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Oral history interview with George Ftikas

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2017.377.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.0949

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    Oral history interview with George Ftikas
    Transcript
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Mr. George Ftikas on September 15, 2017,
    in Falls Church, Virginia near Lake Barcroft.
    Thank you, Mr. Ftikas, for agreeing to speak with us today
    to share your story, to share your experiences
    and your witness of what you saw as a young boy.
    I'm going to start our interview at the very beginning.
    And as I mentioned before we were
    recording, that we'll spend a lot of time
    talking about prewar life.
    And from there, we'll build the story and what you saw
    and what you experienced.
    And we'll go from there.
    So my very first question is, can you
    tell me the date of your birth.
    February 10, 1929.
    February 10, 1929.
    And what was your name at birth?
    George.
    And in Greek?
    Georgios.
    Georgios.
    And your last name was Ftikas?
    Ftikas, yeah.
    Ftikas.
    And where were you born?
    In Thessaloniki.
    OK.
    And that is in--
    That is in Greece.
    That is the northern part of Greece.
    Thessaloniki is a very significant port,
    has been for all its existence.
    It was founded by Alexander the Great in his days.
    So it's not a new place.
    It is not a new place.
    Tell me a little bit about your own family.
    What was your father's name?
    My father's name was Dimitri.
    And he was born in Mavrovouni.
    I don't really know where it is, because I never went there.
    At the time he was born, all that part of the Balkans
    was controlled, occupied by the Ottoman Turks.
    And eventually he went to Thessaloniki,
    which was the diamond of the area and met my mother,
    got married.
    So your father was from a place that
    would have been further east from Thessaloniki?
    Further north.
    Further north, OK.
    And would it have been a hundred kilometers, 200 kilometers?
    Even though you never went there,
    do you have an approximate idea?
    I would say it would be 100 miles.
    OK.
    And as far as what he told you about it
    and what you know of it, was it a village or was it a town?
    Was it the countryside?
    It must have been a town.
    Because I remember my father was not an arts and music lover,
    even though he played the violin.
    Oh.
    So it was a place where you could
    learn how to play the violin.
    And he also was singing the overture to the Aida.
    Oh, wow.
    Well, in a village, you probably wouldn't hear the Aida.
    Yeah.
    Well, that's right.
    But back then, those parts of the world
    were influenced a lot by Austria and that explains a lot
    about the music part of it.
    But I really know very little about my father's beginnings.
    Did he have brothers and sisters?
    I had a brother.
    No, did he have--
    I'm sorry.
    Yes.
    He had a sister who lived in Thessaloniki as well.
    OK.
    And did you ever know your grandparents
    on your father's side?
    No.
    Neither side.
    On neither side, neither mother nor father.
    Wait a minute.
    Wait a minute.
    I knew my mother's mother--
    was very old when I was very young.
    And I have very sketchy memories of her.
    OK.
    Was your father a storyteller--
    No.
    --about his own childhood?
    No.
    No.
    What kind of a personality did he have?
    Was he quiet, reserved?
    Very quiet, very reserved, and very much
    the victim of my mother.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Those sort of things happen, you know?
    So I guess she was not very reserved.
    No.
    Nothing wrong with my mother, but she was the dominant part
    of the marriage.
    What was her name?
    Anastasia.
    Anastasia.
    And do you know about approximately when she was born?
    1900.
    And your father?
    Maybe a couple of years earlier.
    I don't know exactly.
    But I know my mother's.
    Anastasia, and what was her maiden name?
    Sofialidis.
    Sofialidis.
    OK.
    And did she have brothers and sisters?
    Yes.
    She had-- I can count maybe eight or nine siblings,
    including three women, three of my aunts, four.
    None of whom were as good a cook as my mother.
    Really?
    My mother was a famous cook.
    What were her specialties?
    Well, any Greek food you can mention.
    Even if she didn't know it, she would make it.
    She got the talent.
    You know, they all learned the same thing from my grandmother.
    And the others were competent cooks.
    But nobody had the talent of my mother.
    It's the way she put the salt and, you know, I don't know.
    But she was famous in Thessaloniki.
    Well, let me tell you.
    Some people say that it's not so much a skill as an art.
    And that's what makes for a superior kind of cook.
    And she didn't know anything about recipes,
    if you ask her for a recipe.
    When I came to the States, I said, hey, Mom,
    give me some recipes.
    She said, you know how to.
    Says, you take tomatoes and you wash them well.
    You know?
    And that's all the instruction she could give.
    Because everything else she was doing by, I don't know.
    By feel.
    Feel.
    Yes.
    Do you have brothers and sisters?
    Yes, one brother.
    And what was his name?
    Nikos.
    And is he older or younger?
    Eight years older.
    So he was born in 1921?
    Oh, yes.
    OK.
    Is he still alive today?
    No.
    He passed away a few years ago.
    OK.
    OK.
    So there was the two of you, and you were the younger son.
    And spoiled.
    As is your birthright.
    Tell me, how did your father support your family?
    He was working for the Greek post office.
    OK.
    Which had a banking kind of activity or function,
    which I believe was in the United States as well.
    The postal savings something or other.
    Well, yes, there were, sometimes,
    and especially in Europe, there would be savings sections
    connected to banks.
    The Germans have them, the sparkasse,
    that you could go and deposit something
    when you went to the post office.
    It was really a savings account kind of thing.
    But nothing big, nothing that you do with banks.
    It was just for the poor people, you know?
    So was it a civil service position?
    Yes.
    OK.
    And so he was part of the Greek civil service.
    Yes.
    OK.
    Had he gone to secondary school?
    You know, I'm embarrassed to say I know
    very little about my father.
    I don't know.
    He may not have.
    Certainly, he did not go to college.
    But in the job he did, he was actually
    the director, or the supervisor, or whatever, the head guy
    in Thessaloniki of this postal savings service.
    But you know, he could do his job.
    But that's about it.
    OK.
    But if you say it's the saving service for poor people,
    he must have had a very good overview of the community
    and the people who were less well off.
    Not personally.
    Not really?
    His job was, like, in the bank.
    You go there.
    You may eventually learn who is there.
    But you don't really know that much about them.
    Let's turn to your mother's side of the family.
    Can you recite all of the names of the aunts and uncles?
    [LAUGHS]
    Well, there was Apostolos, who may have been the oldest.
    And he was a black sheep.
    And the youngest was Yannis, John, an electrician.
    Prokopis, who is a very interesting guy.
    And then there were Irini, who was actually
    living close to where we lived and was my favorite aunt.
    And in fact, was my second mother.
    I spent as much time in her house as I did in our house.
    And then there were--
    come on.
    It's embarrassing.
    I don't even remember.
    It's OK.
    It's common.
    A lot of people don't.
    It's Lisa.
    And Lisa lived in Egypt, where a large part of my mother's family
    lived and Prokopis was also in Egypt.
    He's the black sheep, did you say?
    No, no, Apostolos was the black sheep.
    OK.
    He embezzled some money.
    He was working for the electric company in Thessaloniki,
    embezzled some money.
    And he managed to get to jail.
    He got out of jail.
    And guess what?
    He embezzled--
    [LAUGHTER]
    So not only he was a black sheep, he was a dumb sheep.
    He hadn't learned how to do it well enough.
    And it occurred to me, actually, just after we visit the museum--
    Our Holocaust Museum?
    --his wife was a Jew.
    But when they married, I guess, she
    changed to being a Greek Orthodox, as is the law.
    And I didn't know she was a jew until a long time afterwards,
    because she really observed all the Greek and Christian,
    religious, you know, protocols.
    And I didn't know she was a Jew, not
    that it makes any difference.
    But she was.
    Did she come into any danger?
    Or the fact that she was married and converted somehow
    save her during the war?
    The fact that she was married and converted
    did not mean anything.
    But the fact that she was not a known Jew did.
    Because all the other Jews were open Jews in the ghettos.
    And she was just-- nobody knew that.
    Unless you made an FBI investigation, yeah.
    How is it that some of your mother's family was in Egypt?
    What brought them there?
    A lot of Greeks, particularly from the North,
    did go to Africa.
    And Egypt was a favorite place.
    Because it was the business minds.
    And they went to Egypt.
    It was a good place to start a business.
    And that's what they did.
    One of my uncles, whom I never met,
    had a big office store of naval stuff.
    And he made a lot of money.
    He was supporting almost seven other families.
    So anyway, a lot of people went to Egypt.
    Because there was more opportunity
    for such development, such entrepreneurship.
    That's right.
    Because Greece did not have that.
    Certainly, Thessaloniki did not.
    Thessaloniki was, like the rest of the Balkans,
    part of the Ottoman Empire.
    Greece was taken over what, at the time,
    was known as the Byzantine Empire in 1453 by the Ottomans.
    And that was Constantinople, which is now Istanbul.
    That's right.
    And then they moved eastward, and--
    no, it was westward, and occupied everything else there.
    So that part of the world was Ottoman Empire, including
    Thessaloniki until 1912.
    When it was-- we call it liberated from the Ottomans.
    It was before it was called Turkey.
    There's a difference.
    And my father was part of the group that was fighting
    the Ottoman's.
    So he would have been a partisan, could one say?
    Yes.
    In fact, my brother had pictures of my father
    in the sort of uniform of the partisans at the time.
    So as I said, I'm really embarrassed that I don't really
    know more about my father.
    It's OK.
    It's not that I forgot it, either.
    But somehow, my mother was more important
    in the family than my father.
    Nevertheless, it's very interesting.
    You know, the mix between one's personal background
    and the immediate family members,
    and then the greater historical picture, this
    is what gives oral histories like this, interviews
    that we're having with people such as yourself, it's immediacy
    and what makes it interesting.
    Because it is history through individuals.
    And from this, I gather, then Greece was a brand new country.
    Greece was a brand new country, an ancient place,
    but a brand new country in 1912.
    In 1912, with Thessaloniki, the Greek independence war
    started in 1821.
    That's a long time.
    That's a long time.
    And pretty soon, it expanded up to Athens a little bit
    North of Athens.
    And that's how it was until 1912,
    when what's known as the first Balkan War erupted,
    where everybody was trying to get rid of the Turks.
    And then there was a fight as to who
    would get what part of the land and pretty much the map
    of Greece as we know it now was established in 1912.
    OK.
    And it would have been a little bit different
    if there was not a politics between the King
    and the prime minister at that time,
    but that's a different story.
    That's internal Greek politics?
    Absolutely.
    OK.
    Did World War I touch Greece and Thessaloniki in particular ways?
    Yes.
    And it is a very interesting story
    that is well-known to people who know World War II.
    But for some reason it is not more widely known.
    But it's very interesting.
    Because in a way, it explains why we won the war and not
    the Germans.
    Are you talking about World War II now?
    World War II.
    Not World War I, because I was asking about World War I?
    I'm sorry.
    World War I, that was a little after Thessaloniki
    was liberated.
    And it was just what, a few years.
    And the French and the British had troops
    in Macedonia and Thessaloniki.
    And in fact, they had built barracks in Thessaloniki,
    at the outskirts of Thessaloniki.
    And when they left, so talking about 1918,
    somebody got those barracks and developed them
    into low cost housing.
    And it was in one of those apartments, so to speak,
    that my family lived.
    Oh, into those barracks, those former barracks?
    Those former barracks.
    And most of the people in those barracks were Jews.
    And in fact, that was a Jewish ghetto.
    An informal, sort of, like, a neighborhood?
    Or an actual ghetto that became a ghetto during World War II?
    No, I call it ghetto because it was a--
    A neighborhood.
    --a neighborhood by predominantly Jewish.
    OK.
    And one of the 17 synagogues in Thessaloniki
    was just around the corner from our house.
    Do you remember its name?
    No.
    Do you remember the street you lived on?
    I do.
    But I'll tell you what, I saw somewhere in the material
    that I looked at, that they had the names
    and addresses of every synagogue except that one.
    And I think the only thing they said
    was Charilaou, which is a reference, like we
    would say in Falls Church.
    Nothing like 3500 Bond Street.
    OK.
    So it doesn't have a specificity to it.
    It just has an overall neighborhood kind of--
    Right.
    And it's interesting that they managed, whoever
    did that listing, managed to get the specific addresses of all
    the others, but not that one.
    But I know where it was.
    What kind of a structure was it, the synagogue?
    Was it a wooden one or a stone one?
    I think it was a stone one.
    There was no wood.
    Wood was not used in most of Greece.
    So for barracks-- you see, when you say barracks,
    I think of wooden barracks.
    Clearly, then the barracks that the French had constructed
    were of different materials.
    Yeah.
    It was--
    Stone.
    Stone.
    Stone.
    OK.
    And then Charilaos who developed the neighborhood, as I said,
    subdivided the barracks into there.
    They were kind of barracks 1, 2, 3, 4.
    And then he subdivided into three units in each one.
    And we had one of them.
    Was it like analogous to a townhouse in the sense
    that there's a long building that's connected,
    but there are separate family homes?
    Yeah.
    But it was a low cost thing.
    When my mother and father got married in 1921,
    they wanted to buy a house.
    And my mother was very finicky.
    And she wanted to have a house just right.
    And they waited to have that house.
    And they never found it.
    Ah.
    Let's go there where it's cheap and wait
    until we find the house.
    They never found the house.
    OK.
    So everybody in the neighborhood was really
    a lower class kind of person.
    Lower working class.
    Lower working class, yeah.
    You know, the neighbors, not all of them, but most of them
    were Jews, were working in, you know,
    very menial kind of occupations.
    Well, a number of questions come to mind.
    You say that Thessaloniki was a diamond.
    And yet, at the same time, to have business opportunities,
    it didn't offer many.
    Because of the historical circumstances,
    people would go to Egypt and other places
    if they wanted to develop a business.
    How did Thessaloniki live?
    That is, what was its main--
    what made it this diamond?
    Thessaloniki is a very important port.
    If you look at the map, it is the best port of the area.
    And let's see, Germany and Austria
    and all of the other little countries
    in between, their commerce had to go through ships back then.
    That was the most common means of transporting things.
    And Thessaloniki was the best location.
    So it was its location that was important, made it a jewel,
    but not opportunities for work.
    OK.
    Would you say that, as a port city,
    it was a well-off port city generally, or a rather poor one?
    How would you describe?
    Well, I really don't know, other than
    to say that if you look at the map, there is no other port.
    And it had a lot of traffic.
    But I cannot compare it to other areas.
    I'm trying to get a sense of were there rich people there,
    were there other classes besides lower working--
    Yes.
    --lower middle class.
    Yes.
    In fact, one of the important buildings in my youth
    was the Villa Bianca in Thessaloniki
    was owned by an Italian Jew.
    And it was about two miles from my house
    and on an important street at the time.
    And it was one of the great places in Thessaloniki.
    Go see Villa Bianca.
    It's not big deal now.
    But back then it was a very important building.
    But it was held by a private family, in private hands?
    Yeah.
    It was a Jewish family.
    A Jewish family.
    And did you ever get inside?
    No.
    OK.
    And there were other obviously wealthy people.
    But how many of them Jews?
    But it's like anything else.
    There is always a hierarchical structure.
    And there are some people at the top and most people are down.
    Are at the bottom, yeah, very pyramid.
    Exactly.
    So you say that the synagogue for which there
    is no address known now was around the corner.
    What about the Greek Orthodox Church?
    Was there one in your neighborhood?
    Yes.
    Excuse me.
    The synagogue was relative--
    I mean, walking distance.
    I mean, just feet.
    The church was, maybe, 3/4 of a mile.
    Did you walk to it?
    First of all, was your family religious?
    No.
    But we went to church.
    You know, not on every Sunday, but certainly Easter, holidays,
    and stuff like that.
    But my family was certainly Christian, I would say so.
    But we were not all that, you know,
    how shall I say fanatic about religion.
    The thing about the synagogue is that I remember
    one time, one of my friends, Jewish friends,
    said do me a favor.
    I says what?
    He says, let's go to the synagogue.
    I said why.
    He says, yeah, come on.
    So I went to the synagogue.
    And he says, turn the lights on.
    And I said, why the hell?
    Can't you do it?
    Well, then I learned that the Sabbath and Sabbath you
    don't do it if you're a Jew.
    And I said, oh, come on.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Did you turn the lights on?
    I turned the lights on.
    And I think I did it a number of other times.
    But I guess they were always asking somebody, non-Jew to turn
    on the lights on Sabbath.
    OK.
    Tell me a little bit more about your mother's family.
    So they were from Thessaloniki?
    They had been there for generations,
    is what I'm understanding.
    Yes.
    And do you know how your grandfather supported his eight
    children?
    I'm being very patriarchal here by assuming
    that it was the grandfather.
    But usually--
    Yes, back then, women were not even allowed to work.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Yeah.
    He was, I guess you would say, from what I understand,
    some sort of a manager in a mill,
    a flour mill in Thessaloniki.
    A big one, as a matter of fact, it was, I guess,
    producing flour for a large part of the country.
    And anyway, that's where he was.
    But he had passed away by the time you were born?
    Yes.
    Your grandmother was still alive, however?
    Yes.
    And did they have a family home that all of the eight children
    had come from?
    Yes.
    And was it close to you?
    Yeah.
    Back then, everything was close.
    We were working.
    OK.
    So I have some other questions that are
    going to sound very strange.
    But I'm going to ask them.
    And it gives us a sense of--
    were there trolley cars?
    What was the transportation like in Thessaloniki?
    There were trolley cars.
    OK.
    Did many people have private automobiles?
    No.
    Were the streets paved?
    No.
    Maybe two or three downtown streets,
    but I would say 90% of the streets were dirt streets.
    OK.
    Did people have horses in town?
    No.
    OK.
    But there were horse driven carts.
    For example, there were three vegetable vendors
    that were passing by our little house.
    And they were driven by a horse.
    And you know, the vegetables were in barrels
    in the back of the cart.
    And my mother would go out and yell at them
    that the tomatoes are not good enough, but buy anyway.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Yeah.
    Well, that's to knock the price down.
    So yeah.
    But that was the transportation.
    There were taxis.
    And once in a while--
    The taxi was horse driven?
    No.
    It was in a car?
    But it was the kind of a car that you had to put the--
    what you call it?
    You had to turn the motor with a crank?
    Yeah.
    So the driver would go out when he was waiting
    for customers who'd go there.
    If you wanted to go to Charilaou,
    that was the name of the neighborhood,
    he would come out and bring the crankshaft--
    anyway, whatever they call it.
    It would go va vroom!
    OK.
    And in fact, about 15 years ago, we
    went to Thessaloniki, because we used to go once a year to visit.
    And my brother and I decided to go and see
    if we can find where our house used to be.
    Because since I moved and he moved,
    that whole area disappeared.
    You go and try to find that synagogue, doesn't exist.
    The street doesn't exist.
    And maybe that's why the guy couldn't find the name.
    You had to be alive at that time to know the name of that street.
    What was there 15 years ago when you went?
    What would you see?
    Apartment buildings, you know, just modern town,
    nothing like we remembered.
    So we went there, and there was one place
    that we could remember, and that was a stop of the trolley.
    And it was there.
    And there was something identifiable.
    And I said, OK, this is where the trolley stopped.
    And from then on, we began remembering the instructions
    we gave to the taxi driver.
    You turn right.
    And then, ah, that was--
    forget now-- Victoria's house.
    And we turn left here.
    And this way, we sort of went through the new streets.
    But they were not quite the way they used to be.
    And we eventually found a townhouse--
    I mean, an apartment building where
    it must be where our house was.
    So after working for about 3/4 of an hour on a small area,
    we decided this is where our house was.
    And woo!
    It grew!
    10 floors, you know?
    And then we went around that corner, guess what?
    We found a tree that we used to climb on when we were kids.
    Oh, wow.
    I forget now what tree it was, a pear tree or something.
    I don't know, something like that.
    How interesting.
    You see, the image I have, a person describes a place.
    And all of us in our minds create a certain image
    of what they've described.
    So I have in my mind these low lying barracks
    made of stone with no vegetation, no trees around
    because they were soldiers' barracks at one time,
    by the French.
    And it's all rather uniform and it's kind of level.
    But is it pretty?
    Are their gardens?
    Are their streets?
    Are there trees?
    Are their garages?
    No.
    Forget about garages.
    There was no need for garage.
    But there was no space.
    These are very small [INAUDIBLE].
    But there were trees.
    And who put the trees?
    I don't know.
    Maybe the developer who bought the thing
    and converted from barracks to living quarters.
    But that's it.
    I tried to make a little garden and grow tomatoes and peppers.
    What did your mother think of your tomatoes?
    [LAUGHTER]
    I don't know if she would buy them.
    So OK.
    Another question that's sort of immaterial, but not.
    Because it gives us a sense of what was development like.
    Did you have indoor plumbing?
    Yes.
    OK.
    But cold water.
    Cold water.
    I was, I believe, 18-years-old when I found that somebody was
    developing housing in Athens that even had hot water.
    And I said they had what?
    I didn't know that there is such thing as hot water--
    In a house.
    --in the house.
    OK.
    And did you have electricity?
    Yes.
    OK.
    How did you heat the place?
    Stove with wood.
    There was a wood stove.
    So by a stove, do you mean a stove that you cook on?
    Or the kind of stove that one finds often
    in Eastern Europe that will be in the corner of a room
    with tile on it and you stick coal in it or wood
    and it heats the whole room?
    And there is the pipes that go and yeah, that kind.
    And my mother would get up at 5 o'clock in the morning
    and start the fire.
    So that when everybody else in the family, you know,
    my brother and my father got up, the house
    was reasonable-- not the house, the living room only.
    How many rooms did you have?
    A living room, a salon.
    Living room, yeah.
    No.
    The living room was one thing.
    Like, living room and dining room.
    And then there was the formal room.
    You know, everybody, no matter how poor you were,
    you had to have a salon, and two bedrooms.
    That's not small.
    It's not small.
    It's not that big, either.
    No, but for that time, for example,
    when I speak with someone who would be from Eastern Europe,
    sometimes they'd have two rooms, you know?
    Yeah.
    It was OK to wait until you find the right house.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Of course.
    Of course.
    And they lived there, you know, I forget now.
    But until-- not recently, but certainly a long time after I
    left.
    OK.
    Was most of the neighborhood like your own home?
    Yes.
    So your Jewish neighbors also would have
    had the same circumstances?
    I was trying to remember how many barracks were.
    And I came up with maybe 7 to 10.
    And all of those were mostly Jewish.
    Because a lot of the people, the Jewish people in Thessaloniki,
    of whom there were a lot, you know,
    there were more than Greeks, more than Orthodox,
    I mean, you know, Christian Greeks, they were poor.
    Yes, as I said earlier, there was the Villa Bianca
    and some other things.
    Now I mentioned later, there was the [INAUDIBLE],
    a very interesting neighborhood downtown in Thessaloniki where
    there were some rich Jews.
    But most of them were really poor and most of them
    lived where I grew up and two other places I
    call ghettos, not because they were called ghettos at the time.
    But because ghetto became a label for anything
    where poor Jews lived.
    OK.
    Yours was named Charilaou?
    Charilaou was the name--
    Charilaou, Charilaos was the genitive case of Charilaos.
    This Charilaos was the guy who developed the barrack
    area into livable quarters.
    And the whole area got his name.
    Charilaou means the place of Charilaos.
    Got it.
    And the other two neighborhoods where there were mostly
    Jews, what were they called?
    One which was very close to where Charilaou was
    was called 151.
    And why?
    I have no idea what the 151 stood for.
    I mean, 151, I would bring it up a couple of times a day,
    you know?
    I will go through 151, or went by 151.
    It was a larger area where Jews lived in Charilaou.
    And then there was another one up northwest
    of the city, which was close to the railroad station.
    And I never really went there.
    But that was probably the biggest.
    And I think that was called Vardaris.
    Vara--
    Vardaris.
    Vardaris?
    Vardaris is the name of a river.
    Even though it's in Thessaloniki,
    I never went there.
    Mhm.
    It was not in my part of moving around the city.
    And I never went to that place.
    OK.
    But I knew it existed.
    And another big bunch of Jews lived
    in Ladadika, which is an area that I mentioned before.
    And it has become, actually now, what
    do they call these places with historical--
    Like UNESCO sites?
    But it's not UNESCO.
    It's the Greek, the government has declared it as an--
    An historical place.
    --an historical place.
    And that is where a lot of Jews lived.
    And they were wealthy.
    And it was famous for a number of reasons.
    First of all, because those people,
    Ladadika is the name of the place.
    And Ladadika means the oil stores.
    And those people were merchants that
    were dealing with olive oil.
    And in fact, I remember the few times I went there back then,
    it was so dirty.
    Because the dirt street and a lot of oil that was being pored.
    Back then, things were not all that well-contained.
    Dirt and oil and you'd get sludge of a certain kind.
    Yeah.
    It's oily sludge.
    Yeah.
    Well, anyway, it was known for that.
    And the people who were running it were Jews.
    And that was a big part of where the relatively wealthier Jews
    lived.
    It was also one of three areas in Thessaloniki where bordellos.
    And I don't know how they ended up
    being at this more or less the same neighborhood.
    But that's how it was.
    When you were a little boy, did you know about that?
    [LAUGHTER]
    When I was a little boy, I knew everything.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Tell me, because it's a port city,
    were there beaches around Thessaloniki
    and did kids go to the beach?
    No.
    Thessaloniki-- OK.
    I mentioned earlier my Aunt Irini, who was my second mother.
    That's right.
    And I spent half of my life there?
    Her house was on the water.
    And in front, there was sand.
    You would call it a beach.
    That's how I spent my early days.
    That's where I learned to swim and everything.
    But it was just a little beach in front of a house.
    There were no other houses around
    to speak of that had the same thing, maybe.
    I don't know, very few.
    But there were beaches further out
    of when you left the main Thessaloniki.
    There were little villages that had beaches.
    But to go there, you had to take a bus
    and we would spend almost an hour to get to it.
    But other than that, there were no beaches.
    So kids didn't go to the ocean or to the sea to play.
    That wasn't one of the things that you would--
    They would be doing it either by taking the bus to go there,
    but if you weren't there, there were expensive restaurants.
    And that's not really for the kids.
    You could go from the center of the city
    to beach villages that were too far to walk,
    that you could go by bus or by little boats.
    And we used to go there, the whole family, a couple of times
    during the summer.
    But for every day thing, there was no beach, really.
    So what did the neighborhood--
    I take it that you had friends in your neighborhood?
    Yes.
    What did you do?
    What were your play activities?
    I don't know.
    Just kicking the can, you know?
    So it was in the streets.
    It was in the neighborhood.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And once in a while my parents, or my uncle and aunt
    would take me to the beaches.
    But you know, infrequently.
    So the rest of the kids, I don't know.
    We just fooled around.
    OK.
    You started school in the '30s?
    Yes.
    Tell me a little bit about your early school days.
    What was your schooling like?
    Who were the other kids in the classroom?
    Well, you know, there was a school very close to our house.
    And I remember very little about it
    except the name of one of my first teachers.
    Her name was Aglaea.
    Why I remember Aglaea and I don't remember
    all the other teachers, because, you know, that was six years.
    You were six years old.
    No, no, six years.
    Oh, you were sixth grade?
    Sixth grade, yeah.
    OK.
    I don't know.
    Was it a neighborhood school?
    Yes.
    You walked to it?
    Absolutely.
    That was really very close.
    OK.
    And well, I learned how to write.
    And I learned how to count.
    And were schools divided that way?
    That is, from neighborhoods, everybody
    would go to their own neighborhood school
    within Thessaloniki?
    Yes.
    And so that meant that other kids, mostly Jewish kids,
    were also your classmates?
    Yes.
    OK.
    So your neighborhood friends and your classmates
    would be the same group of people?
    Yeah.
    There was actually-- how do I say?
    There was no discrimination.
    Or not-- but yes, of course, here's a Jew and that.
    But there was no, how shall I say, confrontation,
    or well, you know, I don't like him
    because he's a Jew or something like that.
    No, that didn't exist.
    The important thing as I remember
    is that those people, even though
    their great-great-grandparents came from Spain, therefore,
    they were in Thessaloniki for two centuries,
    their Greek was marginal.
    They were still speaking a funny combination
    of Yiddish and Spanish.
    Would have that been Ladino or Sephardic?
    Yeah?
    For example, my across the barrack friend Richard,
    when he was telling his younger brother, whose name I've forgot,
    let's go, he said vamos.
    That's when I learned about vamos.
    But that goes for the parents.
    The kids who began going to school, and remember, you know,
    there is chronology here.
    When the kids began going to school,
    you know, they learn Greek.
    So they would all speaking the same language.
    But the parents were the ones where the language barrier--
    well, not barrier, but the differentiation existed.
    Could the fact that Greece had been part of the Ottoman Empire
    have something to do with this?
    Well, it has to do with the fact that no education was
    given during the Ottoman times to anybody.
    OK.
    In fact, one of the resistance kind
    of activities that was known and has been documented in history
    books is the priests would hold schools, so to speak, for kids.
    But it was forbidden.
    So they have to do it under the Ottoman observation.
    But you know, after 1912, the Greek government came in.
    They established the schools.
    And when I went there, there was a well-functioning schooling
    system.
    And everybody went there, including
    the Jews, who I believe became Greek citizens in 1920.
    I see.
    OK.
    So would you say that it was a process
    of some kind of assimilation that
    was starting, if the parents still had a language barrier
    but the children already were fluent in Greek?
    I mean, that's a lot to ask for someone who's in the sixth grade
    to analyze.
    But I'm wondering.
    Well, the parents were not all that--
    their Greek was broken Greek, you know.
    They could speak Greek, obviously.
    They did go to the store, you know.
    They spoke with the neighbors and all that.
    But you could tell that they were not
    really Greek because they didn't have the education.
    OK.
    It was kind of interesting.
    My mother had good friendships with a lot of neighbors,
    including one, I think I mentioned to Nancy at one time.
    It was one of the things that I can't forget.
    When the Jews were rounded up and obviously, everybody
    knew that they would be taken away,
    there was a neighbor by the name of Rachel who had a baby.
    And the baby's name was Rosa.
    And the baby was up to a year old.
    But it was a darling of the neighborhood.
    You know, it was one of those babies that's kind of cute.
    And my mother, I forget--
    I don't forget my mother being on this window and Rachel being
    on the next barrack of that window.
    And my mother said, give me the baby.
    And Rachel says no, the baby stays with me.
    You know, here, it's going to be a difficult trip.
    And so you never know what's going to happen.
    We knew what's going to happen.
    And Rachel said, no, no.
    I won't.
    They'll take us there.
    They'll make us work.
    They'll bring us back.
    They still thought that this might be a tourist kind of--
    anyway.
    I can't forget my mother and Rachel having
    this conversation about Rosa.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    In the neighborhood, how did the Jews live?
    What did they make their living from in your neighborhood?
    They all did things, like, one of them, I remember,
    was working at the port carrying things in his back.
    I don't know how I would call that guy's job.
    In Greek, they call it [GREEK].
    [GREEK] is the guy who, your job is to take sacks.
    You know?
    That was his job.
    And other people, I don't remember exactly what they did.
    But they did similar things, like, dig or nothing
    particularly exciting.
    Were there Jewish bakeries, for example, in the neighborhood?
    Were there Jewish shops?
    Not in the neighborhood.
    They may have been downtown.
    I do not know.
    I do not remember.
    But not in our--
    as far as I remember, they were going to the same stores
    that we did.
    And the stores were on your streets or someplace else?
    No.
    The stores were within walking distance, but not close.
    What was close were the carts that I described
    earlier that were passing by.
    There were three of them.
    And there were fish vendors, which was kind of interesting
    because the sea was a long way, walking,
    because I walked to school.
    But that sea was several miles.
    And those guys had a flat tray on their head
    with fish that they caught during the night.
    And they were coming by.
    And my mother would like to buy fish now and then.
    And when the guy was coming by saying, fish, fish [GREEK].
    She would go and say what do you have today?
    And he would lower the tray.
    And my mother who was always very picky,
    said is that what you're giving me?
    I caught it this morning!
    I don't like that, the eyes, you know.
    I'll tell you, it was difficult to sell tomatoes and fish.
    [LAUGHTER]
    But anyway, she would buy it.
    But that was a different way to buy fish than the way
    we do it today.
    Of course.
    Of course.
    Can you imagine someone from Lake Barcroft, carrying fish,
    going on to Route 7?
    [LAUGHTER]
    Were there Orthodox Jews in the neighborhood?
    I learned that term when I came to this country.
    Back then I didn't know.
    OK.
    There might have been.
    But I don't know.
    Well, in Eastern Europe, often people looked different.
    They dressed differently.
    Would that have also been the case?
    [ELECTRONIC NOTIFICATION RINGING]
    Let's hold.
    That's fine.
    OK.
    Hang on a minute.
    So did Jews and Christians look alike, or did they dress alike?
    Not to my memory.
    That does not mean that they didn't.
    OK.
    But they didn't enough to make enough of an impression.
    I presume there must have been.
    But I don't know.
    Either I was not in the circles--
    OK.
    To you, in a boy's eyes, you didn't see a difference?
    No.
    When I went to school--
    [CLEARS THROAT] excuse me-- the same classes
    except in the Greek schooling system,
    you have to take religion.
    And the early parts of religion is the Old Testament.
    And then the next year is the New Testament.
    And then there is catechism.
    The Jews were excused from the last two, the New Testament
    and catechism, because those were clearly Christian thing.
    But the first year, which was the Old Testament,
    they were required to attend those classes because that
    was the same thing.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    So other than that, there was no difference.
    OK.
    Your parents, did they have a social circle?
    And who made up that social circle?
    Well, we had very few neighbors that were part of the circle.
    And this remains a question mark in my mind.
    And I often tell Duffy, I don't know how that happened.
    Because most of the people were living
    in other parts of Thessaloniki.
    Thessaloniki is a big city.
    Of course, this is a modern part.
    But this is the center of the city.
    You're showing me a map of Thessaloniki.
    Yeah.
    Our house was at the outskirts, out here.
    In fact, if you went this way from my house,
    you were out in the country.
    So you're sort of northeast.
    You're pointing to a northeastern part
    of Thessaloniki.
    And this is the landmark of Thessaloniki,
    the White Tower, the part of a or middle age fortification.
    And it's a very nice building.
    Anyway, that's, like, the Parthenon is in Athens.
    The White Tower is in Thessaloniki.
    And it's exactly at the middle of the town.
    And this was the downtown area.
    This is where the middle class of Thessaloniki is--
    So you're showing me, on the map, someplace
    that is more on the western side, that would be the middle,
    but to the west of the center of town?
    Yeah.
    OK.
    Now we lived here.
    Yeah.
    You lived on the eastern part.
    And two of the neighbors, Apostolos, the black sheep,
    and Yannis, the youngest, were living reasonably close to--
    So your mother's brothers, your uncles.
    My mother's, yeah.
    And let's see, Yannis, the youngest.
    Actually, you asked me that question.
    I never answered it.
    Where he lived was where my mother and her siblings grew up.
    And that house eventually was left to the youngest.
    And the distance between there and our house
    was several miles, quite a few miles.
    But you know, that's the way--
    But it's also still on the eastern part of Thessaloniki.
    Yeah.
    But we also had, of course, a lot
    of distant relatives and other social friends
    in the center of Thessaloniki.
    And we used to go to their house.
    And they used to come to our house.
    And the thing that I cannot remember for the life of me is
    how were those engagements made.
    These days, of course, forget about the email.
    Telephone.
    Well, there was no telephone.
    I forgot to ask you.
    Did you have a telephone?
    And you just answered no.
    We did not have a telephone.
    And making a telephone call sometimes when an emergency,
    it was a big deal, finding a telephone.
    Did the post office have one?
    The post office did.
    But we'd go to a store that had a telephone.
    But that was a long way, a long way.
    But anyway, the others did not have telephones, either.
    Nobody-- well, not nobody, but very few people had.
    So it's a question mark in my mind.
    I know that there was, oh, Thursday, the Lavadas
    are coming.
    How did my mother get to know that the Lavadas were
    coming on Thursday?
    Where was that engagement made?
    And that was not just one, you know?
    It was like today.
    Every day we have something or other.
    I don't know how they communicated.
    I'm embarrassed, but I would be lying if I made up a story.
    Oh, no, no no.
    But I mean, it's a legitimate question,
    given that there weren't--
    there were very limited means of communication.
    I'll tell you how limited it was.
    Now Thessaloniki is a town of some, I forget now.
    At that time, maybe a quarter of a million people, that's a lot.
    Yeah.
    My uncle, in whose house I spent half of my life--
    Irina's--
    Irina's husband.
    Irina's husband, yeah.
    He had an office downtown here.
    OK.
    And he had a telephone.
    Now I'll give you the number of the telephone, 5490,
    four digits.
    That tells you how few telephones were there.
    But it's interesting.
    It's interesting.
    So we started this from who made up your parents' social circle.
    And it sounds like it was both relatives and other friends--
    And other friends.
    --but not necessarily in your immediate neighborhood.
    So you didn't socialize much with the Jewish neighbors.
    We were socially higher end than the immediate neighborhood.
    Did people know one another, though, by first name?
    Yeah.
    Yeah?
    OK.
    A lot of people would give their left hand to come to our house
    because my mother was a famous cook.
    I mean, when I said that before, I mean, I meant she was famous.
    And they want Anastasia's cooking.
    But you know, we went to their houses, too.
    Let's pause just for a second.
    OK?
    Yeah?
    OK.
    You were talking about your mother and her talent.
    Speaking about my mother's talent,
    and it's still a mystery to me.
    There is a very simple Greek biscuit
    or whatever you would call it, [INAUDIBLE].
    In Greek, they call it [GREEK].
    [GREEK]?
    And you make the dough in a sort of long way.
    And then you kind of do it like a hair--
    You make a crescent from it?
    Braid.
    A braid.
    OK.
    Yeah.
    And you make it.
    Everybody makes it, including my mother.
    Nobody makes it the way my mother does.
    I mean, I can't believe that.
    I mean, [GREEK], we find it in every house.
    We have a very good Greek friend here, a very good cook, who
    makes [GREEK], very good.
    But--
    Not the same.
    It's a B minus compared to my mother.
    And I hate to say that, because you know,
    I'm not in advertising, whatever, for my mother.
    But I don't know how she did it.
    Did you ever stand and watch her?
    Oh, sure.
    But you know, back then, I didn't have that much interest.
    The one thing that perhaps would be of interest to you,
    since you're asking questions of that nature,
    is that my mother was cooking under the most primitive
    conditions.
    She either was in the kitchen, the place where you put coal,
    you ignited the coal.
    And you made a fire.
    And you used that fire to cook anything.
    And whether it's high heat, low heat, she did it.
    I don't know how.
    Wow.
    But she managed to--
    She couldn't regulate it normally.
    She had to go by what the fire gives her.
    And there were no hot water.
    She would have to have boil water.
    Excuse me.
    And when you cook or for any other reason you need--
    so she did all of that stuff in that little thing.
    Except, there was, of course, there was no oven in the house.
    So anything that needed to be baked, I had to take it to--
    The baker?
    --the baker.
    That probably is not unique to Greece back then.
    Mhm.
    Because we're talking about conditions
    that were Ottoman Empire.
    You know, that's a few years after.
    Right now, they have everything that we have here.
    But I'm talking about back then.
    And the bakers of the time, in addition
    to making delicious bread, which they were selling,
    they also were using people's baking--
    That is, they offered their ovens?
    Or did they rent those ovens?
    Or did they just--
    Oh, no, no.
    You had to have a child.
    Like, first of all, it was my brother,
    then my brother retired from this chore.
    And I had to.
    When my mother made [GREEK], I would have to take the--
    The dough?
    --the pan, after she was finished it.
    And take it to the baker.
    And the baker was under strict conditions,
    I mean, instructions from my mother for how long
    and how to bake it.
    But that was part of his income.
    He was doing it not only for us, but for everybody else.
    For example, at--
    Easter?
    --Easter, the Resurrection mass is said at 12 o'clock
    at night, when the priest comes out of the church
    and says Christ is risen, blah, blah, blah.
    And we always went for that.
    And after that we went home and we
    had the traditional Greek dish for the occasion.
    So we didn't eat until after 12.
    But my mother would make the thing, which was baked lamb,
    would have prepared it in the afternoon.
    Would have taken it to the baker and brought it home
    before going to church.
    But that was not only I. It was everybody-- well,
    not everybody, a lot of other people.
    So when I went to pick up mine, there
    were there a lot of others.
    But our baker was particularly attentive to me,
    because he knew whose son I was.
    [LAUGHTER]
    But anyway, anything that needed baking.
    What about refrigeration?
    We had an ice box.
    OK.
    Which was, you know what an ice box is.
    Yeah.
    But during the bad times of the war, it was or wasn't.
    So for a few years, the ice box was there but not
    functioning because there was no ice.
    OK.
    Did your parents have--
    what kind of conversations would take place in your own home?
    Did they talk much?
    I asked you before if your father was a storyteller.
    What about your mother?
    No.
    But my mother was fairly social.
    And she spoke some French.
    She had a neighbor, a Jewish neighbor who spoke French.
    And she would open the window and have a good chat in French
    with a neighbor.
    But you know.
    Did they ever talk politics at home?
    Yes.
    There are homes where you don't talk politics.
    But during the times that I remember most,
    the politics were--
    have to do with the war.
    World War II?
    World War II.
    And not so much as to what was happening outside
    in Greece, because what was happening in Greece
    was important enough.
    And you know that really was the center of any--
    Discussion?
    --discussion.
    What about the 1930s, though, before World War II begins?
    Before all of this happens, do you
    remember any kinds of conversations?
    If your father had been part of, let's say,
    the partisans that helped liberate Greece from the Ottoman
    Empire, was there talk about that?
    Was the sort of like a narrative of what Greek history was?
    I don't remember that.
    OK.
    And we had a family friend who was coming very frequently
    to taste my mother's cooking who was
    a major member of that group that were fighting the Turks.
    But I don't remember any important discussions
    having to do with that part.
    Maybe my memory is not good.
    But I don't.
    It could also be you're a child and they're adults.
    And they talk adult things and kids--
    Well, I was not that much of a child.
    I kind of matured earlier.
    But before the war, the government
    was taken over in 1936 by a dictator by the name of Metaxa.
    Mhm.
    And he is a very controversial guy.
    Because like a dictator, he is hated because he was a dictator.
    On the other hand, he was a good dictator
    and without him, Greece would have gone to pieces.
    So you have different ideas about him.
    But he was a hero for the war, because he stood up
    to the Italians.
    And this is really what I wanted to say earlier.
    This is an important piece of World War II history
    that many people do not know.
    And it actually, in my opinion, decided who won the war.
    So let's hear it.
    In October 28 of 1940, Mussolini gave an ultimatum to Metaxa.
    His ambassador knocked the door at 12 o'clock
    night and said, you either allow us to go down,
    take a military walk to Athens, or we'll take it anyway
    on our own.
    And Metaxa said, [GREEK], which in Greek, means no.
    And it has become a famous word in Greek.
    [GREEK] And the Italians attacked Greece on the 28th
    of October.
    And to the consternation of everybody, including the Greeks,
    they didn't make it.
    The Greeks were winning the war.
    And they pushed back--
    the Italians attacked Greece from Albania.
    And the Greeks counterattacked and they began taking Albania.
    And that was a big humiliation for Mussolini.
    But a big worry to Hitler.
    Because Hitler, first of all, had made a big name for himself
    up to that time because he had taken over the whole of Europe.
    And he had told Mussolini, don't touch Greece.
    Greece is neutral.
    Let me do that.
    And Mussolini wanted to get part of the action.
    And he began losing the war.
    And it was an embarrassment to Hitler,
    plus Hitler had already decided to attack Russia.
    But he knew from the Napoleon catastrophe
    that if you don't go there early enough,
    the winter is going to beat you.
    So he wanted to attack Russia, but he
    was delayed because of Mussolini being there.
    So he sent his ambassador to Metaxa now, talking about March.
    So this is Hitler sends his ambassador to Metaxa?
    Yes.
    And he said, look, we'll take Mussolini off your back.
    In fact, you can even hold on to the ground
    that you've won from Albania.
    Keep that.
    All you have to do is tell the British to take back
    a regiment of New Zealanders who the British had sent
    when Metaxa had asked for help.
    Because the British sent one regiment of New Zealanders
    in Crete and one Spitfire.
    And the ambassador said all you have to do
    is tell the British to take--
    To go away.
    And Metaxa said, OK.
    And Metaxa died within 24 hours.
    Oh.
    Then the King appoints another prime minister.
    The same ambassador goes to the new prime minister, gives him
    the same message.
    And the new prime minister says, OK, [? no big deal.
    ?] And he dies within 48 hours.
    It's the foreign office at work here.
    The third prime minister said no.
    And then the Germans said, OK, then we'll
    have to do it ourselves.
    But to go there, they had to go from Austria,
    they had to go through Hungary, they had to go through Romania,
    they had to go through Serbia and Bulgaria.
    That was four countries to go and--
    Get to Greece.
    --get to Greece.
    And its March.
    He did it.
    But it took him two months.
    And it's the same time that, in two months, March, April,
    May, and the next month, he attacks the Soviet Union.
    He attacks the Soviet Union.
    But he knew that he was two months late.
    But he did it anyway.
    He was dumb.
    But had he done it two months--
    you know?
    But he did it two months later.
    Had he done it in March, when he wanted
    to get rid of Mussolini's gaffe, for all I know, we know,
    he might have gone to Moscow and St. Petersburg,
    and the world would have changed.
    The Russians would have not been part of the winning team.
    Interesting.
    So that's how they came to correct, so to speak,
    Mussolini's mistake.
    Let's go back just a second.
    September 1, 1939, do you remember?
    Did you have a radio at home?
    No.
    That's another story.
    OK.
    Tell me.
    So did anybody have a radio?
    Yes.
    Some people did.
    And there was a radio that a cousin
    of mine who lived in Egypt had left at my aunt's house.
    Irina?
    Irini, yes.
    And when the Germans came, it was illegal to own a radio.
    I took it upon myself to take it apart.
    So it was illegal to own a radio, and you took it apart.
    Yes.
    But at the end of the war, I learned how to make radios.
    And in fact, I have one there, one of the first radios made--
    anyway.
    So we did have radios at the end of-- after the end of the war.
    OK.
    So let me go back to my--
    I assume that you would have heard about the beginning
    of World War II over the radio.
    Do you remember how you learned that the war is
    starting on September 1, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland?
    Oh.
    Do you remember?
    Well, that was newspapers, you know?
    There was-- up to 1940, I knew--
    I had all the news.
    We had all the news from whatever it means.
    There was radio for those people who had radio,
    but most of the news came from newspapers.
    OK.
    And did people talk about that?
    Did they talk about the war?
    Of course.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    A lot.
    And what kind of conversation was going on?
    Do you remember?
    Well, everybody was wondering whether it would hit Greece.
    And we thought that we maintained--
    Metaxas maintained a fantastic neutrality.
    No-- they're not part of anybody.
    If Mussolini had not attacked Greece,
    nothing would have happened.
    But of course, people were wondering.
    And the Italians in August of 1940--
    that is, a few months before they actually attacked--
    torpedoed one Greek navy vessel.
    And we-- nobody at the time-- the official thing
    the government says, we don't know who did it.
    Obviously, it was the Italians because there was nobody else
    that had ability to torpedo.
    And that was an early warning sign that a war might be coming.
    But you know, we didn't know until the 28th of October that
    war is here.
    How did you-- how did it happen in your life?
    That is, how did you find out?
    On the 29th of October, I went to school, as I did every day.
    And the teachers were outside the school,
    telling us, go back home.
    We are at war.
    And that's it?
    And that's it.
    And when I went back home, a neighbor had a radio,
    and he had it up there, and the radio was playing marches,
    and-- you know.
    I went home and said, you know, hey, you know, we're at war.
    By that time, everybody had found out.
    But I learned actually outside my school.
    I went there with my bag, books, and expecting
    to have another class.
    And was there mobilization?
    Yes.
    Who was mobilized?
    Well, there was army, as it always was.
    So was your brother mobilized?
    My brother was not old enough to be mobilized for the war yet.
    But people who were of age were immediately [INAUDIBLE].
    I went to the army later myself, and you know--
    But this is after the war.
    Aye, after the war.
    But the 29th of October, you know,
    the people who started gaining ground to the Italians were
    the ones that were already in the army,
    because every male in Greece has to serve a certain time.
    OK.
    It was a--
    And then, of course, they brought people who had--
    were in reserve, you know?
    So within a few days, weeks, they
    had enough people to support the counterattack.
    But that's how it started.
    OK.
    And then for the next--
    how long was it?
    The next half year or so, there's
    no German presence at all from October to spring of 1941.
    No, May.
    May of 1941.
    1941.
    The Germans came.
    Do you remember that?
    Yeah.
    Can you tell me a little bit about-- what was
    the first things that you saw?
    Well, the first thing that I remember
    is that during the Italian time, the Italian planes would
    come and bomb Thessaloniki.
    And we had trenches dug up to-- when the sirens went.
    [SIREN NOISES] We were going to the trenches.
    But pretty soon, we found that the Italians really
    were dropping bombs wherever, without any particular--
    Target.
    --target.
    Some of them fell in the sea.
    And some just anywhere, and then went back.
    So we didn't go to the trenches anymore.
    But when the Germans came, I had to say at that time,
    I admired their--
    they knew what they were doing.
    They came and went and bombed the electric--
    the power--
    The power plant.
    --plant, the port.
    You know, I could see why they were doing it.
    The Italians, they didn't know what they were doing.
    But anyway, that was the beginning of saying,
    hey, what's coming now is serious.
    [LAUGHS]
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    And then they came--
    after they went through the countries
    that I mentioned before, they broke the Greek--
    the Greeks could not possibly do the same thing to the Germans
    that they did to the Italians.
    And the Germans marched to Thessaloniki,
    and it took them a month to go through the whole Greece.
    That's added to the time that he lost to attack the Soviet Union.
    So were they in Thessaloniki by June 1941?
    I think it was late May.
    I don't remember the exact date, but I mean, there abouts.
    And then another month until they got further south.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    And so he has two attacks then, one onto Greece and the other
    onto the Soviet Union, because that happens in June--
    late June 1941.
    Late June.
    Exactly.
    When he cleared up what he wanted
    to clear without going there, he attacked
    Greece, the Soviet Union.
    Obviously, he would have done it in March if Metaxas did not die.
    And I don't think he died of whatever they thought.
    Not natural causes?
    No.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Two prime ministers in three days is--
    It's quite a coincidence.
    Quite a coincidence.
    Yeah.
    So do you remember the first time you saw a German soldier?
    No.
    And I don't remember whether they had a parade or anything.
    I don't remember.
    What was going on in your neigh-- by the time
    the Germans come in late May 1941,
    what's the mood like in your neighborhood?
    Anxiety, because I don't know that anybody knows what
    to expect after the war starts.
    You know, for Americans who fought World War I
    or World War II long distance, it's different.
    But if you are in the country which is actually
    engaged in the war, you don't know what's going to happen.
    So the Germans came and life continued as well as possible,
    but with a lot of difficulties.
    Such as?
    Well, food became unavailable.
    Mm-hmm.
    No more fish bladders?
    No more fish bladders.
    Because the Germans would take the food.
    And there was no--
    they were controlling all transportation,
    so goods did not move.
    In the villages, people were better off because--
    That's right.
    Food's right there.
    But going to Thessaloniki or Athens
    was difficult. And back then, the Greeks
    ate a lot of beans, which I suppose
    all southern countries do, you know,
    like the Italians, the Spanish, you know.
    Bean soup was the most prevalent food.
    I ate so much bean soup back then
    that I told my mother after the war,
    if things are getting better, I don't
    want to ever have beans again.
    And it's a very interesting thing
    that I got so hooked up to the beans after a while.
    I can't do that, having beans.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Anything-- because I got hooked to the thing.
    So instead of it being something that you had too much of
    and it repelled you, you became addicted.
    Exactly.
    [LAUGHTER]
    OK.
    So anyway, we suffered as well as everybody else, but not
    as well, because you could look down on Main Street here
    and you see people just dropping dead of famine.
    And you could see people, you know, down dead.
    And the municipal cart would go and pick up the bodies.
    It was that bad.
    That bad.
    Now, we were lucky, because somehow we
    were able to have something to eat most of the time.
    Not every day.
    So there were days that you didn't eat.
    Yeah.
    There was no bread.
    Bread is the number one thing that--
    eat.
    There was no bread at all, because the Germans
    were taking all the flour.
    My father had some friends out in the country,
    and they would send us oil, which
    is important in the Greek cooking, and beans.
    And in fact, my father had a friend
    in the postal service in Athens, and he would send postal package
    to that guy who was high up in the postal service in Athens
    as a gift.
    And it was the most-- it was like giving him diamonds.
    And it was-- in Athens, they were worse off than
    Thessaloniki, because Thessaloniki is surrounded
    by agricultural villages that produce agricultural stuff,
    and it was relatively easy to--
    relatively-- to smuggle them in.
    In Athens, much bigger city, doesn't have the same situation.
    So food getting to Athens was a heck of a lot more difficult.
    So anyway, these packages that my father sent of the little
    that we had to him was--
    that guy after the war was thinking that my father
    was the greatest.
    But anyway, that was one part of the Greek occupation.
    That was one of those differences, one of those things
    that became more difficult.
    Yeah.
    Then, of course, there was a curfew.
    You couldn't be out after a certain time.
    I don't remember.
    The trolleys were more or less working.
    Sometimes yes, sometimes not.
    But there were two trolleys, one where the driver was
    and another one in the back.
    And the Germans ruled that the first one
    was for the Germans only.
    The second car was for everybody else.
    Well, [LAUGHS] I remember this strongly,
    that the very few times it was able to move,
    there was just one or two Germans in the front,
    and everybody else, the whole down--
    Packed.
    --back inside and out the second.
    I wish I had a picture of that.
    It must have looked bizarre.
    And one time, I remember I ran and grabbed the first car,
    because I wanted to go there, and I was kind of young.
    And there was a German soldier that saw me,
    and he just kicked me with his boot and kicked me out of the--
    Trolley.
    And I still remember that.
    Was there much military, German military presence
    in the streets?
    No.
    What happened is-- there are two things that I think
    are interesting.
    One is that many Germans soldiers
    in the garrison of Thessaloniki who
    were working on this part of--
    this is--
    You're talking about the main part of town.
    Downtown.
    Downtown by the water.
    That was a street that had been--
    the houses had been burned in the big fire in Thessaloniki
    in 1917 and rebuilt. And those were the best houses
    in Thessaloniki.
    Plus, the beautiful view, because it's the bay.
    So a Greek--
    I mean, a Greek-- a German captain would go by and see
    an apartment there that it is--
    that's good.
    He would go and say, OK.
    I'm coming in today to take charge of the apartment.
    Just get the hell out of here.
    Some were even more--
    I'm coming in 48 hours.
    Get out.
    So many of them--
    I don't know how many--
    just confiscated houses.
    On the other hand, close to where I lived in Charilaou,
    there was a maintenance store for the Germans.
    And I don't know what maintenance they did,
    but you know, there was--
    obviously, they were dealing with machinery and stuff
    like that.
    And I had a gramo-- we had a gramophone.
    And the spring of the gramophone broke.
    So a neighbor of mine and I took the gramophone apart and found
    out that the spring had broken.
    And we took the spring apart and we--
    the two pieces, we joined them with a nail.
    I mean, that is really as rudimentary or elementary
    or whatever as you can do.
    But the spring worked, so when we put it back in its case,
    it was working.
    But in the process, all the grease
    that was in the box that contained the spring had gone.
    So my neighbor said, you know, we need grease.
    I said, no, I need grease.
    He said, yeah, we do.
    I said, well, [INAUDIBLE] where can we buy grease?
    He says, let's go see the Germans.
    So we take the box of--
    or the spring.
    We go to the maintenance store.
    There's a guard there.
    And we did something that is so totally stupid,
    and yet it worked.
    We went there and the guard was, let's say, maybe 20 feet away.
    We show him the box with the spring and said, [NON-ENGLISH].
    And the guy comes back with his gun on his shoulder.
    He comes here.
    He understands what we're saying.
    He takes it, goes inside, and a few minutes later
    comes back with the thing all greased up and gives it to us.
    Now, a few years later, I go into the army.
    And you know, if you're a sentry, as he was,
    and first of all you speak to anybody,
    let alone leave your post and go and do something for a stranger
    is high crime in military.
    So that guy really did something very bad for--
    there were bad Germans and there were good Germans.
    Was this an example of a good German?
    Yes.
    Were there others that you saw?
    Once the Germans of the neighborhood,
    like that maintenance and [INAUDIBLE] others,
    in one of the winters they had some athletic games
    among themselves.
    And I and a bunch of other neighbors went up on a hill
    to watch them.
    And after they're finished and they had something to eat,
    and there were leftovers.
    And they looked at us up there, and they invited us
    to the leftovers.
    We were too afraid.
    We didn't go.
    But the guys were very, I believe--
    what am I trying to say?
    They were sincere.
    Sincere.
    You know?
    They really wanted to--
    come on.
    But we were afraid.
    And one time, another time that is worth saying I
    think that Duffy heard this story many times.
    It was towards the end of the war,
    and what happened is people in the barracks--
    I keep calling them barracks, but there's units--
    in the summer would go out, because it's hot.
    There was no AC or anything like that or a fan.
    And so they hide in the house.
    They would pull out chairs and sit in front of the houses.
    And so would the people from--
    The other side.
    And well, that was this particular time.
    It must be 1945.
    I don't know.
    We're sitting there, my father and people
    from the neighborhood.
    I would say about a dozen people.
    And I was there, and I believe my brother.
    And we see from the corner a green uniform.
    Green was the uniform of the Germans.
    And everybody freezes, sat up.
    It was-- there was no other German that everybody
    came through that street.
    But when he comes close, he's a kid.
    He's 14 years old.
    Maybe 15.
    I mean, he's a kid.
    Didn't have any--
    No beard yet.
    --any hair yet.
    So my father gets up and says, Anastasia, bring me the cognac.
    My mother hears this, says, are you crazy?
    He sees the kid.
    Brings out the cognac.
    He used to make cognac.
    And she gives it to the kid.
    The kid is given a chair.
    He sits down.
    He speaks no Greek, of course.
    We speak no German.
    But you know, there is an international language
    that develops.
    And then he begins saying, Hitler no good.
    And we couldn't agree more.
    But--
    You don't say it.
    --you don't say it.
    Yeah.
    It's a very interesting situation.
    Now, he was a good German.
    I mean, he saw families out there.
    And remember, his family is in Bavaria.
    And you know, he came for comfort,
    but he didn't wear the right uniform.
    [LAUGHS]
    Yeah.
    So anyway, that's--
    That's what-- so what happened-- tell me now.
    Let's turn to what happened to the Jews.
    Well, I cannot really say too much about what happened early
    on.
    I know that there were people who were--
    downtown Jews were occupied.
    There were some pictures that you showed me.
    Nancy showed--
    Platia Eleftherias.
    That's the Liberty Square, the biggest square in Thessaloniki,
    where they rounded up Jews there.
    And they actually beat them.
    You know, physical--
    This is stuff you saw or stuff you heard?
    No.
    Stuff I heard.
    OK.
    Was this soon after the German occupation?
    I don't remember.
    OK.
    But sometime before the main event.
    And the Jews of my neighborhood were not particularly happy,
    but nobody was happy, you know?
    They were not, let's say--
    my recollection is they were not unhappier
    than we were, because they didn't know that anything would
    happen to them in particular.
    OK.
    That's what I was after.
    That's what I wanted to get a sense of.
    Was there more anxiety, more fear,
    or as much fear as everybody was having?
    Yeah.
    The latter.
    But up until November--
    October 28, 1940, we knew what was going on
    in the rest of the world, because you know,
    the newspapers were covering news as usual.
    But after that, you only got news
    that were coming to you from the German information.
    And of course, it was nothing--
    we knew nothing of what is happening elsewhere.
    But somehow, things have a way of trickling down,
    and we knew that the Jews in Poland had been taken away.
    How that thing came down, I don't know.
    But as I said before, there's no way
    ever you can stop the flow of news and information.
    So what happened to Poland--
    in Poland was known.
    And in fact, there is a big question
    as to what happened in Thessaloniki,
    because if you saw the film The Pianist, which described pretty
    well what happened in Warsaw, it's exactly what happened
    in Thessaloniki.
    I mean, exactly the same technique, the same everything.
    Even the uniforms were the same.
    So describe it.
    Describe it.
    That was known to the rabbi of Thessaloniki.
    Must be [INAUDIBLE] 17 synagogues.
    They have a lot of rabbis, and plus the head rabbi.
    Because they went-- the Germans went to the head rabbi
    and told him exactly the same thing that they
    told the rabbi in Warsaw.
    Look, you know, we Germans don't like you guys.
    You know, we want to sort of keep you at arm's length.
    So I want you to do the same--
    this thing.
    Just move all the Jews in one place,
    so we don't want you mixed with the rest of the population.
    Now, they had done the same thing in Warsaw.
    You know, the guy in Thessaloniki knew it.
    And he said, OK, I'll do it.
    That was stupid.
    Some people say it was treason.
    I don't know what.
    But in fact, the chief rabbi in Thessaloniki
    agreed to the Germans to actually organize the Jews
    in sort of an almost military fashion that
    enforced the movement of the Jews
    from the various spots in the ghettos, in Charilaou, 151,
    and the one up in Vardaris.
    Put them in one place.
    And where was that place?
    There was probably one in Vardaris.
    There were two places, perhaps.
    And one in 151.
    So not in Charilaou.
    Not in Charilaou.
    The guys in Charilaou went to 151.
    Did you see that?
    Yeah.
    You know, there was the people like one of my neighbors
    became one of those Jewish--
    Was he a policeman, like a Jewish policeman,
    or a Jewish guard, or--
    Yeah, whatever you want to call him.
    That actually enforced this movement of everybody
    to go to one place.
    And when that was accomplished, then those guys no longer
    had any power or any strength or anything.
    They were just-- just like any other Jew.
    Then the Germans came with their trucks
    and put everybody in the trucks, took them to the train station,
    and boom.
    Out.
    Did you see any part of that?
    No.
    That's-- before they were taken from Charilaou and taken
    to wherever they were taken, that's when I said earlier
    the incident happened when my mother asked Rachel, hey,
    give me [INAUDIBLE].
    And then Rachel just says ah, says,
    you know, they are taking us there to work
    and they are bringing us back.
    That's what they were telling them, of course.
    So how is it that your family would have known more?
    More what?
    More that that's not what it's going to be,
    that it's going to be far more dangerous than that?
    We didn't know, but we thought.
    Are you kidding me?
    You're taking a family, including babies,
    under bad work conditions to Germany to work
    and they will bring you back?
    I mean, that's stupid.
    That doesn't happen.
    I mean, it was clear.
    And also, we knew that the people in Poland
    had been taken to Auschwitz and killed.
    That-- as I said before--
    You knew this.
    As I said before, that's the kind of news
    that you didn't read it in the paper, but somehow it came.
    OK.
    So if we knew it, they knew it.
    But they were hanging on.
    On the other hand, what else could they do?
    So you're saying they were--
    They themselves were convinced by the Germans
    to police themselves and put themselves in one place
    where they could not get away.
    So your neighborhood emptied out.
    Yes.
    Did anybody come back-- come in there and lived in those houses?
    Yes.
    Yes.
    But I wanted to say one more.
    This thing happened in Thessaloniki and it also
    happened in a town maybe 100 miles--
    I don't know-- north of Thessaloniki, Kastoria.
    And that is where we met Nancy where they have a fantastic
    documentary.
    Did you see that?
    We're talking about-- you're referring to Nancy Hartman who
    was with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's
    Archives.
    And there was a documentary shown at the museum, the name
    of which was--
    what was it called?
    The name of the town?
    No, the name of the documentary.
    I don't know.
    He's going to tell you.
    OK.
    All right.
    We'll come to that name.
    But just so that someone in the future who listens to this
    knows what we're referring to.
    It was fantastic.
    But this is a town close to Thessaloniki
    where there were relatively many Jews as a percent.
    I don't know what the percentage was.
    But enough for the Germans to go there.
    It was an insignificant town.
    And they picked up the Jews there
    before they did in Thessaloniki.
    And what I'm trying to get to is that why
    it happened in Thessaloniki and in Kastoria, that little town,
    because the concentration of Jews was high.
    As you can see in that map, there was 20% of the population.
    That's a high percentage.
    In Athens, nobody happened-- nothing happened.
    Nobody-- no Jew was ever bothered--
    was bothered, or-- no--
    in Athens, because there were relatively few Jews.
    So are you seeing the percentage of Jews
    in Thessaloniki was about 20% of the total population?
    I-- yeah.
    Don't put that--
    I don't know.
    But looking at the--
    The graph that you made.
    And you know, and just--
    I would say that's about right.
    OK.
    Hang on just a second.
    The name?
    Trezoros, The Lost Jews of Kastoria.
    Trezoros, The Last-- The Lost Jews of Kastoria
    is the name of the documentary that you saw that talks
    about the Kastoria Jews.
    But it is such a beautiful, beautifully done thing.
    I would love to own it if it ever becomes available.
    And it gives-- the guys who did that documentary
    did a great job finding even films before the war.
    I didn't even know there was actually a film made.
    That they were make-- yeah, that these things were done.
    And-- yeah.
    Anyway, it was--
    OK.
    So are you saying there was no roundup of Jews in Athens?
    No.
    Uh-huh.
    Because they were more dispersed,
    there weren't as many?
    Yeah.
    I mean, the Germans are great organizers,
    very efficient people.
    They did it Thessaloniki, because Thessaloniki
    was a joke for them, as well as Warsaw.
    But there were other cities where the Germans were--
    where the Jews were not taken away, because it was difficult.
    But in Thessaloniki, not only was it
    that there were a lot of them, but they were also in one place.
    So even if the rabbi did not cooperate,
    if the Germans had to do it all by themselves,
    It was relatively easy.
    All they had to do, go to Charilaou, go to 151.
    And if they didn't get everybody,
    they would get the lot.
    But in Athens, there was no such thing.
    OK.
    But when they left your neighborhood,
    there was no German military presence.
    It was all done by who the rabbi had appointed
    within the Jewish community?
    Or was there a German military presence?
    No, there was-- when everybody was taken into the--
    From your neighborhood.
    --from my neighborhood, there were no Germans there.
    But the Germans came-- after the-- everybody was
    going there immediately in 24 or 48 hours, then the Germans came.
    Oh, I see.
    So they didn't stay there long.
    It was only for a day or two before they're put on trucks.
    Yeah.
    I see.
    And they were-- talking about the Jewish people,
    once they did their job, then they would just
    let everybody else.
    They didn't have any authority or anything.
    So that was a very well done job, I would say,
    if I were to do it, you know.
    And there is a--
    Well executed, you're saying.
    Very well-- I admire the Germans.
    And actually, there is a theory that the guy who did that
    is the guy who did it in Warsaw as well,
    Waldheim, who ended up being the second
    or one of the secretaries of the United Nations before--
    You mean Waldheim?
    Yeah.
    Oh.
    You think that Waldheim organized the Thessaloniki
    roundup as well?
    There are some people who say.
    OK.
    I see.
    I see.
    But whether that's true or not, I don't know.
    Of course--
    Let me come back to-- let me come back to that part
    where you say I admire the Germans.
    Let's make sure that we understand
    what you mean by that.
    Well, I think the Germans in general
    are very well-organized people.
    Very efficient.
    They do things well.
    Look at them.
    They lost the war.
    Germany was in troubles after '45,
    and they were able to become again the number one
    industrial power in Europe.
    OK.
    So I mean, what's right is right.
    OK.
    But you're not necessarily approving.
    No.
    Oh, OK.
    No, I'm not.
    I just wanted to make sure that that's on tape.
    I mean, you know, somebody may kill me--
    kill me.
    And if he is a good shot, I would still say--
    OK.
    [LAUGHTER]
    OK.
    That's a good shot.
    Yeah.
    Facts are facts.
    OK.
    OK.
    So your neighborhood empties out.
    Then within a few days, Thessaloniki empties out
    of its majority of its Jews.
    What happens then?
    Who moves into your neighborhood?
    Well, at the same time, there were
    all kinds of things happening in the country.
    A lot of people lost their homes in the villages
    because of German activity.
    And there was resistance attempts
    in a lot of parts of Greece.
    Some of them good, some of them not.
    But whatever had happened, the German reaction
    was always to destroy the village where that happened.
    So all of a sudden, those people in the villages
    found themselves without a house, and many of them
    went to the larger civil areas like Thessaloniki.
    And they had to stay somewhere.
    And all of a sudden, you know, there
    are a bunch of houses which are available.
    So our neighbors changed from Jews
    to refugees, Greek refugees.
    By the time you mentioned that incident close
    to the end of the war where there
    is a young German boy, about 14 years old, and he comes by
    and all of the neighbors are outside on their chairs
    because it's hot, and you know, you're
    chatting with one another, was the neighborhood completely
    filled up again?
    Yeah.
    OK.
    So was there any sign that there had been Jews there?
    I don't know how to answer that.
    The synagogue was still there, I suppose.
    I don't remember.
    But tragic as that the event was,
    it was not the only thing that was happening.
    There was a war going on.
    There was-- all of a sudden, the resistance
    became a major problem because the resistance was a good idea,
    but it turned out that it became a political thing.
    It was not so much resistance against the Germans
    as the resistance A against the resistance B. Became
    a political thing.
    So they weren't able to unite against resistance
    to the Germans.
    No.
    And who were the forces--
    the various forces within the Greek resistance?
    Well, there were a number of them which were more or less OK.
    But unfortunately, there was one that
    became very prevalent and very well organized,
    and it was communist.
    And it was helped by the Russians,
    and they got supplies from Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.
    All supplied by [INAUDIBLE].
    Like today, where the Axis gets their various forces
    outside, supplies, the things--
    they find ways to--
    To do it.
    --to do it.
    And that is one thing.
    I never liked Roosevelt in this particular instance.
    He's the one that did it.
    When he went to Yalta, when the Yalta--
    Conference?
    --Conference took place-- and actually,
    we took once a cruise and went to the room where the--
    In Yalta.
    In Yalta.
    And we found out that Stalin and Roosevelt stayed
    in one very nice house, but Churchill stayed in another one
    several miles away.
    So after the work was over, Churchill went to his house,
    and Churchill-- and Stalin and Roosevelt
    stayed together for the evening and in the morning
    for breakfast.
    So Stalin had all the time to do his talking to Roosevelt
    without Churchill being there and keeping him straight.
    And what they did in Yalta was, to my way
    of thinking, a treason, because they gave a big part of Europe
    to Soviet Union, which they didn't have any--
    they shouldn't, you know?
    All the neighbors of Greece were given.
    You know, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania.
    [CLEARS THROAT] Excuse me.
    Certainly wouldn't agree with that.
    I mean, I'm sure he didn't at the time,
    but then it was two versus one.
    But Churchill put his foot down on Greece.
    He wanted Greece [INAUDIBLE].
    So what Stalin did, after he got in Yalta what he got,
    he wanted to take Greece anyway.
    So he used this Resistance Army, which
    became less and less appealing to the Germans,
    and more intending to establish itself as the next power--
    In Greece.
    --in Greece.
    And in fact, it wasn't until Churchill
    sent some troops in Athens that they might have done it.
    But Churchill saved Greece.
    And then the Greek army began.
    So it's interesting.
    From your story, we have both British betrayal
    and British support in that Metaxas disappears
    and the other prime minister disappears,
    and you suspect the foreign office in their demise.
    Well, of course, because that was a specific reason.
    The British found the attack of Mussolini
    to Greece to be something that they needed to help.
    They helped.
    And then they understood the Germans wanting them out.
    But for them, it was a way to--
    Get into--
    Get into it.
    So when the prime minister said, OK, we're
    going to go along with the Germans,
    we're going to ask you to go away,
    they didn't want to go away.
    So it was-- it was not against--
    something against Greece, I don't think.
    It was that this man, Metaxas, held the power at the time.
    He was a prime minister and he was a dictator.
    He could say to the Germans, yes, I'm
    sending the British home or not.
    And he said not.
    And the British said, no, we want to stay here.
    And we will stay here.
    And we will stay here.
    Well--
    And it's--
    And that caused the Germans to have to go and do it.
    So I understand the British doing it.
    I mean, in the war, you have to do bad things.
    Would I do it?
    Would I kill Metaxas?
    I don't know.
    But I'm glad I didn't have to make that decision.
    So let's go back down to a more personal level now.
    You've painted this picture of more
    was going on in Greece after the deportation of the Jews,
    and particularly the resistance--
    the development of the resistance movements,
    the forces behind that, and their fight amongst each other
    as well as against the Germans, and the rise of the communist
    underground supported by Stalin.
    How did that play out in your life, in your family's life,
    in your neighborhood's life?
    How did that affect you?
    Well, it didn't last long, because fortunately,
    as I said earlier, the British managed to have a confrontation
    or a fight with the guerrillas.
    And at the same time, the Greek army started getting organized.
    So the guerrillas were not that many,
    but they had the power, because they were the first ones.
    Nobody else was around almost.
    But the Greek army was--
    it was possible for the Greek army
    to organize itself enough to begin pushing them back.
    Was there support in Thessaloniki for the guerrillas
    or the Greek army?
    Well, it was a political thing.
    OK.
    And that was part of the answer to your question,
    is that it polarized people.
    OK, the Germans left, but now who is going to run the country?
    One of the various political parties.
    The communist party was very strong.
    Are we still talking--
    But there were other parties as well.
    And you know, the communists were
    strong, but not that strong.
    Are we now talking post-war years?
    Post-war.
    OK.
    I'm still within the war.
    I want to get a sense of, was there
    anyone in your neighborhood, for example,
    who supported the communist guerrillas against the Germans?
    Yes.
    OK.
    Because-- but that continued and was documented after the war.
    Let's stay within the war, though.
    We'll go after the war.
    I want to find out about that.
    But I want to know--
    let's say if the Jews are taken away--
    when?
    In 1941?
    No, they were taken in March of '43.
    They're taken away in March of '43.
    So until March of '43, they live in their own communities
    and there aren't any particular restrictions against them.
    And it's only then when they are told
    to move into that one location that the change happens.
    Yes.
    So for about a year and a half under German occupation,
    there is no anti-Jewish regulation that's
    put in place that you remember.
    That I remember.
    I cannot say no.
    But if there was any serious, I would remember it.
    There may be things that would not clear--
    There were a lot of things happening at that time,
    you know?
    The Jews is one thing, but the guerillas was another.
    Did people have to wear yellow stars?
    Do you remember them wearing yellow stars?
    Not until the rabbi started cooperating with the Germans.
    OK.
    So this is very soon before the actual deportations,
    to be able to identify who's Jewish.
    Yeah.
    All right.
    So in 1943, they're taken away.
    When did you say it was in '43?
    March?
    March of '43.
    March of '43.
    And so we've got another two years
    of the war left before it ends.
    Just over two years.
    Yeah.
    During those two years, how did those resistance activities
    that you're talking about, how did those manifest themselves?
    Did your brother, who's now 22, 23 years old,
    did he join anything like that?
    No.
    Did your parents support any one underground
    over another underground?
    No.
    Well, I myself towards the very end
    joined one of those non-communist things,
    but I didn't really do anything other
    than just take a piece of paper here to there.
    But my family had no involvement of any consequence.
    OK.
    Either the larger family with your uncles--
    and did you have cousins or anything--
    No.
    No.
    No.
    No.
    But politically, we were positioned very much
    against the communists, you know?
    There were other emerging resistance forces
    that represented political factions other than communist.
    Those continued, of course, after the war.
    They became political parties.
    But that sort of thing was started in--
    in fact, not even started.
    I would say continued, because there
    were political parties before.
    So we were among the extreme right, you would say,
    in the right in the sense of anti-communist.
    OK.
    OK.
    Did I understand that you helped rescue some Jews?
    Your family helped rescue somebody?
    Hide.
    Hide.
    Tell me about that.
    OK.
    My uncle--
    Irini's husband.
    Irini's husband-- had a--
    What was his-- excuse me.
    What was his name, your uncle?
    Irini's husband?
    Christos.
    Excuse me?
    Christos.
    Christos.
    And his last name?
    Christidis.
    Christidis.
    OK.
    So Christos--
    Christidis.
    Christidis.
    Had a cousin.
    And the cousin was an officer in the Greek army.
    I think he was a colonel at the time.
    And he distinguished himself during the four months
    of the war against the Italians.
    And eventually, he came back.
    The Greek army, of course, was dissolved.
    And he was married to a Jew.
    Her name was Dolly.
    And she was a French Jew.
    And his family-- her family was part of the Jews in Ladadika,
    the oil--
    Area that you talked about.
    Yeah.
    And apparently quite wealthy.
    I'll explain in a minute what I mean.
    The officer-- and his name was Archimedes--
    left Greece.
    He smuggled himself to Egypt where
    there was a small Greek unit, a battalion.
    More than a battalion.
    I don't know.
    And he went there because he was patriotic.
    He wanted to be with whatever--
    his Greek army is in the Egypt, but that's it at the moment.
    So Dolly and her two children were in an apartment,
    downtown Thessaloniki.
    But see, because she was not in the ghettos of Charilaou,
    151, she happened to be like my aunt, a Jew, but she was not--
    Known.
    --known, you know.
    So the Germans did not go to give her a yellow star
    because they didn't know--
    they didn't know her.
    So she lived there for a while with her children.
    And one day, she went out with her children to do shopping
    or whatever.
    And she went back.
    She was on the third floor of that apartment building.
    And she was going up.
    The two children began going-- being children,
    ran up the stairs.
    And the neighbor on the first floor opened the louvers
    and said, Mrs. Angelopoulos, the Gestapo's upstairs.
    Now, I have no idea how the Gestapo found out about her,
    but they did.
    And she runs up the stairs and grabs the kids and says, shush.
    And pulls them back and gets out of the building,
    goes to the corner.
    And they begin running, and they went to Aunt Irini's house.
    Was this the house, you know, they were relatives of.
    And there is a family council, what to do with these people?
    OK.
    So your uncle is related to the Greek officer?
    Yes.
    His cousin.
    His cousin.
    OK.
    Got it.
    OK.
    So what to do?
    Yes.
    What to do.
    And my family-- and I don't even know who else was there.
    But I was there.
    And-- what to do?
    And the suspicion was that if the Gestapo found them
    where they were--
    and we have no idea how they found.
    But if they for whatever reason wanted
    to re-investigate further, cousin is a perfect place
    that anybody would start with.
    So that was not a good place for them to stay.
    With Irini and her husband.
    Irini-- yeah.
    So at that time my father said, you'll come with us.
    To this day, I find this very extraordinary,
    because my father--
    yeah.
    Yeah.
    He was a guerrilla at one time when he was young.
    He was not really a person that you would say he's a risk taker.
    And in fact, he was a very conservative person.
    And him saying all of a sudden, no, come with us,
    was rather extraordinary, then and still now.
    So they came with us and they stayed in that little apartment
    that we had in Charilaou.
    And the kids were about my age, a boy and a girl.
    And they stayed in our house for about six months.
    And then there was--
    an association-- I don't know--
    that was following people like Dolly [INAUDIBLE] know was
    Jewish or not Jewish, probably Jewish,
    that was trying to take care of Jews that were--
    Hiding.
    --hiding.
    And the idea was that sooner or later, those people
    would be found in our house.
    And I'll tell you why.
    And it would be safer in Athens where they can really hide.
    But going from Thessaloniki to Athens at that time
    was not very easy, but they did it.
    So one day, they just left and went to Thessaloniki.
    To Athens, you mean.
    I'm sorry, to Athens.
    I'm saying why it was not particularly
    safe to be in Charilaou.
    That is because, as I described earlier, where we lived
    was open.
    You know, there are all the neighbors, small units,
    everybody pulling out their chairs, people visiting them,
    people visiting us.
    And one thing about Dolly is the minute you saw her,
    you knew she was a Jew.
    I mean, she had the classic Jewish physiognomy.
    I mean, they could put her on Israel's coins.
    So it was easy to spot her.
    And in fact, another big question in my mind
    is they stayed there for six months.
    A lot of people came to visit us, to visit our neighbors,
    were visiting-- you know, staying outside in the summer.
    How come one of these guys didn't go and claim the bounty?
    I don't know, because there was a bounty to turn them in.
    We were lucky.
    But anyway--
    They were lucky.
    Everybody was lucky.
    Everybody was lucky.
    Everybody was lucky.
    Yeah.
    There was a severe punishment if you hide--
    hidden Jews.
    It was like Anne Frank, you know?
    My family would be in trouble.
    Anyway, eventually, of course, when the war was over,
    the officer who was in Egypt by now is a general,
    and he became chief of staff of the Greek army.
    And the family had some gratitude for us,
    because we took some considerable risk,
    as a matter of fact.
    And-- ah.
    The connection to Ladadika.
    I think Dolly was--
    I don't know that for a fact, but I'm piecing things together.
    She was so wealthy, because her family was part
    of the owners of those oil--
    Olive oil.
    --stores.
    And also, she was from France.
    Her Greek was a little bit so-so.
    She had a lot of jewels.
    I know that because the family lived
    a long time out of bracelets and pendants
    and stuff that had value.
    But I mean, they lasted years, so she
    must have had a lot of them.
    So this is how she kept themselves
    fed during the hard times is by selling the jewelry.
    Yeah.
    And then my niece has been asked by the two children who
    inherited whatever she had.
    She goes to Ladadika and some of those stores
    which still exist and collects rent and sends them to the kids.
    No kidding!
    One of whom lives in New Orleans and the other lives in Paris.
    OK, hang on just a second.
    [LAUGHS]
    I'll go back to where we were.
    So at any rate, the children survived?
    They survived?
    And after the war, they felt gratitude towards your family
    for how you helped save them.
    Yeah.
    And their father being a big wheel in the Greek army, when--
    my brother was in the army before I was.
    But when I went, for example, I was
    in a training school outside Athens,
    quite a bit outside Athens.
    And one afternoon, an officer comes and says,
    I have orders to take you to Athens.
    I said, what?
    [INAUDIBLE] you better go.
    It's an order.
    OK.
    Well, my-- we call ourselves cousins, you know?
    Dolly's-- Dolly's children and we call each other cousins.
    My cousin had a party, and he wanted me to be at the party.
    This is Dimitri.
    Dimitri.
    OK.
    He told his father, hey, get George here.
    So his father called the--
    he is the big [INAUDIBLE].
    I need him, and he didn't have to tell anybody, because he's--
    The chief of staff, yes.
    [LAUGHS]
    So I went there. but part had--
    part of the party.
    And then they took me back.
    It was quite a bit.
    It was at least an hour and a half.
    You know, back then, an hour and a half on a truck
    was a long time.
    Anyway, that has nothing to do with anything else, but that's--
    Well, it's your connection after the war.
    It is the kind of connection that you had--
    Then my so-called cousin Dimitri who worked for the--
    ba, ba, ba, ba.
    [CLICKS TONGUE] International Bank.
    The World Bank?
    The International Monetary--
    Fund.
    Mm-hmm.
    And then he started a mutual fund of his own
    that was only open to United Nations personnel,
    and he made some money that way.
    Did anyone who was taken away from Charilaou come back?
    No.
    Not that I know.
    Chances are not.
    OK.
    Do you remember where you were when the war ended?
    I was in Thessaloniki exactly that minute.
    And I don't know that it was a minute when it ended for us.
    But right after the war, Thessaloniki
    was occupied by the guerrillas, the communist guerrillas.
    And I lived for three months under their regime.
    It was terrible.
    Tell me about that.
    Well, we had-- we didn't have the Germans.
    Now we had the Greeks who were wearing
    the Greek communist uniform.
    And they had all kinds of rules and regulations about living,
    but I don't remember exactly, but they were not
    really [INAUDIBLE] pleasing, because they were real Bolshevik
    kind of communists, you know?
    I remember the mother of a friend of mine
    who was sympathetic to the communists,
    saying, they say they are going to outlaw combs,
    because combing is a luxury.
    I see.
    So no more combs.
    Well, I didn't see--
    live-- well, they didn't live to impose such things.
    But I'm telling you that they were not only communists,
    but they were real--
    Kooky.
    Yeah.
    [LAUGHTER]
    So on the more serious side, though,
    was there any kind of political fear during those three months?
    Were there were people who were arrested?
    Were there any kinds of controls that you
    would feel in your daily life?
    Not that I remember.
    I'm sure it happened.
    It didn't happen close enough for me to remember.
    We thought in our family that this was a bad--
    another bad chapter in a history that
    was not too pleasant so far.
    But we didn't think that that would last.
    We thought that the communists were there.
    They had the power.
    But the power was not enough to keep them there given
    the fact that the new army was possible to be organized quickly
    enough with the help of the British
    and the officers who only four years ago were trained officers
    who were able to do what they did.
    There still was an army corps.
    There still was a military.
    Yeah.
    Once the army was able to get organized and going,
    it was possible to beat the--
    But it took a long time.
    We are talking here about--
    let's see.
    When I went to the army, which was 1950, it was still going on.
    Oh, really?
    There still was a partisan war going on?
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    The Greek army cleaning up parts of where the guys--
    those guys had established themselves.
    And in fact, I probably would have gone there,
    because I was in the army at that time,
    except I was chosen to become an interpreter,
    and I spent half of my military life in Athens being a playboy,
    you know?
    Not bad.
    Not bad.
    [LAUGHS]
    But other guys who had been to the military school with me
    were up in the mountains fighting.
    What language did you-- did you study languages in that you
    became an interpreter?
    Well, I spoke some English.
    And you spoke-- and where did you learn English?
    Oh, a lot of places.
    It started with--
    Your mother.
    My mother.
    Your mother spoke some English?
    No.
    She didn't speak English.
    That's another question in my head.
    One day she said--
    incidentally, back in those days, everybody who was educated
    spoke French.
    And one of the things you learned in school was French.
    My mother spoke French.
    And one day, she comes to me and says,
    you're a smart guy, smart boy.
    And she said, I think you ought to learn a language.
    And said, you have to learn English.
    Now, why she said that, I have no idea.
    Why did she choose English?
    I don't know.
    She's smart.
    She was prescient.
    As far as the language, the world language,
    that was the one.
    It was no longer French.
    You know, it was very unusual.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    And she hired an Armenian lady who started teaching me English.
    And I remember a book that she brought me.
    The first thing, sitting, standing, and bowing.
    [LAUGHTER]
    And that's how you learned--
    That's the three first words that I learned.
    [LAUGHTER]
    So-- and then I took it upon myself to continue.
    I went here and there and I more or less convinced
    people that I can speak English with maybe an interpreter.
    And this was in-- what years were you
    in Athens as an interpreter?
    Early '50s.
    In 19-- I cannot--
    I don't remember the exact year, but I say maybe '52.
    So you're, like, 20, 21 years old.
    Yeah.
    To '54.
    Then finally, it was time for me to be released from the army.
    My service was three years.
    And then I was an interpreter attached
    to the American military mission.
    There was a bunch of officers sent by the Pentagon
    to train Greek officers, and they knew weaponry.
    And there was about 30 or so of them.
    And that's where I was attached as an interpreter.
    [INAUDIBLE] about 4 or 5.
    So that's your first American connection.
    Yes.
    And when I was discharged from the army,
    the [? admissions ?] offered me a job as a--
    continue as a civilian.
    And you did.
    And I did.
    When did you come to the United States?
    1959.
    So not so-- not so late afterwards.
    I mean, you didn't stay much longer in Greece.
    Well, that's when things get complicated in a different way,
    you know?
    I met an American lady there who actually
    was working on the sixth floor.
    We were-- the American military, which was on the fifth floor,
    and CIA was on the sixth floor.
    Oh.
    Nobody-- everybody knew that that was CIA.
    That's where my former wife used to work.
    But she never said CIA.
    She always said, when I was working for the government.
    [LAUGHS] Anyway, so--
    And that's how you got--
    I was teaching her Greek, because she
    was a Greek scholar at the school,
    and then just, you know, how it happens.
    We got married and I came here.
    OK.
    But did the rest of your family stay in Thessaloniki?
    Yes.
    Including your brother?
    Yes.
    OK.
    In fact, we've traveled a lot.
    My brother has traveled almost not at all.
    But he came here.
    But you say he came to the United States.
    He came here-- who was the president of here?
    Reagan?
    Bush, the first Bush.
    Yeah.
    So in the 1980s.
    He came in the late 1980s.
    OK.
    Well, I think we've come close to the end of our interview,
    but I'd want to ask, is there something
    we haven't talked about that you think is important for us
    to capture?
    I'm sure it is, but it'll probably occur to me
    the minute you leave.
    [LAUGHTER]
    That happens.
    Let me tell you, that happens all the time.
    But hang on just a second.
    In a second, I'll introduce this.
    So Nancy from our photo archives is here with us
    today, Nancy Hartman.
    And she recalls a story you had told her
    before about an incident that happened during the time
    that you were hiding Dolly and her two children.
    Could you tell us that?
    Well, during that time, my brother was--
    [INAUDIBLE] he was 20 years old.
    So he went out with Dolly somewhere.
    I don't know.
    Now, Dolly was hiding, but he was going out, you know?
    And there was a curfew in town, 8 o'clock.
    And she went with my brother.
    I have no idea where they went.
    A store?
    A store wouldn't-- I don't know.
    Maybe they went to visit somebody.
    And they were walking back to Irini's house,
    but it's after 8 o'clock.
    And lo and behold, there is a German patrol.
    Clunk, clunk, clunk.
    Halt. And-- oh my god.
    They look at their watch.
    It's after 8 o'clock.
    And they stop there, and the German patrolman
    shows with his finger the watch, obviously, the time.
    And my brother was kind of a different person from me.
    He was a very extroverted person.
    He grabs Dolly and says, [GERMAN].
    [LAUGHTER]
    And I don't know what she said, you know?
    She was probably peeing in her pants.
    [LAUGHTER]
    I mean, what a time to hide from the Germans and [INAUDIBLE]
    your coat for curfew violation.
    But anyway, the German was I guess one of the good ones.
    He looked at them and says, ah!
    Moved his hand like, get help.
    Go, go, go, go.
    And they ran, you know?
    And they got out.
    It was a close call.
    I can remember my brother coming and saying, [GERMAN]!
    [LAUGHTER]
    To his mother.
    [LAUGHTER]
    But it was some quick thinking on his part.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    Well, obviously, the family became very friendly with us
    after that.
    They were coming to our house not only for my mother's
    cooking, but because you become close under those conditions.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    OK.
    Again, if there is something else that you will remember
    that you think is important, you can get in touch with us later
    and we'll try and make a second brief interview
    to add that part.
    So this is not necessarily the end.
    This can be just for right now.
    There's one thing that's interesting.
    It was-- it was important not to say anything about the Jews.
    You could say it, but you could not write about it.
    And there's things.
    When I was a--
    And you're talking about which time?
    During the war?
    No, after the war.
    After the war.
    During the time when the Jews were taken away,
    which was March '43, and the end of the war.
    When I was at that age, I was publishing
    a handwritten magazine.
    Oh my goodness.
    Oh my goodness.
    And there is all kinds of stuff here.
    During the war years?
    In 1943.
    Oh my.
    Oh, jeepers.
    This was in October, I believe, of '43.
    It was all handwritten.
    And it was circulating in the neighborhood.
    Your work?
    Your-- oh my goodness.
    Yeah.
    So there was all kinds of things here,
    written by a lot of people, but mostly by me.
    And it is comments about the war.
    And that was OK.
    But I did not put anything here that had to do with the Jews,
    because this thing was circulating in the neighborhood
    and I didn't want anything there that had to do with the Jews,
    because that would put me in trouble.
    I could say anything--
    well, more or less anything, more or less acceptable,
    and an analysis of what's going on in the war
    between the Germans and the-- that was OK.
    Really?
    But you couldn't say anything about the Germans or the Jews.
    And there is nothing in all this book, which
    I know covers a couple of years, that
    says anything about the Jews.
    For fear.
    For fear.
    Did you know of people who had said something
    and who were not Jewish, who suffered some repercussions?
    I cannot-- I heard, but I do not remember.
    I cannot-- I cannot make up any story.
    But yeah, there were penalties to people who--
    Who helped.
    --helped.
    This is an amazing work.
    This is an amazing work.
    Well, I will want to talk to you about this book,
    because it is a very important-- if it's contemporary, that is,
    contemporaneous for the time, there
    are few things that are as good witnesses.
    But for this point, at this point what I will do
    is I will say, this concludes the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum interview, unless you
    wanted to say something else right now.
    No.
    The date of this particular issue,
    was one of the first issues, was 29th of October of 1943.
    That was three years after Mussolini attacked.
    But that date is even today celebrated
    as a national day in Greece.
    And it's called the Ohi Day, the no day
    when Metaxas told Mussolini no.
    Oh.
    And you know, this issue was dedicated to that.
    And here's the picture-- or not picture.
    Oh, caricature.
    Caricature of Mussolini.
    Amazing.
    Just amazing.
    Is that your drawing?
    No.
    I can write, but I cannot paint.
    I had a friend who did all the paintings-- all the--
    Drawings, the illustrations.
    Well, as I say, we will talk about this book
    now after I record.
    But for right now, I will say this concludes the United States
    Holocaust Memorial Museum interview with Mr. George
    Ftikas on September 15, 2017, in Falls Church, Virginia.
    Thank you again.
    And in Charilaou.
    [LAUGHTER]
    And I must say, you are--

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    George Ftikas discusses life in Greece during the occupation; being a witness to the deportation of Jews from Thessaloniki; and his family’s involvement in the rescue of Jews related to them by marriage.
    Interviewee
    George Ftikas
    Interviewer
    Navazelskis, Ina
    Date
    interview:  2017 September 15
    Geography
    creation: Falls Church (Va.)

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    2 digital files : WAV.

    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
    Ftikas, George.

    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 George Ftikas on September 15, 2017 in Falls Church, VA.
    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 08:05:45
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn565549

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    Summary (English)

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    Also in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum oral history collection

    Contains interviews with Holocaust survivors, concentration camp liberators, rescuers, relief workers, former POWs, and people of different social and ethnic backgrounds who were targeted by the Nazis and their collaborators or witnessed the events of the Holocaust

    Date: 1989-2023

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    Oral history interview with Eddie Willner

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    Oral history interview with Lisa Dawidowicz Murik

    Oral history interview with Lisa Dawidowicz Murik

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

    Oral history interview with Ernst Weihs

    Oral history interview with Ernst Weihs

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Agnes Vogel

    Oral history interview with Agnes Vogel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dora Goldstein Roth

    Oral history interview with Dora Goldstein Roth

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yocheved Arie

    Oral history interview with Yocheved Arie

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leo Hanin

    Oral history interview with Leo Hanin

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Walter Schnell

    Oral history interview with Walter Schnell

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erna Tebel Stern

    Oral history interview with Erna Tebel Stern

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gerda Blachmann Wilchfort

    Oral history interview with Gerda Blachmann Wilchfort

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gidon Arye

    Oral history interview with Gidon Arye

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carl Knuemann

    Oral history interview with Carl Knuemann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Vogel

    Oral history interview with Michael Vogel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nina Schuster Merrick

    Oral history interview with Nina Schuster Merrick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Rozencwajig Stock

    Oral history interview with Eva Rozencwajig Stock

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ivo Herzer

    Oral history interview with Ivo Herzer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Brodecki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irene Weber

    Oral history interview with Irene Weber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Josef

    Oral history interview with Josef

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Stanislaw Soszynski

    Oral history interview with Stanislaw Soszynski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Lewent

    Oral history interview with Abraham Lewent

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Miriam Storch Lewent

    Oral history interview with Miriam Storch Lewent

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Preben Munch-Nielsen

    Oral history interview with Preben Munch-Nielsen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anny Rubinstein Kast

    Oral history interview with Anny Rubinstein Kast

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Waterford

    Oral history interview with Helen Waterford

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Ward

    Oral history interview with Thomas Ward

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred R. Wohl

    Oral history interview with Fred R. Wohl

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Raya Markon

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jacob Vogel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Philip Vock

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Joseph Gatenio

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mariette Moscovici

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Jack Moss

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Mel London

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gisela Feldman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bert Fleming and Irene Fleming

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Haim Shmueli

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Itka Zygmuntowicz

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Granirer Flor

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Renee Scheuer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Carl Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Lotte Hirsch

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Herma Barber

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral History

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

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral History

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

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