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Oral history interview with Ina Sagen Zigelman

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2015.169.1 | RG Number: RG-50.106.0242

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    Oral history interview with Ina Sagen Zigelman

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Ina Zigelman (née Sagenkahn), born on June 4, 1925 in Memel (Klaipeda), Lithuania, discusses her childhood with her father, a shopkeeper, and her sister Hannah, who was three years older than her; her very large extended family; speaking German at home and learning modern Hebrew after school; enjoying swimming, skating, and ice skating; attending a German public school for four years then to a private high school; having no restrictions between 1933-1938; her father selling his business and leaving after Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia and going to Kovno, Poland (Kaunas, Lithuania); getting affidavits from her mother’s relatives in the United States; going to Kovno and renting two rooms from Jacob Gens (later head of the Vilna Ghetto); attending the Sholom Aleichem Yiddish school; hoping to get visas to go to San Francisco, but the American consulate being closed; the German invasion; her uncle and cousins getting killed; her father hiding in the apartment while she hid in the basement after putting sandbags against the windows during bombings; refusing to wear the yellow star; being ordered into the ghetto August 15, 1941; dismantling radios and other appliances so the Germans would only get damaged goods; her mother being in a bad emotional state; her family of four living in one room with no plumbing; getting a certificate showing she was only 13 so she could stay home, which allowed her to work in her mother’s place; shoveling dirt and loading bricks 14 hours daily at an airport; being involved in the underground teaching young children at night; repairing German soldiers’ uniforms and stealing the insignias to give to the resistance; not going to the partisans as she was afraid her mother would tell someone; losing many friends and relatives at the Ninth Fort; her father losing his eye after being beaten trying to protect some children and then being sent to Dachau; being deported to Stutthof in the summer of 1944; living with nuns and Romanies; sewing numbers on clothing; going by boat from Danzig to Elbing and walking through forests to a village named Truntz; sleeping in tents and digging anti-aircraft trenches; getting strafed by Russian planes in January 1945; being liberated in Torun, Poland by a Russian Jew from Kiev, Ukraine on a white horse on January 23, 1945; sleeping in a railroad station in Alexandrov; being ordered by the Russians to guard cattle, oxen, and horses in a village; getting to the Red Cross Headquarters in Munich, Germany and learning that her father was in Feldafing; she, her sister, and her mother joining her father in September 1945; getting married and celebrating with a can of pineapple juice; working for the UNWRA as an interpreter beginning in December 1945; meeting General Eisenhower when he visited her office; arriving in New York, NY on May 24, 1946 on the S.S. Marine Perch; settling in California; feeling that she lost her teenage childhood; and going back to Kovno, Ninth Fort, Ponary Forest, and Stutthof and finding it painful.
    Interviewee
    Ina Zigelman
    Interviewer
    Gail Schwartz
    Date
    interview:  2015 May 29

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    1 digital file : 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
    Zigelman, Ina, 1925-

    Administrative Notes

    Provenance
    Gail Schwartz, on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch, conducted the interview with Ina Sagen Zigelman by telephone on May 29, 2015.
    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 08:13:15
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn607948

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