easy for her.
    No, I'm sure it wasn't.
    I'm sure it wasn't.
    But that was about an hour a day, something like that.
    An hour in the morning, an hour in the afternoon,
    two hours a day.
    Oh, that's not a lot.
    That's not-- no, that's not a lot.
    That's about what she spent.
    She might've spent a little bit more time there
    by washing the milkers and things like that.
    Now, here's a question that may be a little bit
    unfair but I'll ask it anyway--
    I mean, unfair to your mom.
    Did you feel, after she fainted in the choir, back in Germany,
    and then got paralyzed, and then was sick,
    did you ever really have a mom again?
    Was she your mom in that sense of--
    No, in a sense of speaking, no, she wasn't.
    But technically speaking, yes, she was my mom.
    But as someone who looks out for you, someone who you can go to--
    No, she didn't do that part.
    That part right there, actually, she lost that.
    She didn't do that at all.
    So I just had to overlook that and forget about that.
    I didn't know whether that's going to be for forever or what.
    But by the time she got over it, by the time
    she came over here to America, I was already married
    and I was of age.
    And I was doing OK.
    I really didn't need her help.
    But I needed to help her.
    So that's the way I was looking at it.
    So when your brother then goes to Pennsylvania,
    you're still working for this guy who
    got you that driver's license.
    Yeah.
    How long did you work for him?
    Oh, from 1954 to--
    two years, I guess, 2 and 1/2 years.
    OK.
    So by that point, you're 19 years old.
    Yes, yes.
    What happens when you're 19, when you stop working for him?
    I signed up for the military.
    I went in the army.
    I wanted to go to the Rangers, but the Rangers
    were filled up at that time.
    They didn't have enough to start another class.
    So they told me to wait a while.
    So I waited a while.
    But that time never came.
    So I just said, OK, I'm just going
    to go ahead and sign up for whatever you have available.
    Because, since I was signing up, I
    had my choice of whatever I wanted to.
    Now, if I would have got drafted,
    that would have been a different situation.
    But at that time they were still doing a draft.
    That was 1956.
    So what did you choose?
    So I just chose, well, what whatever
    was going to be available.
    And what they had available was automotive.
    I said, fine.
    So they put me through the school, automotive school.
    I had the certification.
    I had the degrees.
    I could take care of cars running at that time, in 1956,
    up to '59.
    But when I got discharged and I tried
    to find a job, where we were living, there was nothing there.
    Were you married by that point?
    Yeah, we got married, yeah.
    So the only place I could go was in Baltimore, taxi cab company.
    But if I go to Baltimore, that would take me
    two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon
    to get back home again.
    So I would spend four hours a day driving on the road.
    Because in those days, 83 was not open yet.
    And where were you living?
    We were living in Parkton, on Mount Carmel Road.
    And we had to use 111 from Baltimore
    all the way up to Hereford.
    Had to use 111.
    And that took time.
    So the neighbor to where we used to live,
    he was at our wedding, Corky Bailey.
    And he said to me at the reception,
    if you can't find a job, I have a job for you.
    And I said, what's that?
    He said, working at Black & Decker.
    Well, I knew what it was.
    And I said to myself, when I was working at [? Eickmann's, ?]
    before I went in the service, I will never work in a factory.
    I just didn't think I would like to work in a factory.
    OK, so 1956, I went in the army.
    And then I got discharged in '59.
    And Corky came to me and told me that he had a job for me.
    I said, OK.
    So he took me in one afternoon and signed me up.
    And I was to report for work that night, third shift.
    So I said, OK.
    But see, I already had the training
    while I was in Baltimore--
    vocational school, I had the training.
    And I had the training when I was in Mt Airy school,
    on sheet metal working, and power tools,
    and use of instruments, things like that.
    I had the training on
    Them.
    So while I was at Black & Decker, they checked me out.
    And yeah, they were satisfied with the way
    I was doing the job.
    I could read the blueprints.
    And so they promoted me to a planner.
    The planner that they head, he took another job or something.
    I don't know.
    And so they promoted me to a planner.
    We had to move, then, from Towson to Hampstead.
    So we moved from Towson to Hampstead.
    And started everything fresh in Hampstead.
    And they give me a stack of blueprints.
    And my job was to make up a operation cards,
    how to get that part done, how much it would cost
    to get the part done, and so on, like for military
    or for private contractor that wants some parts.
    So you needed estimates and specifications.
    Right.
    That's what it amounted.
    So OK, so I learned how to do that in no time at all
    because I was already trained for that, some of it.
    So that's what I was doing for Black & Decker.
    But I still had a mind about automotive job.
    But then we moved to Hampstead from Towson.
    And we started in Hampstead in 1970.
    OK, 1970, from there, all right, so first of all,
    they had openings in [? Tarboro, ?] [? Maryland. ?]
    And I turned them down in [? Tarboro. ?] Because Diana
    didn't want to leave her family.
    And I don't blame her.
    So I turned that job down.
    So they offered me a job in Easton.
    Well, that was close enough-- two hours away--
    so I accepted that job.
    Then I had that job, then, from 1975 until 1998.
    So you had your career at Black & Decker.
    Yes, I had my career with Black & Decker, not that I wanted to,
    but that's what I did anyway.
    I had a career with Black & Decker for almost 20 years.
    And I wanted to get 40 years in.
    But I couldn't.
    I had to leave.
    They were moving.
    They were moving to Mexico, and I didn't know that.
    Were you happy during the time you worked, Though was it
    satisfying work?
    Oh, yeah, it was.
    It was OK.
    It was fine work.
    I didn't have no problems.
    OK.
    We've come full circle.
    And my last questions have to do with going--
    with Europe again.
    Did you ever, before you retired,
    go back to Europe to visit the places you had been in?
    Yes, I have.
    Mm-hmm.
    What years were these?
    Well, first off, we went back with a church group.
    A Lutheran minister took us.
    It was 1998.
    So just about when you finished Black & Decker.
    When I finished with Black & Decker, yes, when I retired.
    The minister, he needed a couple more to fill in his roster.
    So we signed up.
    And he took us to Germany, France, Europe.
    Were these any of the places you had lived in?
    Yes.
    When he found out that I was in an orphanage in Bad Aibling,
    he got the bus driver to go through Bad Aibling.
    But I didn't see anything in Bad Aibling when
    they took us through there.
    So he circled around.
    He went back to Austria.
    We went to Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
    We went there and a couple other places.
    Oh, in Austria, we also find out-- we learned something
    that we didn't know.
    In Austria, when they bury somebody,
    they bury them standing up.
    Did you know that?
    I knew that that happened in some countries.
    Yeah, that's Austria.
    And we didn't know that.
    You know, usually they lay somebody down.
    But in Austria you're standing up.
    That's how they bury you.
    And I've heard from other people I've
    interviewed that sometimes those plots are not
    forever in Austria, that they can be
    resold because there's no land.
    Ah, oh, well, that could be.
    I don't know.
    But then, after that, in 2003, we
    went back to Germany, Bad Aibling.
    And we stayed in Bad Aibling for a week.
    And that's yourself and your wife.
    Right, yeah.
    We were looking for my father's grave.
    Were you able at least to identify
    the cemetery he was buried in?
    No, I didn't go there.
    We made a phone call to Regensburg.
    He died at Regensburg Hospital.
    Made a phone call.
    And they said, no, he is not buried here.
    So that was the end of that.
    Do you know the date of his death?
    Yes, I have a date, yeah.
    I have a birth certificate the day he died.
    The death certificate, yeah.
    Yeah.
    It's a handwritten death certificate.
    Yeah.
    Did you ever go back to the Ukraine?
    No, never went back to Ukraine.
    I did not go back to Ukraine.
    Because when I was in the service, training that I had,
    my commanding officer told me, if I ever go back to Ukraine,
    they're going to--
    I don't know.
    Let's see, how did he say?
    "The Soviets are going to get you" or something like that.
    And I don't know, he sort of scared me.
    Then he said to me, if you ever go back,
    make sure that we know about it.
    So my brother, he went, I don't know,
    three or four times I think he went back.
    Three times anyway.
    And he asked me if I wanted to go.
    And a couple of times I couldn't go because of my heart.
    Doctor told me I couldn't travel to Ukraine.
    Because if anything happens, I didn't have insurance.
    But you told me, I believe, either off camera--
    it might have even been on--
    that your brother never found your village.
    Is that right?
    Yeah, he found the village.
    But there's nothing there.
    I have pictures right there, to show you,
    of the church in the village.
    It says [? Chyparivka ?] 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you know, the view.
    Right.
    OK, [?
    Chyparivka . ?] But there's nothing there except the church
    and the cemetery.
    There's a church and cemetery.
    That's the only thing that's there.
    And right next to it, I don't know, a couple miles away,
    there is a small village there.
    The name's on the back of the picture.
    And he looked at that picture.
    That's what I wanted to show you--
    the roofs and the houses, how they were made.
    Because what we lived in was exactly the same
    as what this is.
    Stucco-- it was made out of stucco.
    And the roof is a straw roof.
    OK.
    Well, that's what we'll do right now.
    And Mr Bojko, thank you very, very much
    for sharing your story with us today,
    for taking us through the tough times, the hard times,
    and sharing with us the things that
    brought you contentment and joy, and making
    this available for people who had
    no idea that these kinds of experiences happened.
    You are welcome.
    With this, I will say this concludes the United States
    Holocaust Memorial Museum interview with Mr. Paul
    Bojko on August 24, 2017, in Trappe, Maryland.
    And now we will film some photos.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    OK, so I'm rolling.
    OK, Mr. Bojko, tell me, what is this photograph of?
    This photograph is of my family--
    my dad, mom, Victor, and me.
    And you're holding something.
    A ball?
    Are you holding a ball there?
    Victor is holding a ball.
    I'm holding an accordion.
    Oh, but I thought you were the older brother
    and he's the younger brother.
    He is.
    He looks taller than you.
    No, it's just the way he's standing.
    Oh, I see.
    OK, sorry.
    That's right.
    That's right.
    Now I see you are the older one.
    And about what year was this taken?
    1943.
    Do you remember when it was taken?
    Not really, no.
    Not really.
    OK.
    And you parents look quite young.
    Yes, they were right young.
    I don't know exactly what age they were,
    but they were right young.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    Then you can pan to the other side after we start talking.
    OK.
    OK, can you tell me, Mr Bojko, what is this a photograph of?
    This is a photograph of a wagon with straw or hay on it,
    and a house next to it with a straw roof--
    stucco house with a straw roof.
    And that was like your house?
    Yes, exactly like our house, yes.
    And about when was this photograph taken, do you think?
    This was taken 1943.
    Excuse me.
    It couldn't have been '43.
    This is when your brother went back.
    Oh, that's right.
    That's right.
    I don't have my glasses.
    I can't see.
    We're going to-- let's cut.
    We'll do this [INAUDIBLE].
    OK, oh, excuse me.
    Pardon me.
    We've cut.
    OK.
    OK, Mr. Bojko, tell me, what is this photograph of?
    This photograph is of Maria's house in [?
    Chyparivka . ?]
    Except that it doesn't exist anymore, [?
    Chyparivka . ?]
    No, it doesn't exist anymore.
    But that's on the property where it used to be.
    And the house is made just like the house that we used to have,
    with stucco around it and a straw roof.
    The roof is made out of straw.
    OK, I'm a little confused.
    Because is this house built on the same spot where
    your parent's house used to be?
    Well, I don't know exactly it's the same spot.
    It's approximately this same location, yes.
    OK.
    And who is Maria?
    Maria, I'm not sure.
    My brother tells me that Maria is my mother's sister.
    But the age does not work out.
    So I'm not sure.
    OK.
    And did he meet her during one of his trips back.
    Yes.
    And about what year would this have been, this picture?
    2005 approximately.
    OK.
    All right.
    Thank you.
    OK, Mr. Bojko, tell me, what is this photograph of?
    This photograph is of a graveyard
    where our great-grandparents are buried.
    And it's in [?
    Chyparivka , ?] approximately the same place where our farm
    used to be.
    OK.
    And you've mentioned that there is a church there.
    Yes, there is a church there.
    But--
    It looks like nothing else.
    Well, I don't see anything else.
    Yeah, OK.
    And your brother took this picture?
    Yes.
    In 2005?
    2005, yes.
    OK.
    Let's stop there.
    Thank you.
    And upwards for the cross later.
    OK.
    Got it.
    OK, rolling.
    And tell me, what is this photograph of?
    This photograph is of our great-grandfather's grave
    in Portachenko.
    And that's my brother that's kneeling down there.
    So that's Victor on the left?
    That's Victor on the left, yes.
    And your great-grandfather was Mr. Potapenko?
    Well, that's what it says.
    I'm not sure.
    [CHUCKLES]
    OK.
    And this was, again, about 2005.
    Yes, that's when the picture was taken, approximately 2005.
    Thank you.
    Thank you.
    And Mr. Bojko, this is obviously your brother again,
    brother Victor.
    And whose grave is this?
    This is the grave of my great-grandmother--
    supposed to be of her grave--
    in [? Chyparivka. ?]
    And this would have been your mother's side.
    Yes.
    OK.
    All right, thank you.
    OK, Mr. Bojko, then tell me, what is this photograph of?
    And when was it taken?
    This photograph was taken right after the war, 1945.
    And it's my family--
    father, mother, Victor, and me.
    Are you in between your parents, or are you
    at the side of your father?
    I'm on the side of my father.
    OK.
    And everybody looks quite-- can we cut for a second?
    Everybody looks very young in this photograph still.
    Your mother looks very young.
    You look-- yes, you're about 8 years old,
    aren't you, something like that?
    And your father looks still quite young.
    And this is after all the difficulties.
    6-- yeah, that's when it was taken, right after the war.
    That's what my brother told me.
    I don't know.
    Isn't that what he said, Diana?
    I don't know about that picture.
    I'm not sure then.
    I'm not sure.
    You'll have to look at your size.
    OK.
    And you told me, off camera, that your father had bought you
    new uniforms or new suits or something for this picture?
    Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
    Yeah, he got the--
    well, I'll call them the outfits.
    Outfits.
    Outfits, yeah.
    It's the shorts, as you can see, and suspenders.
    OK.
    Do you remember when this picture was taken?
    No, I don't.
    No, not really.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    Can you tell me what is this photograph of?
    This photograph is of some of the people in DP camp
    in Weisenberg, right after the war,
    probably of about '46 or '47, something like that.
    And this Would have been the Ukrainian DP camp.
    Yeah, the Ukrainian DP camp.
    That's correct.
    And you said, earlier, your father is standing in the back.
    Yes, he's right there in the back by the pine tree.
    So his head is sort of at the base of the pine tree.
    Yes, yeah.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    Mr. Bojko, and who is this picture of?
    That picture is of me.
    It was taken probably about 1949, in my room in my barracks.
    In Bad Aibling?
    In Bad Aibling, yes, in Bad Aibling.
    All right.
    Thank you.
    OK, Mr. Bojko.
    And who is this in the photograph?
    That picture is taken in Bad Aibling, by the mess hall,
    of my brother and I, by the stone wall,
    with our friend dog in front of us.
    What was the dog's name?
    Do you remember?
    No, I don't know.
    We had quite a few different dogs come around.
    They were just stray dogs--
    come around.
    We'd give them something to eat.
    Do you know who took the picture?
    I think the picture was taken by our caseworker.
    Well, she's no longer with us today.
    Diana, what was her name?
    Joan.
    Joan Metcalf.
    Just like that.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    OK, Mr. Bojko, then this looks like some sort
    of document for you.
    Can you tell me what it is.
    It's my ID card--
    fingerprints and my picture on there.
    OK.
    And your date of birth.
    Yeah, date of birth, and the whole works is on there.
    So tell me, when was the first time
    you saw this identity card after, you
    know, leaving Bad Aibling?
    Well, I probably saw that--
    I don't know really.
    I guess when I got the rest of the pictures from the Red Cross.
    And this would have been in 2000 and--
    2009, '10.
    OK.
    And what did it mean to you when you
    saw these documents and these pictures
    that you got from the Red Cross?
    Did you ever expect to see them again?
    No.
    I didn't know they existed, to tell you the truth.
    OK.
    And does it have a meaning for you?
    Well, it's my identification card
    at that time, which was in 1947, '48, '49,
    somewheres along in there.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    OK, and can you tell me what this one is.
    This is an identification card for my mother.
    OK, same as you had.
    Same as I had, yes, with the fingerprints and her picture.
    And it's dated the third of March, 1948.
    And it says that her birth date is the 4th of October, 1909,
    which means that she would have been just 39 years old--
    Yeah, that's about right.
    --in this picture.
    Yeah, that's about right.
    Because my father, when he died, he was 42, I believe.
    A young man.
    So that's about right.
    Well, the war didn't help matters.
    [CHUCKLES]
    No.
    These documents, it certainly shows
    what they were at the time, that this was your ID card
    and this is her ID card.
    Does it have a special meaning for you
    outside of that, for your children, for your family?
    Well, yes.
    It actually shows that, back in 1947, '48,
    we did have ID cards for everybody.
    And this is one of her ID cards.
    OK, OK.
    Thank you.
    OK, so tell me, what is this photograph of?
    OK, this is Boy Scout group in Bad Aibling.
    OK.
    Which one are you?
    I'm the second one from this end, right here, from the right.
    The one who's looking in the camera?
    Yeah, the one that's looking in the camera.
    The first one is Vassil.
    He is scout helper.
    I'm the second one.
    Nicky is the third one.
    And Victor is the fifth one.
    And the sixth one is Alex.
    OK, so Victor is the second from the left,
    and Alex is the left, the final one.
    Yes.
    And then there's somebody in there who you don't remember.
    There's two, right there, that I don't know who they are.
    I don't remember.
    And do you think this was 1947 that this was taken?
    No, it's later than that.
    It's probably about '48, '49, I would say.
    OK.
    All right, thank you.
    OK, Mr. Bojko, can you tell me, who is this a photograph of?
    This photograph is of Mr. and Mrs. Kent.
    They were the Quakers.
    And they were our house parents in Bad Aibling orphanage.
    They took good care of us.
    And they're the ones who were thinking of adopting you.
    Yes, they're the ones that were thinking of adopting us,
    yes, Victor and I.
    And if we could pan up to the other photograph--
    wonderful.
    And the young man in the middle, who is that?
    The young man in the middle?
    In the lighter jacket.
    In the lighter jacket-- that's Mr. Kent.
    OK.
    And the boys around him are--
    Yeah, some orphans around there.
    But I think the one on the right hand side is Mitka.
    Yeah, that's what's written down underneath there.
    Oh, is it?
    OK, that's Mitka.
    The other two, I'm not sure who they are.
    OK, you have written down there, Stoyen at the far left.
    And the little boy is Rodeck.
    Oh, OK.
    OK.
    So these are some of the kids.
    And Mr. Kent, who looks very young himself.
    He does.
    He's just out of school.
    And when the orphanage closed in Bad Aibling,
    her and him were sent to Africa.
    Ah, I see.
    And he was killed in Africa.
    Was he?
    Aw.
    Yeah.
    He was driving a Jeep.
    And somehow, I don't know what happened,
    but it flipped over and killed him.
    What a handsome young man.
    It was.
    And they lived someplace around New York State.
    I'm not sure where they lived.
    OK, thank you.
    Thank you for sharing that.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Paul Bojko discusses his experiences in Ukraine during the Holocaust; being deported as a boy with his family from his home in Ukraine to Auschwitz by German soldiers circa 1943; being sent to other forced labor camps during the war; and living in an orphanage in Bad Aibling during the immediate post-war years.
    Interviewee
    Mr. Paul Bojko
    Interviewer
    Navazelskis, Ina
    Date
    interview:  2017 August 24
    Geography
    creation: Easton (Md.)
    Credit Line
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    1 digital file : MPEG-4.

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Bojko, Paul, 1937-

    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 Paul Bojko on August 24, 2017 in Easton, MD.
    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 08:05:43
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn563763

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    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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