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Oral history interview with Susan Flusser Tausig

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2018.153.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.0965

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    Oral history interview with Susan Flusser Tausig
    Transcript
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Mrs. Susan Flusser Tausig on April 26,
    2013, in Manhattan, New York.
    Thank you very, very much for agreeing to speak with us today
    to share some of your story and your family's story.
    I'm going to start with basic questions,
    and we'll go from there.
    I'm at your service.
    Thank you.
    Tell me, what was the date of your birth?
    December 26, 1936.
    I am 81 years old.
    OK.
    And where were you born?
    In Vienna, Austria.
    And what was your name at birth?
    Susan Flusser.
    Susan Flusser.
    I kept my maiden name as my middle name.
    I usually just use the initial, but I gave you the whole name.
    Well, thank you.
    Thank you for doing that.
    And often we ask that because people change their names.
    Yes.
    Some have kept the same parts of their names from before.
    Like, Wilhelm will become Bill, something like that.
    Well, you know, it may have been Suzane.
    Was it?
    Flusser.
    Yeah.
    It was Suzane Flusser?
    But I dislike that.
    I never use it.
    But to my German-speaking friends or my family, I'm Susie.
    Never mind all that other stuff.
    So I'm Susie, or professionally, I didn't want to go around.
    Just call me Susie.
    So I'm Susan, but that's what I was born with, actually
    Christened and all.
    Were you christened?
    Yes, yes.
    Then is one of your parents not Jewish?
    Correct.
    Which one?
    My mother.
    What was her name?
    Her--
    Her first name and her maiden name.
    Her name was Blanca Lipiner.
    Blanca Lipiner?
    Lipiner, L-I-P-I-N-E-R. And there was some--
    she was, if you want to call it that,
    half-Jewish, half-Protestant.
    But in those days, if you are in a middle European environment
    religion and you weren't practicing
    like some people, where it was very important
    and their lives centered around a synagogue--
    but in general, in Austria, where she was,
    it was not a factor.
    So yes, she had one parent who was Jewish, one who wasn't.
    She married my father, who was Jewish both sides.
    But how is it that you came to be christened
    being one-quarter Christian?
    Was she practicing enough?
    I guess.
    OK.
    Just asking.
    Not practicing, but it was, quote, "customary."
    OK.
    Did you have brothers and sisters?
    I had an older brother.
    What was his name?
    Peter.
    Peter Flusser.
    And he passed away about 15 years ago, unfortunately.
    He was older, and he died of complications of diabetes.
    But he was a mathematics professor in Kansas.
    I see.
    How many years older than you was he?
    About seven.
    And he was born, then, in what year?
    1930.
    1930.
    OK.
    And you're 1937, December '26?
    Well, December '36.
    December '36, yes.
    Sorry.
    Yeah, so seven--
    Yeah, it's close.
    It's close.
    And tell me a little bit about--
    well, first of all, I asked your mother's name.
    Your father's name.
    What was your father's name?
    My father's name-- he was called Rudy-- was Rudolf Flusser.
    All right.
    And were they both from families who
    had been in Vienna for a long time, for generations?
    Or were they newly arrived?
    My mother, as far as I know, was from a more established Viennese
    family.
    Her father was an attorney there, as far as I know.
    My father was born in Budapest, Hungary, and he came to Vienna.
    The parents had some business.
    He was mainly in textiles.
    And he came to Vienna and met my mother.
    Actually, he met her brother first.
    And guess what?
    [LAUGHTER]
    So let's talk about both sides of the family a little bit.
    Your mother had how many siblings?
    My mother had three biological brothers and one half-brother.
    We go back now a step to her parents.
    Her father was a widower with two adult children
    when he met the lady who was to become his wife.
    And your grandmother?
    My maternal grandmother.
    She was-- [GASPS] divorced with a little boy, who became--
    he never legally adopted him because that, quote, little boy
    eventually found me to talk to me.
    And so her married name at that point was Morganstern.
    That means before she married?
    Before she--
    After she married?
    After she married.
    I have her maiden name somewhere.
    But my maternal grandmother was a Mrs. Morganstern
    with a young son of 3 or 4 whose name
    was Oscar, who married this widower.
    Named Mr. Lipiner.
    "Lip-ee-nah."
    Right.
    "Lip-ee-nah."
    OK.
    L-I-P-I-N-E-R. There is an interesting aside to that name,
    because my uncle, who then became a practicing physician
    here in New York, he got tired of people saying, hello, Dr.
    "La-Piner."
    So he decided to spell his name differently, L-E-P-E-N-E-R,
    but it was with an i.
    I see.
    And some friends were, oh my goodness,
    he wants to sound like a Frenchman.
    I said, no.
    "Le Pener."
    He just wanted to get closer to the original pronunciation
    of his name.
    But to answer your question, there
    was big brother Oscar, whom they all idolized.
    And then this couple with the two adult children
    and one little one had four of their own.
    Wow.
    That became my Uncle Pepi, who was Joseph, Uncle Fritz, who
    was Siegfried.
    Then came my mother, and then came little Guido.
    So my mother had three biological brothers
    and one half-brother.
    And all I heard from her is they idolized
    that half-brother because his age was closer to them.
    Daddy was an elderly man as far as they were concerned,
    and he was.
    And so if you're in trouble, you go to Oscar,
    and he will intercede with father on your behalf.
    What about the two older children that were
    your grandfather's?
    They did not look kindly on the fact
    that he married a woman so much younger.
    Apparently he married this lady who was just two years older
    than one of his children.
    So well, he was in his 40s, I guess, and she was--
    anyway, I don't remember the exact ages.
    I could look it up somewhere.
    But they decided they didn't really
    want to have much to do with the new family.
    So did you have any contact with them ever?
    No.
    No, my mother didn't even have, and she was--
    that would have been her half-brother and half-sister.
    As far as she told us, there was really no contact.
    Maybe they spoke to their father once in a while.
    But they went--
    Separate ways.
    Right.
    And it was your father, your grandfather, Mr. Lipiner,
    who was the Protestant part of the family and Mrs. Morganstern?
    I never quite figured out if he was half and half.
    But Mrs. Morganstern must have been the Jewish part,
    because her son, Oscar, had his problems when the Nazis came.
    He had married a Christian girl who tried to hide him.
    But then a neighbor ratted him out,
    and he ended up in a work camp.
    But he survived-- not too long, but he just
    barely survived the war.
    So in the camp that Oscar was sent to, it was some labor camp,
    and he was not permitted to wear any protection.
    The other workers could.
    Anyway, his lungs got damaged.
    So from his son, I heard little bit
    about what happened to my mother's oldest brother.
    So that would be Oscar?
    Oscar.
    The half-brother.
    The half-brother.
    So he must have been the Jew.
    I never was quite sure whether the grandfather
    was partly Jewish or not.
    But the children, the other children,
    were allowed to identify however they wanted.
    Excuse me, please.
    So did you--
    So we were at my mother's side of the family.
    So there was the--
    obviously the Jewish oldest brother, the half-brother.
    And then came the four of them.
    And they were Joseph--
    They were left to decide, basically, what they wanted.
    There was no emphasis on any religious education
    in the family.
    So they were secular?
    Hm?
    It was very much a secular family.
    Secular, right, because I know, next--
    the biological brother, the oldest, Pepi, meaning Joseph,
    he managed to come to the United--
    he was a doctor.
    He could manage to come to the US for much earlier than others,
    because he was specializing in some lung--
    in addition to some lung disease.
    And there was an expert in New York.
    So he was involved-- he was the head of the Viennese
    medical something.
    So he came very early on here to work with that expert,
    that specialist.
    Before you were born?
    Oh, yes.
    And he never went back anywhere.
    Next in line was another brother, Fritz,
    or Siegfried, Lipiner.
    And he became a dentist.
    And he was with us in Shanghai.
    Then came my mother.
    Then came a few years nothing.
    I once asked her how come.
    She said, you know, things happen.
    Sometimes, anyway, there may have been,
    but we never talked about a problem.
    And then came little Guido, who was quite a bit
    younger than my mother.
    When was your mother born?
    My mother was born on June 7, 1896.
    OK.
    So she had you when she was about 40?
    40.
    She was 40 years old.
    She was obviously 33 when she had my brother.
    And her baby brother, as she called him, was, I think,
    six years or more, nine years, younger.
    Oh, wow.
    And so she helped raise him because their mother died--
    I think she was only--
    mother told me she was only about 53.
    She died very young.
    So she left behind three--
    all these children.
    But one was still in school, was a little boy.
    And my mother told me how he would come to her office
    and sit at a desk to do his homework.
    And then they would go home.
    So you never knew your oma?
    No.
    No, no, no.
    And so that's my mother's siblings.
    Now, Fritz was in Shanghai.
    He eventually went back to Vienna.
    That was an option I can describe later,
    that people from Shanghai, if they wanted to get out now,
    they could agree to be repatriated
    to where they came from.
    We'll come to that point.
    That's interesting.
    So Fritz went back to Vienna and became--
    practiced dentistry in Vienna.
    There was no place else.
    The youngest of my uncles--
    Guido.
    --Guido, he went to South Africa.
    Oh, wow.
    He went-- and he identified totally Jewish
    and married a Jewish lady.
    He had a friend, classmate, and they made a wager together.
    Look, we have to get out.
    Now, we don't know if we can succeed, but we'll try.
    So you're the one who's going to America.
    I will go to South Africa.
    If one fails, there's another one to help.
    So Guido ended up in South Africa.
    And his friend-- do you know if his friend ended up in America?
    Yes, in Connecticut, in--
    I forget where.
    Danbury, I think.
    Yeah, Danbury.
    So when Guido left Vienna, did you know him
    as you were a little girl?
    Not then.
    Not then.
    I met him.
    He was my favorite uncle.
    He was delightful.
    But I only met him as an adult, because I
    was six months old when my parents left Vienna.
    Really?
    So I do not remember the--
    people ask me, do you still remember something?
    And I say, no, I don't know the color of my crib.
    I was six months old when they--
    both parents went from Vienna to Prague.
    OK.
    We'll get there.
    We're right now still on family, who is who.
    Who's who.
    Who's who.
    So does that pretty-- and obviously,
    your grandfather, Lipiner, you wouldn't have known
    because he was so much older.
    He was old, and he passed away before all--
    I think both that grandfather and grandmother passed away
    before Nazi anything.
    Yeah, OK.
    Which is different from my father's side.
    So if there's nothing else to add right now to your mother's
    side, any other people that are significant
    who were part of their lives, their social circle
    from your mother's side?
    Not right now.
    It may pop up, because that oldest uncle's son found me.
    I forgot to ask his name.
    What was his name, first name?
    It'll come to me.
    Fine.
    But he is a Morgenstern.
    Oscar was a Morgenstern.
    He was a Morgenstern, right.
    Oscar Morgenstern had two sons.
    And the one I know--
    well, anyway, his name will come to me.
    One of them made it his business to try
    to find my mother after the war, because he survived.
    And eventually, through my uncle Guido, he found my married name.
    And when I went to Vienna, he got on a train all night just
    to get to Vienna so he could meet--
    With you.
    --his little cousin.
    Aw.
    All right.
    Let's turn to your father's side of the family.
    He's from Budapest.
    Living in Vienna.
    Living in Vienna.
    Did he come alone, or did his family come with him?
    Or did he come with his family?
    How did that transfer happen, and who was there?
    I don't think they were in Vienna, because--
    or they were--
    I know them to be in Prague.
    So they were-- the rest of the family I knew to be Czech.
    There were Hungarians living in first Vienna and then in Prague.
    And his parents, my father's parents, I
    never knew Hugo Lipiner.
    I don't know when he passed away.
    My little cousin now knows all the dates,
    and she's been doing the family history.
    And his mother, Elizabeth, who was quite the family
    matriarch that I heard a lot about.
    And she did not survive.
    And she had three children.
    My father was the youngest of three.
    Who were the others?
    The others were the oldest, a girl, Hermine Flusser.
    OK.
    The middle one, Jula, I guess Julius.
    The Hungarian was Jula.
    And then my father.
    Rudolf.
    Rudolf.
    And Hermine married, I guess, at the age of 17 or something, 18.
    Anyway, and she had a baby girl.
    And that was my cousin.
    And that made my father an uncle at the age of 10.
    Oldest, got married, had a baby.
    He was an uncle.
    And that part of the story is that Hermine's marriage did not
    look happy, and Grandmother Elizabeth, my child
    is not happy.
    That means the baby is not happy.
    She packed them up to come home.
    So my father was--
    had his sister back, and he had a little niece
    who was the baby of the family, almost like his baby sister.
    So they kind of grew up together.
    They grew up together.
    And he grew up--
    now, remind me-- he grew up in Budapest
    when you're telling me this.
    Or his family--
    By then he is in--
    Prague.
    --Prague.
    Vienna and then Prague.
    I don't know which is which.
    But no more Budapest.
    So he leaves Budapest for which of these two cities first?
    I believe Vienna.
    Vienna.
    That's where he met my mother.
    And then he meets your mother in Vienna,
    but he grows up in which city?
    In Budapest or in Prague?
    Where he grew up, my father?
    Yes.
    Oh, he grew up, obviously, in Budapest.
    As a young adult, he is in Vienna,
    where he meets my mother.
    And then his family that was in Budapest moves at some point--
    To Prague.
    I think they were in Prague, yeah.
    OK.
    And so do you have early memories, earliest memories,
    of Prague?
    Oh, I was in Prague till the age of four.
    So I have very vague memories.
    We went back, my husband and I, on a vacation
    and met some people, like that son of Oscar--
    Gustav.
    It'll come to me.
    And the only thing that looked familiar
    is I looked at the paving stones.
    There's a very distinct way that they pave the streets in Prague,
    sort of a curved pattern.
    Whatever it was, I go, I remember that, but nothing else.
    I don't remember anything else of Prague
    on going back on vacation.
    And yet Czech was my first language.
    Was it, rather than German?
    Because in Prague, the Germans were not well-liked anymore.
    That's true.
    And my parents did not want their child
    to me saying something or calling out in German.
    So they hired a Czech nanny for me,
    and my first language was Czech.
    Interesting, very interesting.
    Now, what part of Prague?
    Did you visit-- even if you have no memories of it,
    do you know where you lived in Prague?
    Did you know details from before?
    I had a street name some place.
    I had no memory.
    I mean, when you're--
    little scenes might come up.
    And I have a couple of snapshots that my father
    took with me on a sled going down in the snow.
    But no, I don't--
    when you're four--
    Of course not.
    What I meant was is that from any documents
    your parents might have had, did you discover what part of Prague
    you had lived in?
    If I find some documents, I may get
    a street address or something.
    But you didn't have it, for example,
    when you went to Prague with your husband later?
    No, no, no.
    We just went with a relative who was Oscar's granddaughter
    who spoke Czech and had survived in Prague.
    And so she met us in Vienna, and we drove to Prague.
    And she showed us all the sights.
    What year was this?
    I have to look.
    I forget.
    It could be approximate.
    My date-- you know.
    Chronology is the first thing that everybody forgets.
    Yes, yes.
    And the only thing I need to know--
    Maybe in the mid-'90s or something.
    It was after the Velvet revolution?
    Oh, yes.
    Oh, yes.
    The Velvet revolution is another factor in our lives
    because my father, who then lived in Vancouver,
    British Columbia--
    goes all over the place--
    he was registered with the Red Cross
    in case any relatives, in case anyone is found.
    And he gets a notification.
    We found a Rudolf Flusser who escaped in the '56.
    That date I know the Velvet--
    Oh, that's the--
    The Hungarian--
    That's the Hungarian uprising.
    Uprising.
    Yeah.
    And he escaped with his wife to Vienna.
    He had survived the war in Hungary, protected
    by his Christian wife who had a sister who
    was a nun in a convent--
    so very Christian.
    But they were not practicing.
    And when they came to Vienna, my father
    got the information he was named after that uncle, Gustav.
    Oh, so this was a relative?
    His uncle, his uncle.
    So that Hungarian uprising brought that uncle--
    his uncle Rudolf, my grand uncle, to light.
    He didn't know that man had survived,
    and he was named after him.
    So my father was ecstatic.
    He, of course, flew to meet him and helped
    support him a little bit for the rest of his life in Vienna.
    Yeah.
    Can we cut just for a second?
    You know, came to the fore, meaning that my dad suddenly
    found his favorite uncle.
    Which is wonderful.
    And so that's the only reason he flew to Vienna.
    He was never going to set foot on that country.
    But for him and my father, he got there.
    He got to his hotel.
    He got to visit the uncle.
    He went back to the hotel.
    He went back to see the uncle.
    He did not visit any of the places
    that he had lived in in Vienna or anything.
    He just would have none of it, but he went to see the uncle.
    Why?
    Because what they did.
    There was the Nazis and they--
    the names he had for them.
    So since he lived in Vienna and had to get out and their first
    stop was Prague, with a seven-, eight-year-old boy
    and a six-month-old baby, he was not very happy with
    the Austrians.
    That's understandable.
    I wondered whether there was some specific experiences
    that he personally had that you found out about, that he told
    you about his life in Vienna.
    No, it was-- you know, he had a happy life or something,
    normal life, busy.
    I do not know of any restrictions that he faced.
    But he had a contact in Czechoslovakia.
    In fact, at one point, he got Czechoslovakian citizenship.
    Oh, wow.
    And that I know because I found his passport, an old passport.
    And so the family was now in Prague.
    One of the things that is interesting in the dates that--
    you were born in December 1936--
    Correct.
    --as a half year old baby.
    You moved to Prague.
    Yes.
    That's pretty early considering the sequence
    of historical events.
    It is before the takeover of Austria.
    The Anschluss.
    The Anschluss.
    And many people who--
    many Jewish people who were still in Vienna
    felt everything is fine until the Anschluss.
    Yes.
    So for your parents to leave earlier,
    it's either very prescient, or something must have happened,
    I would think, to say, OK, we're out of here.
    We have a contact.
    We had business opportunities.
    All I know is they packed up and went to Prague.
    OK.
    And what was your father's business?
    I don't know if--
    Textiles.
    Textiles.
    And who was the lawyer?
    Who had finished law school?
    Grandfather on mother's side.
    Mr. Lipiner.
    Lipiner.
    The Lipiners.
    Yeah, the Lipiner was--
    the old man was a lawyer.
    A lawyer.
    And did your father go to--
    did your father have higher education?
    Yes.
    We had to have whatever education
    and then specialized education to commercial--
    to be a textile engineer.
    OK.
    And did he work for somebody else,
    or did he have his own business?
    At one point they had their own business.
    It was a family.
    His father had a textile business,
    and I assume that there was an outpost in Prague
    and seemed a good idea to manage that.
    OK.
    Well, that makes a lot of sense.
    That makes an awful lot of sense.
    And your parents-- and then for some reason,
    not only your parents are in Prague,
    but the rest of his side of the family
    comes from Budapest to Prague, because you mentioned
    your grandmother being there.
    Yeah, pretty sure that they didn't stay in Vienna, unless--
    I'm not sure at this point whether Grandmother Elizabeth
    stayed in Vienna.
    I should ask my cousin.
    She's been researching it.
    They could have come out of Vienna.
    So they also would have done Budapest.
    There's a contact in Vienna.
    Whether they ended up in Prague, might not.
    They may have stayed in Vienna.
    When you were in these early years in Prague,
    did you know any of your father's side of the family?
    I have a very fleeting, vague memory of my grandmother.
    Elizabeth?
    Elizabeth.
    And actually, it was one of saying goodbye.
    Wave goodbye to grandma, whoever else was there.
    So I guess they stayed in Vienna.
    That's from where they got arrested.
    So Elizabeth and her daughter, Hermine, and son,
    Jula, stayed in Vienna.
    Did not talk to her?
    And I remember-- no.
    And I remember that scene of, wave goodbye to grandma.
    And there were other people there.
    And everything else was from family stories or history.
    So what happened to Grandma Elizabeth
    and her daughter and her son?
    Grandma Elizabeth, my father found out,
    was in Theresienstadt.
    North of Prague, yep.
    And don't know where else.
    Son, Jula, also went there.
    But my little cousin Betsy, who's
    named for her Grandmother Elizabeth and her middle name
    is Susie, for me, she found out that Jula went to several camp--
    was arrested and then went to several camps.
    And the last camp that she traced him to
    was this name that I asked you about, Schwarzheide.
    Schwarzheide.
    And she ordered a book and she left already.
    It's here.
    And she is fixated.
    She knows where he went, the next camp, the next camp,
    and the last one is this Schwarzheide.
    Schwarzheide.
    She's trying to find out more, if it can be done.
    So is there documentation that your Grandmother Elizabeth
    died in Theresienstadt?
    I don't know.
    And if my father found out more, he didn't talk about it.
    He found out the Theresienstadt, and with me he left it at that.
    If he ever found out more, I do not know.
    If he ever found out more about his sister, I do not know.
    Did she also go to Theresienstadt?
    Was she also arrested?
    She was-- yeah.
    So Grandmother Elizabeth, Hermina, and Jula died.
    And the little one, my father's niece, Ilus, Ilona.
    Ilus came to Shanghai.
    So my father basically had himself--
    I mean he survived-- and his niece survived.
    And she was whose child?
    Hermine's child.
    She was also-- Hermine had a son and a daughter?
    No, no, she just had a daughter.
    My father was an uncle at the age of 10.
    So there was his little niece, who was Hermine's child.
    That's right.
    I'm sorry.
    I'm sorry.
    I got--
    It can get confusing, and it'll get more confusing.
    But we'll get to that.
    We'll get there.
    We'll unravel it all.
    But there we have the father's side,
    where the grandfather, I think, passed away.
    Hugo died just before, natural causes
    of heart attack or something.
    Elizabeth survives, becomes a widow,
    and she and two of her children disappear.
    Her youngest, Rudy, manages to go to Prague
    and then end up in Shanghai.
    Hermine's daughter ends up in Shanghai.
    How does Hermina's daughter, Ilus, Ilona--
    when your father and mother and you and your brother
    left Prague, I would assume she would
    have stayed with her mother and her grandmother.
    Right.
    What was her route to be with you in Shanghai?
    How was her fate different from her mother's and her
    grandmother's and her uncle's?
    She married.
    She met the love of her life, another Jula.
    Married and was able, through, I guess, talking with my folks--
    because as things got bad and suddenly there
    was no place where you could go and no visas were issued
    and no quotas were full, there was one place everybody
    found out about.
    And that was, if you had the money,
    you could buy yourself a tick to Shanghai, no other restrictions.
    So Ilus and her husband managed to get out.
    And I forget which route they took,
    but it was early, by boat--
    by land and then by boat.
    And they got to Shanghai.
    From Vienna?
    From Vienna.
    They go to-- whatever--
    Genoa and take the boat there.
    My parents, who were in Prague, started exploring
    how do we get out of here.
    When?
    Well, they started-- soon after they got there,
    I guess they started exploring.
    There comes a point when I am--
    by the time I'm two years old when my parents separate.
    And they separate by way of my mother and brother
    leaving for Shanghai.
    Is this a formal separation?
    It then turned out to be one.
    So they separate.
    And from what I'm told, they decided it would be easier
    for a woman alone to go with a 9-,
    10-year-old than a little toddler.
    So what happens is she leaves.
    She can still get all her transit visas to get to Genoa
    and board a boat and ends up in Shanghai by boat.
    By boat, OK.
    My father was more hesitant for whatever reasons.
    And finally, to hear my mother tell it,
    she was bombarding him with letters,
    "But you have to get out.
    You have to get out."
    He agrees to leave Prague with me.
    By that time, no transit visas, like what's happening now.
    They're afraid the Syrian refugees won't go
    and they'll settle along the way, so no more transit visas.
    So to get out of Prague, my father and I in a small,
    very small, group of people in a similar situation managed to go
    on the Trans-Siberian railroad through Siberia--
    Do you have any memories of this?
    --to Vladivostok.
    Wow.
    Do you have any memories--
    I have some memories of that train ride.
    I remember it being very long and a lot of snow
    to see outside the windows.
    And that was, I guess, March or something.
    '38?
    '41.
    [GASPS] This is March '41?
    We are practically the last people out of Prague.
    So your mother is leaving in 1938--
    Yes.
    --when you're about two years old.
    Exactly.
    And you leave when you're four and something, four years old,
    with your father.
    And at that point, for the historical record,
    the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were in an alliance.
    They had a non-aggression pact.
    Which means that you could--
    Which means that we ended up in Vladivostok.
    But the Chinese, who were aligned themselves with allies,
    they blocked the train communication,
    because there's a way to get south.
    They would not let the train go south.
    So in Vladivostok, everybody ended up getting, obviously,
    off the train.
    And we ended up going by boat to Japan, going south in Japan.
    And my father and I arrived in Shanghai by boat from Japan.
    Wow.
    So I guess Kobe and so forth.
    Anyway, so that's-- as you pointed out,
    there was this non-aggression pact because the Russians joined
    the Allies practically at the end of the war.
    No, it was actually June '41.
    It's three or four months later that Nazi Germany
    attacks the Soviet Union.
    And then they're no longer allies.
    But they didn't formally agree to be ally-- whatever.
    Yeah, they did.
    They did.
    Oh, they did.
    OK.
    Well, it's OK.
    Not at the time when we had to go across Siberia.
    The reason I brought it up is because once
    they're allies, that means that you
    wouldn't be blocked within the European part of the journey.
    You'd be able to go from German-occupied Czechoslovakia.
    And do you know how you got onto the--
    where you got onto the Trans-Siberian railroad,
    whether it was in Moscow, whether it was--
    Oh, no, it was in Prague somewhere.
    Oh, so it was from Prague?
    We went the whole route.
    I see.
    I think it was two weeks on the train.
    OK.
    So it passed through Prague and then goes further eastwards?
    All the way.
    And it wouldn't have had political hindrances because
    of that alliance.
    That's why I bring it up.
    But it's interesting that, at the other end, you do.
    But they did check, and there were police going
    through the train periodically.
    But anyway.
    Did the train stop?
    Do you remember it stopping on the way?
    I remember some stops, but no one
    could really could step off and step back on.
    OK.
    And was there--
    I remember one incident.
    Apparently, my father was able to take three little suitcases--
    one for him, one for me, and one for the child's toys.
    And I remember him sitting me down
    at a train where it stopped.
    And he went somewhere, had to obviously show
    some papers or something.
    And that I remember.
    He sat me down.
    He says, please-- and he could be stern.
    He could be soft.
    He said, you sit on this suitcase till I come back.
    I remember that.
    You do not move.
    You do not go away.
    Anybody talks to you, you smile, you answer,
    but you do not leave these--
    and there were three suitcases.
    And then he tells the story that I got a little bored there.
    And I took one suitcase and I started
    rubbing off some chalk marks.
    And my dad said he almost had a heart attack.
    But these were what the--
    Officials.
    --Gestapo people had put on there.
    And oh my goodness.
    But anyway, we got back on the train with all three suitcases.
    [LAUGHS]
    So then I remember, because he was very quiet and very stern.
    Sweetheart, you shouldn't have done it.
    You know, I need that mark on the suitcase.
    Oh.
    Well, you know, one can only imagine
    what your father was thinking as he was on the train.
    He is seeing all of the stress.
    He is feeling all of the stress that it
    takes to get from point A to point B. These are not
    the friendliest of officials.
    No.
    From where he starts to where he goes.
    And until he reaches the end point,
    he has no idea whether you'll really get there.
    Right.
    No, I was pretty good about it.
    I think I had one bad night in Kobe.
    They put us up, the little group.
    And there was someone--
    there was one older--
    somebody's older child.
    And I always-- they said, you look after her.
    He became quite a well-known professor and worked at the UN,
    but anyway--
    from that little group.
    But I was apparently very good, except when they got to Kobe
    and we were in the hotel.
    And I was fast asleep, and then the adults went somewhere.
    And I woke up, and my father was not here.
    And where could he be, of course?
    And apparently I raised quite a ruckus.
    And people came running because the next thing I know
    is there's my dad running up into the room.
    He has me in his arms.
    And what else to do?
    I remember him walking me down this great big hotel
    staircase and the other people from the group in there.
    Are you all right?
    Are you all right?
    Susenka, all the names.
    And people looking.
    So I know I must have raised quite a ruckus in that room.
    That's all I remember.
    You were four.
    But I was all right.
    Yeah, well, you were four years old.
    You were four years old, and it was dark.
    And you didn't know the place.
    And it's normal.
    Right.
    Is that normal, [INAUDIBLE]?
    I guess it's normal.
    Yeah, it's normal.
    But you see, what makes these things interesting
    is the normal human reactions people
    have in these extraordinary times and the significance
    that then they take on because of that.
    Kids are kids.
    And they continue to be kids when bombs are falling.
    Oh, yeah.
    And I had to, yes.
    So thank you for sharing that.
    Thank you for sharing that anecdote.
    I liked that episode.
    Anyway, the whole group then ended up the same on the train
    and then by boat in Shanghai.
    And on that trip--
    By boat.
    By boat to Japan, train, and then boat.
    And on that trip, [INAUDIBLE].
    On that trip, my father started to teach me a little verse.
    That part I think you've heard.
    He started to teach me a little greeting in German.
    Remember, I only spoke Czech.
    So he was trying to teach me something in German,
    so that I remember when we arrived in Shanghai,
    I'm at the railing, up to the lower railing.
    My father is looking over, and he says, that's your mother.
    That's your brother.
    That's your cousin, Ilus, who's an adult at this point,
    with her husband and baby, Henry.
    So she, in Shanghai, had had a son who was one-year-old--
    that I remember in '41--
    in her arms.
    And they were there at the pier to greet us.
    What was the phrase he tried to teach you?
    Well, apparently it was a welcome statement.
    You don't remember what it is?
    No, I don't remember it.
    But I do remember something, what I understood enough
    after I came.
    And there's these strangers.
    And I recite this to my mother.
    And I remember my brother saying, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
    And I held it against him all my life.
    I understood that.
    [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
    Let's tell the camera what that means.
    What's she saying?
    So my brother, who at this point was 11, says what's she saying.
    My hard-learned welcome to my mother and brother.
    Yeah, well, kids again.
    So then in Shanghai, I had, except for one lady,
    nobody really to talk to in Czech.
    So gradually I forgot all my Czech language.
    What language did your parents speak to one another in?
    German.
    And had that been true in Prague as well?
    To each other, yes.
    My dad knew some Czech.
    My mother knew none.
    So they spoke German to each other.
    That's why they hired that--
    Czech tutor.
    --Czech nanny.
    Let's break for second.
    Before the break, we were talking
    about how you got to Shanghai.
    Before I forget, do you remember the date
    you arrived in Shanghai?
    That's one of the few dates that are inscribed in my memory.
    And that was April 7, 1941.
    So if you left Prague in March '41.
    Whenever, yeah.
    February, March.
    Something like that.
    You were on the road for quite a while till you got there.
    Exactly.
    And you remembered an incident where
    you tried to greet your mother in nicely learned German.
    And your brother says, what's she saying there?
    Right.
    So let's follow that language topic for a while.
    When you were in Shanghai and spent some time there,
    what languages did you learn?
    Well, I got reintroduced, essentially, to my mother
    since I'd had no memory of her from early,
    nothing much to speak of.
    So her language was German.
    So I picked up German.
    I immediately picked up English from life around me.
    And the first school I was sent to, Public Thomas Hanbury
    School, as a kindergarten or first grader, which the Japanese
    promptly took over.
    So I wasn't there too long.
    None of us were there too long.
    And then being friendly with my neighbors and such
    and having a Chinese amah in the house,
    I picked up Chinese, the Shanghai dialect.
    And so as I grew older, I evolved,
    or I just improved, in those three languages,
    and I really forgot all my Czech.
    There was the story of a soldier who
    was being operated on here after an injury,
    and the doctors were all saying, what is he talking about.
    What is he mumbling under his anesthetic?
    And then one of the nurses figured out,
    he's saying something in Yiddish.
    And he woke up.
    He had no knowledge.
    And they said, how come you spoke Yiddish?
    Oh, he'd had a Yiddish-speaking grandmother, and that
    had been an early language which he'd forgotten but somehow,
    under the anesthetic, things came out.
    And they say any serious injury or something can--
    speaking of the brain, can rattle your brain.
    And Henry always joked, well, if I hit you with a 2 by 4,
    will you start talking Czech?
    Henry was your husband?
    Henry was my husband.
    So he joked, if I hit you with a 2 by 4,
    maybe you'll start talking Czech again.
    You never know.
    You never know.
    We never found out.
    No, that's a good thing.
    That's a very good thing.
    So in Shanghai, I grew up in these languages.
    And then in the schools, multiple schools I went to,
    the language of instruction was always English.
    So that was one of the greatest assets I had,
    that I was totally fluent in English.
    I mean, it's my basic language when I came here--
    To the States.
    --into the States because of the struggle
    to fit in and with language.
    And my language was pretty good, and it was my best language.
    So that's an ease that you had that others who came over
    did not.
    Correct.
    Let's kind of circle back to something else
    that's a little bit more in your immediate family.
    You had not seen your mother for a couple of years
    and had no memory of her before.
    Not really.
    At this point, I want to ask a little bit about
    your parents' personalities, both from your mother's side
    and from your father's.
    So when you're in Shanghai, you start to get to know her.
    Tell me, what kind of a person was she like?
    What were her interests?
    What were her manners or the things
    that she found important, her values?
    My mother was really the most--
    trying to be the most resourceful person
    in a very difficult situation of being
    there as a refugee in China.
    I mean, the last thing that a middle European person ever
    thought of would be then they would
    be plunked down in the middle of a Chinese environment.
    Of course.
    When she got there with my brother, just ahead,
    my cousin Ilus and her husband had already arrived.
    So we lived at adjacent rooms or something.
    So that helped that she had somebody there
    that she knew from all her life, but it was pretty difficult
    for them to manage initially.
    Did she have to find a job when she was there?
    No, she didn't, although she was quite a woman's libber.
    She'd had a job at the Kreditanstalt in Vienna.
    Very few women had ever been--
    had ever worked there.
    And once she came--
    there's a reason for mentioning that.
    But once she was in Shanghai, no.
    But somebody who had been there much earlier
    was a gentleman who then became my stepfather.
    So she met him--
    She knew of him, the way you know of somebody
    in an organization, oh, yes, Mr. So-and-so.
    Didn't have much personal contact
    because my stepfather, who worked for the Kreditanstalt,
    he was an inspector, meaning when
    he went out to the branches, they
    weren't very happy to see him.
    Here comes the audit.
    That's right.
    So he traveled a bit throughout Austria, mainly the branches.
    But he was a little--
    earlier in Shanghai, I think late '37 or '38,
    something like that.
    He-- who would have thought to leave?
    He was very comfortable in his life in Vienna.
    He was married, had a son.
    No such thing as thinking of leaving.
    I'm now moving to my stepfather by way
    of telling you about my mother.
    My stepfather had a very close friend
    in Vienna, [PERSONAL NAME] something, Schneider.
    I get to meet him once.
    The most dignified and gentle of people.
    And that friend, as I heard the stories from my stepfather,
    talked to him and said--
    he was of a lesser nobility or something.
    He was untouchable, but he was a Christian
    the way Christians should be.
    And he said, my friend, I hear things
    that are troubling me greatly.
    I think you need to leave the country.
    And my stepfather-- what do you mean?
    Why?
    He said, think about it.
    He said, look what's happening, and your son
    will be of military age very shortly.
    And Jewish boys are sent to the front as cannon fodder.
    They were right on the front lines.
    You must leave.
    So my stepfather listened to his friend after not too long
    and decided to apply.
    Where do you go?
    He'd never applied for a visa or a quota anywhere.
    But you can go to China if you bought a ticket.
    So that's what my stepfather did with his wife and son.
    What was his name, your--
    Ludwig Rosenbaum.
    So Ludwig, or Luigi as we called him, packed up the family.
    The difference was that he could take some of his assets.
    He could take his belongings, his huge library.
    He was an accountant.
    That's why he worked at Kreditanstalt.
    His hobby was music.
    He played the cello.
    He played the piano.
    He had a huge musical library of notes
    and the instruments, et cetera.
    He was able to bring all that to Shanghai
    and to settle in the former British section,
    because Shanghai was divided by the French and the British
    and the Russian, et cetera, sections.
    So he was able to buy a house near a park,
    furnish it fully, and continue with good--
    as good a life as you can under the circumstances,
    but better than most.
    By virtue of being there, he said people
    like him would go to the Jewish authorities who were helping
    the refugees and would check, can I help, what can I do,
    and so forth.
    And he saw on a list of newcomers--
    he recognized Blanca Flusser, Blanca Lipiner Flusser,
    because that Lipiner rang a bell, because she
    worked as Lipiner, and son.
    So he immediately introduced himself to my mother.
    And can you come to our place and meet his wife, meet the son?
    So he kind of started helping my mother
    and Ilus because they were together
    in a little kind of help and where to go for what
    and not to be--
    Completely alone.
    --so completely alone and isolated.
    So he turned out to be a big helper.
    In turn, when his wife got sick and eventually passed away,
    my mother could help there.
    And by then, they had established
    some kind of friendship, which a little later became a courtship.
    So by the time your father arrives with you in 1941,
    was the courtship underway?
    Or was it something that--
    Not really.
    Just, here's somebody who was in Vienna.
    But there was no reunion with my father.
    There was civil talk and so forth.
    But my father took an apartment, and they
    stayed in close contact.
    And to the wonder of many people, my father and my mother
    thereby separated permanently and I think divorced officially
    in '43.
    I found some marriage and divorce papers.
    And they stayed friends for the rest of their lives.
    And my mother remarried.
    My father absolutely adored and became friends with Luigi.
    He always called him-- that man is a saint
    for what he's putting up with.
    And they got along.
    And then my father met my stepmother in Shanghai.
    She had come from Russian origin,
    and in Shanghai there was the distinction
    between the white Russians and the red Russians.
    Absolutely.
    And the white Russians started escaping with the Bolshevik
    revolution, and her parents first ended up in Harbin,
    where she was born with her twin,
    and eventually as merchants made it to Shanghai.
    What was her name?
    Her maiden name was Ravve, R-A double V-E.
    So it was Dina Ravve and Raya Ravve.
    And her twin sister, Raya--
    I mean, they were both educated first in the school in Shanghai.
    They ended up at the Sorbonne for further education.
    But subsequently, my stepmother who
    came back to her family group in Shanghai, Raya,
    went to what was then Palestine.
    It was not yet Israel.
    And she came visiting, but she lived in Palestine, then Israel
    for the rest of her life.
    All these destinies intertwined now.
    Oh, yes.
    So my stepmother's father had various interests
    with some of the old Sephardic Jews, who
    had been there [? street ?] people and were doing very well.
    And they had--
    I think it was lumber, if I remember, lumber
    company, bringing in lumber, getting it to people
    who were building houses.
    But he was something to do with lumber.
    So that's your stepmother's father?
    Stepmother's father.
    And wheels within wheels, somewhere along the line
    my stepfather, who had worked for the,
    I think, British gas company as an accountant--
    then with the Japanese, things got difficult, more
    restrictions.
    Anyway, he got a job at Woodcraft Works Limited,
    which means my stepfather worked in the same side
    by side with my stepmother in the same company,
    in the same area.
    Wow.
    So talk about wheels within wheels.
    So they were both there.
    After they were-- subsequently, I had four parents.
    Now, I took it very well.
    Did you ever ask your parents why they
    separated, why they divorced?
    We didn't quite get--
    they didn't go into details, not at that stage.
    Didn't quite get along anymore.
    Being married is different, but we like each other so much.
    So they would have long discussions and dinners
    together.
    And they all, I guess at first--
    maybe not in the beginning that it was easy--
    but they agreed to be united for the sake of the children.
    And they continued to be the best of friends.
    And they were all presenting a united front.
    That's pretty good.
    But you know, a five-year-old or six-year-old,
    mommy, can I have that-- well, I don't know.
    Talk to Luigi.
    Well, Luigi never said no to me.
    Of course.
    I believe it was much easier for me being, quote,
    "a cute little girl" than for my older brother,
    because I know he--
    it was natural for child to harbor some resentments
    against my stepfather for a while
    because he took his mother away.
    I mean, I'm sure Peter fantasized
    that the parents would get together,
    because he had experience of the parents being together.
    Yes, yes.
    That makes sense.
    It was a-- so he didn't know what went on,
    that one left and he left with the mother
    and didn't get to see his father for over two years.
    But that's the way it was.
    So fast forward, we are in Shanghai.
    I have four parents.
    So here we are.
    And this all started from the question
    I asked of what was your mother like.
    Right.
    And you say she was very resourceful.
    She was resourceful.
    She helped manage things in the most difficult of environments.
    She was loving to us.
    The children were her everything.
    She was very well educated, very, very literate.
    Had she gone to higher education?
    She had done something, but I don't
    know the names of the schools.
    But the fact that she got a job at--
    Creditanstalt.
    --as a woman, that was a big deal.
    It is a big deal.
    So she, in that sense, was--
    she was very involved and knowledgeable about politics.
    She could argue with my dad about all sorts of things,
    to the exclusion sometimes of the others.
    My stepfather was more interested in anything
    to do with music.
    My stepmother was more into the business end
    of the family business.
    So yes, my mother was--
    she had a lot of hard things dished up to her.
    She managed this early stage just with her son.
    That's right.
    She managed to win me over, which took a while.
    Did it really?
    Well, I do remember rebelling.
    It's time to take a bath or go wash up.
    And who's this woman who's trying to scrub me down?
    So I do remember making a little bit of a scene.
    I want my father.
    So he came in and--
    I mean, he was there.
    He anticipated something.
    So I got talked down and so forth.
    And gradually, I accepted this lady, that this was my mother.
    Now let's turn, then, to your father.
    Return to my father.
    What kind of a personality did he have?
    My father had a heart of gold and a very forceful personality.
    My father was the stereotype of the Hungarian.
    And I knew him with kind of graying hair,
    but he was a redhead.
    So he was a redheaded Hungarian.
    And if he got mad at something, the fist was on the table,
    and whatever was on it clinked.
    He had a temper?
    He had a temper.
    He was a brilliant entrepreneur.
    So he managed, in all this difficulty,
    to start up again in Shanghai a textile company with a factory
    that imported whatever, the goods.
    And they created the woolens, mainly for men's suits,
    the stuff in it.
    And he managed to build up a very good business.
    That's terrific.
    Which is what encouraged him--
    which involved his wanting to basically stay there.
    Life was good until Mao Zedong came.
    But that's a subsequent story.
    Well, you know, you mentioned something that
    sounds like it's a pattern.
    He liked being in Prague, and your mother left.
    And he stayed because he liked being in Prague.
    He gets to Shanghai.
    He likes being in Shanghai.
    Mainly that he built up his business again.
    And he was entrepreneurial.
    And he always said, you guys are smart, but you need jobs.
    And he creates his jobs.
    Yeah, yeah.
    And he did.
    So in Shanghai, who did you live with?
    I was shared.
    Were you?
    How did that happen?
    I don't know.
    They just worked it out.
    Weekdays--
    No, I meant by, how did that happen, what
    was the pattern of sharing?
    Oh, the pattern of sharing was that weekdays
    I lived with my mother and stepfather.
    And weekends, I lived with my father and stepmother.
    And that part you've heard.
    Their economic situations, while all were comfortable,
    they were a little different.
    So during the week, I sat on my stepfather's lap being
    taken to school on a rickshaw.
    But Friday after school, the chauffeur came to pick me up.
    So your father was more better off than your stepfather was?
    Yeah, my stepfather kept working,
    but my father did very well.
    And he continued to live in this then
    French section, former French section, of Shanghai.
    And he did all right.
    Not bad considering he arrived with two small suitcases
    and a suitcase of children's toys.
    Toys.
    And those two suitcases had counted
    how many pairs of underwear you allowed and how many socks
    and how many any of these.
    So that was all itemized.
    So he did well in Shanghai.
    And I don't know where to go forward.
    But when rumors came of, there's this communist--
    Oh, we're not coming--
    yeah, we'll get there in a bit.
    --he took his time deciding what to do.
    What I want to do, though, is--
    now still circle back to those war
    years, the time between '41 and '45,
    when you are going between age four and eight.
    Between the ages of 4 and 8, having arrived
    and going to the British school, which
    was the big layout school compound,
    big lawn in the center--
    well, the Japanese thought that this
    would make a nice internment camp,
    seeing as there are bathrooms and classrooms for putting
    people in.
    So I remember that we were all one day
    being marched out of the school to some place, wherever.
    It was a holding pattern.
    So that was the end of that kindergarten or first grade.
    What was the name of it, if you remember?
    The school was Public Thomas Hanbury School.
    You had mentioned it, yes.
    From that school--
    I guess that's '42 or whatever--
    somewhere in 1943--
    I remember seeing that date--
    the Japanese issue a proclamation
    that everyone who arrived after '38, because it included
    my stepfather, had to move to a section of town called Hongkou.
    Now, the Japanese take over.
    And occupation of Shanghai, I do not
    know my history in this part of the world that well.
    Can you tell me what year that was?
    I don't know exactly what year the Japanese moved in.
    Evie is checking it.
    I'm going to google it.
    But the whole area was under Japanese occupation.
    When you arrived with your father?
    Yes, yes.
    But given the circumstances of Shanghai, the port,
    the Japanese trod very softly on how people could come in.
    They thought it might be a good idea
    that they would bring in some assets, so do some good.
    So they, even though they were the occupiers,
    didn't always treat the Chinese too well, they allowed--
    they didn't welcome but they allowed this to happen.
    When all these refugees came in, they
    got put under increasing pressure
    because they didn't understand all this Jewish business.
    They know from race, but not this other stuff.
    So they got put under pressure by the German authorities
    to do something about these Jewish refugees.
    For a while, they just said, all right, we'll get around to it.
    Eventually they issued that proclamation.
    Everybody who arrived after that date, we will put them in--
    I don't know what's in New York.
    The Lower East Side is now pretty gentrified.
    We'll put them in this poorest part of town.
    It was then called Hongkou, and people had to move there.
    Officially, they said, we will just exchange your residence
    with somebody there.
    Well, my stepfather had this absolutely beautiful house
    with all that goes with it, and he
    had to exchange his house with somebody from Hongkou.
    That person had ripped out the wiring
    from the light fixtures, just everything.
    And I just found a permit that he was given by the authorities
    to fix up the house that he was, quote, "exchanged into."
    So he fixed up the house in the, quote, "ghetto area."
    It was on Zhoushan Road.
    And once it got fixed up, I don't
    know where we were in between.
    We all moved into the Zhoushan Road.
    But he was able, with whatever assets he still had,
    to afford the house, to have it fixed up,
    to bring in his instruments and his library.
    So everything came to that house.
    So did he lose ownership of the house he had purchased?
    Of course.
    I mean, the part that just fell apart-- well,
    the Japanese just said, you just exchanged.
    This new person now owns it.
    Which was an interesting experience
    to see that Chinese family start moving in,
    because the first thing we noticed
    was that a ton of vegetables were in the bathtub.
    And then the mother sat down on the throne
    surrounded by everybody, because this was indoor plumbing.
    Oh, my.
    So this was--
    I remember that.
    I remember the vegetables in the tub.
    And I remember the mom was sitting on the throne and some
    of her kids surrounding her.
    You can flush this.
    You don't have to carry it out.
    So we were in Zhoushan Road as of, I guess, '43.
    My father was in an apartment somewhere separate,
    but they were friends.
    And somewhere along that line, he had met my stepmother.
    And I don't know where they lived,
    but my stepmother's parents did not have to move.
    They were the Russians who had been there for a long time.
    So while some people were starving in Hongkou,
    literally, the big drama with the grandparents
    was if the cook could not find something that she
    wanted on the black market--
    because on the black market you could get anything, practically.
    So they continued their life in their part of town,
    but all the post--
    '38 people.
    --'38 people were into the what was then called Hongkou.
    So what's interesting in what you're
    telling me is the distinction might
    have been to target the Jews.
    Oh, yes.
    Absolutely.
    But the rule is specified by a year.
    Yeah, a year.
    So it means if you're not a Jew but you happen
    to have arrived after 1938--
    They would be flexible.
    You might appeal or something.
    But it really applied to the Jews.
    I see.
    I see.
    And they were put under pressure, which I only found out
    from reading some things that came across,
    like one young man who was from Austria or Germany
    who was doing a study on people who were forced from homeland.
    And somebody told him about the Shanghai Jews.
    He had no idea about this whole episode,
    and he started researching it.
    And that young man held a talk here in New York
    because he then studied Chinese and, of course, knew German.
    And he mentioned how one Chinese translator really
    fudged a little bit, at the risk of his life,
    some of those dispatches from Germany
    to make them a little milder.
    Oh, wow.
    And I just read by looking at something--
    I think she took the book or I kept it here, my cousin--
    how the Japanese offered a solution of,
    why don't you promise these people
    to transfer them to someplace and scuttle the ship.
    So I read that.
    I had had no idea of that particular episode.
    And I just read it in a book that somebody gave us
    about the Shanghai interlude.
    So that means that their solution would
    have been save the people but sink the ship,
    so that it looks like the people sank with it.
    Yeah, it was the Germans making a suggestion.
    The Japanese did not go for it.
    What did happen is that a series of restrictions
    were put into place.
    And if you wanted to leave the Hongkou area,
    say my stepfather to get to his job, which was outside of that,
    you needed to get a little passport, a little passport.
    I have some copies of that, some of them here.
    And that meant you had to go to the Japanese commandant who was
    in charge of this part of town.
    And he was Mr. Goya.
    And there are lots of cartoons and lots
    of articles describing Mr. Goya--
    Oh, really?
    --who was quite a puppet.
    And he could be friendly to one person
    and slap up the next one who came to apply.
    So it got very difficult because every few months
    you had to go there and get your passport
    to be able to leave the district.
    And they even mobilized refugees themselves to help monitor these
    in and out passports to make sure you don't overstay
    and so forth.
    And they called that the [NON-ENGLISH].
    The [NON-ENGLISH]?
    The [NON-ENGLISH].
    And if you were a refugee who was on [NON-ENGLISH],
    and my husband Henry was one, you got an armband and you were
    stationed to help check that the person who was moving outside
    the ghetto area had a valid passport.
    Because if you try to come back and it's not valid,
    who knows what the Japanese guard might do.
    Well, isn't that interesting.
    You mention now the word "ghetto,"
    because that's exactly what it sounds like without barbed wire.
    It was called the ghetto area, the Shanghai ghetto.
    Some book titles describe it that way.
    There was no formal barbed wire.
    There was guard stops and so forth.
    But if you left without having the proper identification,
    you left at your peril.
    And besides, there was nothing for you to do outside that.
    You were forced to live in that area.
    So paint for me a picture, with words, if you can,
    what Hongkou looked like.
    I'd be glad to show you some photographs that I have.
    I'm thinking from your mind's eye as a child.
    The ghetto area where people lived was--
    it had been the poorest section among the Chinese.
    And the Chinese poor people continued to live there.
    And many people gave thanks that these poor people
    shared or were helpful to these refugees that came among them.
    The buildings were-- today Shanghai is a skyscraper city.
    They were little just houses, if you will.
    And Shanghai was known to have a series of lanes.
    You go into one, and then you'd be
    in a whole lane with buildings.
    So if you can imagine that it would
    be an outside entrance that you go into-- perhaps
    a European village.
    You enter a main spot, but then you
    go through the narrow area, which
    were called lanes, because it was too narrow to call a street.
    And there would be houses alongside.
    Now, life in Hongkou varied quite a bit.
    My stepfather, having had the means to fix up the house--
    it was kind of luxurious to have that house.
    He still had a job to go to.
    So we were comfortable.
    On the other hand, many of the refugees who came there,
    and I can show you pictures, had nothing at first.
    They were selling what they had on the street
    to get some money to buy some food.
    Some were put up by sort of a [? ORT ?]
    or a self-help organization and so
    that there'd be like a soup kitchen
    so they'd have something to eat.
    There was some buildings that I walked through and knew
    of where they put up people who had no means and nowhere else,
    so that you lived--
    you had a bed and maybe a bunk bed and a big sheet
    to separate you from the next bunk bed, where
    other family would be put up.
    So there were some people who experienced
    the worst of hardship there who were in there.
    I remember an incident which my mother repeated to me.
    She went to the kitchen and asked the amah, which we still
    could have, what are you doing.
    What's an amah?
    Amah is a servant, a live-in servant.
    It's a Chinese word.
    It's a Chinese word, OK.
    But it became active in English conversation.
    I said, what are you doing?
    She said, Mrs. So-and-so asked me for the grounds of the coffee
    to take home that had been served.
    So there were people who were really hard up.
    And for a while, we were able to continue more comfortably.
    That came to a very abrupt end, but I'll come to that.
    Now, let's turn to your father.
    He was better off than your stepfather.
    My father worked.
    I forget with whom he worked at first.
    But then he was able to-- as soon as the war ended--
    I mean during the war, he got by with whatever resources
    he still had.
    I don't remember who he worked with or for.
    But soon after, when he'd met my stepmother, who was not
    limited to living in Hongkou, he could, I guess,
    move in with her.
    And they were married.
    That was my question, yeah.
    And he got started up with his [INAUDIBLE], with his--
    So in other words, while you were--
    you and your mother and your stepfather
    had to move to Hongkou, your father did not.
    He did, but I don't know exactly where.
    He lived nearby in an apartment not too far away,
    since he was a frequent visitor, and then
    eventually moved with my stepmother and could stay there.
    So somewhere, the dates get fuzzy.
    But I know that obviously between--
    he married, I don't know, 1946 or something.
    I'm not sure.
    But all I know is in '43 everybody into Hongkou.
    My stepfather could still afford to fix up that house.
    And that lasted until July 17, 1945,
    when the war was just over in Europe.
    That's right.
    VE Day.
    And the Allies decided to focus on the Far East.
    And July 17 was the first real big bombardment in Shanghai.
    And there was a naval academy a few streets up
    from where we lived.
    [PHONE RINGING]
    And may I be excused?
    Let's cut.
    Yeah.
    Hang on a second.
    So let's repeat again.
    The bombardment was quite a--
    July 17.
    It's a date that many will remember.
    And I think I started to say there was a naval academy not
    too far from our house.
    And one bomb went there, but it didn't explode.
    And the soldiers were able to defuse it.
    But one missed as far as the plane is concerned, the B-29,
    by very little, but it hit our house.
    Your house?
    Yes.
    And I have a picture of our house, a photograph.
    And was I surprised to find out that our house is now
    in all the pictures in the archives which
    show that Shanghai was bombed, and it really happened,
    especially on July 17.
    So your house in Hongkou--
    Was bombed.
    --was bombed.
    The bomb fell past our window.
    My brother and I had just been out on a bicycle,
    cashing in some rations.
    Everything was rationed at that point.
    And we were caught in the sirens,
    and my brother said, shall we go visit--
    shall we go over to--
    anyway, Tante Erla, who was a family member, so to speak.
    She was my stepfather's sister-in-law,
    meaning sister of his late wife.
    But she became-- she stayed part of the family.
    Shall we go to Tante Erla, or do you think we can go home?
    I said, OK, I think we can go home.
    He said, OK, hold on tight.
    So I got my--
    I mean, I had my arms around his middle,
    and he pedaled furiously.
    And we made it home.
    We'd run up to our room.
    He jumps on his bed.
    He's going to read.
    He never did finish David Copperfield.
    And I'm there taking my dress off,
    and I go flying because the force of the bomb
    generates a lot of whatever it's called.
    So I go flying, and I end up on top
    of the rubble of what was our house and part of the neighbor's
    house.
    I saw this thing.
    You know, it takes a split second.
    I saw bomb before I ever saw a bomb.
    It went past the window.
    But I jumped through the--
    I mean, I headed for the door.
    I didn't have to jump.
    The force of this thing picked me up and put me on top.
    What had happened, unfortunately,
    was when the air raid sirens went,
    there were people caught on the street.
    And since our house was the first one in the lane to be--
    here is street, here is into the lane--
    there were people sort of pressed against the house.
    And I know the amah asked my mother,
    can we let some of these people in,
    they're right there on the street.
    So my mother told her, well, let some in.
    Keep them in the hallway and around here.
    Don't let them run all over the house.
    Well, they would have been killed outside.
    They got killed inside.
    There were, they told me later, about 30 people
    killed by that bombardment.
    And my mother was home.
    She was a little scraped, but we both ended up on the rubble.
    Were you on the first floor, second floor?
    There was a-- call it the first floor.
    Up was the children's room and another two steps
    up to the main bedroom.
    So first floor European is usually second floor American.
    So would it have been the ground floor or the floor above it?
    The floor above it.
    You walked up a flight of steps, turned to the children's room,
    walked up another small flight of steps to the master bedroom.
    Got it.
    We had steps-- it's easier to describe
    if I showed you the picture.
    But anyway, we also had access to a roof garden
    because it gets very hot in Shanghai, subtropical climate.
    So we had a roof garden.
    And thank goodness these cement steps that went up to the roof
    garden held the cable, so that the steps did not
    fall on top of everything.
    Because what happened is--
    well, I got pushed out of the door and wherever.
    My brother, who was sitting on the bed,
    got buried under the rubble.
    Wow.
    And it took a lot of screaming and yelling.
    And after a while, there was still
    screaming for Peter, Peter, Peter.
    And what I remember what was scary,
    and I'll never forget that.
    Apparently a man who was also buried
    there heard this-- everybody took up the call who
    came to help Peter, Peter.
    And he was like--
    I don't know if you like opera, but he
    was like Jonathan in the cistern in Salome.
    And he was calling back, Peter, Peter.
    And I remember this deathly deep voice calling my brother,
    but he was buried.
    From the rubble?
    From the rubble.
    So people came by hand.
    They pulled away bricks and what not.
    Eventually, I got carted away, and the parents or my cousin
    lived across the street from where we were, or rather
    worked there.
    And I got brought over there.
    My adult cousin put one of her blouses
    on me so it made like a dress.
    And they kept me there while they unearthed the [? people. ?]
    Was the entire house destroyed?
    Half of it.
    Was your mother-- what floor was your mother on?
    She was up in the master bedroom, which
    was another little flight up.
    She, together with me, ended up on top of the rubble.
    She also got active right away, pulling bricks away.
    And then men came from all over, everybody
    to help, because she kept yelling, my son, my son.
    So everybody helped till eventually they got him
    out and got to the hospital.
    And your stepfather was not at home?
    No, he was at work.
    And sort of a funny aside, he and my father
    were going to come--
    that day come home to our house for lunch.
    And the amah had made a big pot of plum dumplings,
    Zwetschgenknoedel or something.
    Zwetschgenknoedel.
    They found the pot with the knoedel and all the black soot
    on top.
    Good god.
    Good god.
    And they were walking down.
    They had reached the point where they were walking down.
    And as my father said, our eyes opened wider and wider.
    I mean, that's a house.
    Let's walk faster.
    So they came on the scene, both of them, father and stepfather,
    to this horrible scene that--
    house opened.
    And people helped and people looted--
    not just the Chinese.
    The nice Europeans did their share, too.
    And anyway, the main thing was they
    got my brother to the hospital.
    I won't go into all the details.
    It would make this story much too long.
    But my brother's leg was full of shrapnel.
    And the doctor who was there, who subsequently, we were told,
    was helping himself to drugs to deal with all the--
    what was going on, he didn't do what needed to be done.
    So my brother developed gangrene in his leg and sepsis.
    The point was they then had to amputate his leg.
    And to the end, I never knew if my brother really knew,
    or we didn't talk about it.
    But I knew from what the adults were
    saying that he need not have lost
    his leg if the right treatment had been done.
    Anyway, they didn't have all the things.
    And one person who was a major figure in our lives--
    his name was Pastor Werner Wedel, W-E-D-E-L,
    and he was in charge of the Lutheran community in Hongkou.
    But he had to come to Shanghai because his parents--
    somewhat he was Jewish, with a J in the passport.
    And he was kind of a fast family friend.
    My stepfather bought him the little gold cross for when
    he became an official pastor.
    Anyway, Pastor Wedel, as we then called him--
    this is now July 17, '45.
    Peter's in the hospital.
    And we are all ducking now where I am under the desk,
    as if this would help.
    Anyway, soon thereafter, the atomic bomb's dropped
    and it was end of the war.
    In August.
    In August.
    In that period, from July to August,
    is when my brother got sicker and sicker and greener
    and greener.
    And that I can get emotional about.
    Pastor Wedel put on his collar.
    He spoke English.
    He went and met--
    the American fleet, the Seventh Street,
    is chugging in to Shanghai.
    He with his missionary by then-- he had some missionary
    connections--
    he gets to meet the reverend on that-- the chaplain
    on the boat, who introduces him to the surgeon on the boat.
    He gets them to come to the hospital.
    And there is a photo op that exists with the chaplain
    and a doctor shaking--
    the surgeon and a doctor shaking hands over my brother's bed.
    [GASPS]
    And he got the first penicillin shot, a shot in Shanghai.
    Of course, the Americans, they brought more medicines
    for the hospital and everything.
    But he got the first penicillin-- there was no--
    so you can blame the doctors for not doing all
    that they could do.
    But I am told--
    I wasn't there-- that when things got bad for my brother
    and my dad found out about that doctor, he landed him one.
    They had to separate the men.
    He cornered him in a corridor, and my dad had a temper.
    And so he handed him one.
    But anyway, Peter got the first penicillin injection,
    which saved his life--
    I mean, then more, but that was the big photo op.
    There was a little article in the local newspaper, whatever
    American bring.
    Had it been an American bomber?
    Actually, yes.
    So this was-- actually, the American bomber
    even killed some high-ranking American who was already there.
    I found an article.
    Anyway, back to my brother.
    He gets the injection.
    He survives that.
    He gets transferred to the French hospital right
    after the war.
    Maybe they can do something to help.
    This butcher had butchered more of the flesh
    on the leg than the bone.
    They tried to stretch it.
    Forget it.
    He was there with weights on his leg.
    He needed another surgery.
    So my brother really suffered because his--
    the rest of what was left of his leg
    was very short, very difficult to handle with prosthesis.
    But the result was that he got some preferential treatment
    and got to come to New York because he
    had-- remember my uncle who was here all the time?
    He could go stay with him, and maybe something can be done.
    And that uncle was a doctor?
    Yeah.
    So maybe something could be done.
    Ultimately my brother suffered a great deal
    with heavy prosthesis.
    I see now they are running races with what can be done.
    And now they have thought control to prosthesis.
    But he had this big heavy thing around his waist and metal bars.
    It was horrible, but that's what he got.
    And eventually he got rid of it all.
    He just used his hand crutches.
    He said, I can't deal with that anymore.
    So to the end of his life, he then just used hand crutches.
    What a tough, tough thing.
    But how were we together, you know, here he is 15 years old.
    All this happens to him.
    Then from the French hospital was
    closer to my father and stepmother's home.
    So to the extent that he could then leave the hospital just
    to get care, he went to live there.
    I showed up on weekends.
    So he grew very close to my stepmother, who
    was changing bandages and so forth,
    because my mother was back in Hongkou.
    So they found someplace else small that we could live in.
    And I'm there and Peter is there.
    Did anybody else survive from under the rubble?
    I don't know.
    Maybe the man who screamed Peter's name.
    I mean, there were others.
    But on the record, there were 30 people killed.
    Well, they were right around our house.
    And the picture-- many years later, my nephew heard of--
    an exhibit was being done by the Leo Baeck
    Institute in New York in connection
    with that young man who had done his research
    and talked about it.
    He said, oh, come on, I'd like to see that.
    And we went to see the exhibit.
    I said, that's our house.
    What's it doing there?
    And then I have a photograph.
    I said, that's our house.
    So there's some pictures in books of people
    who write about Shanghai.
    Our house is the archival picture of,
    yes, there was a bombardment.
    Too bad that it's in such a way.
    Too bad that it was as a result of a direct hit.
    Right.
    That was the hit.
    So that was '45.
    War ends in '47.
    No, no, no.
    War ends in '45.
    '45, I mean.
    And I still have a few questions about that.
    OK, because then come the communists.
    We'll talk about that.
    Before we get there, you mentioned earlier
    that there was German pressure to move the Jews into Hongkou
    and that eventually--
    That they did.
    That the Japanes did.
    Was there also German presence in Shanghai?
    Was there, for example, a German diplomatic community?
    Was there any Nazi kind of representation?
    Not visibly and not that I would have seen as a child,
    because the Japanese weren't that interested in doing
    anything with the Jews.
    It was just the pressure from Germany.
    And the Chinese didn't understand this whole business,
    because I remember once my amah saying, now let's
    talk seriously.
    The master is so nice--
    she meant my stepfather--
    but what did he to?
    I said, he didn't do anything.
    He was of a religion, even though you don't see him running
    to a synagogue or anything.
    But that was-- oh, come on.
    He must have done something that he had to run away.
    So they didn't understand that this thing of being Jewish
    could mean life or death of being deported from your home,
    because to the Chinese--
    my friend who lived there, her mother was
    more Buddhist and her father was more Taoist,
    and you all lived together.
    You didn't accuse anybody of anything.
    Your religion was personal.
    I didn't learn about being Jewish as an ethnicity till I
    came to New York.
    Oh, that's interesting.
    Jewish was being a religion.
    You're Catholic.
    You're Protestant.
    You're Jewish.
    And you practice it actively, or you don't practice it actively.
    That's your personal decision.
    But I come here, and they say, oh, so-and-so
    is Italian American and this, and so-and-so is Jewish.
    I said, Jewish what?
    Jewish Italian American?
    Jewish Russian American?
    I learned it here.
    From Jews or from Gentiles?
    From everybody.
    You ask anybody.
    If you encounter somebody--
    they mean it well sometimes.
    They don't mean it in any negative way,
    not always, I mean.
    But what is the Jewish ethnicity?
    You are Lithuanian or Russian or Polish.
    But what's this Jewish business?
    Well, what you just touched upon is a question
    that I don't know many people have satisfactorily answered.
    What is the Jewish identity?
    Is it a religion?
    Is it an ethnicity?
    Is it something else?
    Is it a civilization?
    Is it all of these things?
    Many came to it then as a reaction.
    If you're going to call me that and so forth,
    they start looking into it.
    And some became here, that I knew, became more observant,
    if you will.
    My parents, step-parents did not, in the situation
    being where my father was pure Jewish,
    if you want to call it that.
    He felt Hungarian, I mean.
    My stepmother, she felt Russian, but she was Jewish.
    My stepfather, Rosenbaum family, he felt Jewish,
    but he never set foot that I knew in a synagogue.
    And my mother was sort of half and half
    or whatever to do some good work.
    She was more active in the Lutheran community in Shanghai.
    They helped Pastor Wedel earn his stripes,
    or rather earn his cross.
    Collar, yeah.
    And everything was open.
    Between the bombardment of the house and prior--
    I'll just come back to one fun--
    Sure, sure.
    --fun-- that's my mother for you.
    The year before the house got bombed,
    there was a meningitis epidemic in Shanghai.
    I got sick.
    My stepfather's son got sick.
    My stepfather's son, Wolfie, was 26 years old.
    I just found a picture of Wolfie and his new bride.
    He'd been married two years, and he keeled over and died.
    From the meningitis?
    Yeah.
    I was apparently very sick--
    for almost a year.
    I mean, for many months they worked on me,
    but then I was so weak.
    So my mother got a doctor.
    She said her jewelry went to buy drugs or whatever.
    So he tried different things.
    And my story there was not a very nice one.
    Being sick with meningitis is no picnic.
    I get very upset today when I see parents
    not vaccinating their children.
    Now there is a vaccine, for heaven's sakes,
    for some of these things.
    So I was very, very sick.
    I remember horrible headaches.
    I had four lumbar punctures with no anesthetic.
    And people laid me down on a table.
    I'll never forget that and the pain of that.
    And my mother told me that's the only time
    she ran out of the house, because I screamed.
    But my stepfather got into such a depression.
    He said if that child dies, I just lost my son,
    I'd kill myself.
    So my mother had--
    was watching out for me and had everybody watching out
    for my stepfather who for the rest of his life,
    wore a black necktie.
    You could buy him a nice silk one for holidays.
    But in memory of his son, he always wore a black necktie.
    And he did put a candle out on Wolfie's state of death.
    That was as religious as he got.
    Anyway, to make a long story short, eventually I survive.
    I'm nine years old.
    We're still in the house before the bombardment.
    And my mother says, this child isn't going
    to want to learn anything.
    She goes to the British school.
    It becomes the camp.
    She goes to something else, something else happened.
    She's now in school.
    She's out for a year.
    She's been so sick.
    What do we do and where is there a good school?
    Well, there is a convent school nearby, and I am well known.
    So Institution de la Symphonie, I get there
    and I meet the Mother Superior.
    Even when I was 9, she must have been a little lady because she
    was barely taller than I was.
    I remember her with big teeth.
    Maybe it was a denture.
    She was half-Portuguese, half-Chinese,
    and we get to meet her.
    But my mother had the foresight.
    She said, I want my child to go fit in where she belongs,
    or she'll never want to study.
    Solution-- there is a young man here
    who can use good dinners, which he gets,
    but he is a rabbinical scholar.
    He then becomes a rabbi.
    So Rabbi Sober-- I remember his name--
    went with mother and me to the convent.
    I remember the library, where we sat around a big table.
    And they were discussing what I needed to learn to fit
    in to where a 9-year-old would fit.
    OK.
    I got packed up.
    We went home, and the study started.
    And I either got rapped on the knuckles or I got cheered on.
    And I have a picture.
    I'm going through pictures.
    I just found one of me sitting on his shoulder.
    He was giving me a ride to go take the photograph.
    So I rode horseback.
    You get a kid on your shoulder.
    And he worked with me till they all decided
    I didn't need tutoring anymore.
    I was fine in school.
    And so that's the school I kept going
    to till after the war ended, when my stepfather took me there
    in the rickshaw and my dad had me picked up by the chauffeur.
    So I was taught--
    as you can see, you asked what kind of woman was my mother.
    She fed the young pastor.
    She fed the young rabbi.
    She was open to just be a good human being, to help people.
    And there, in turn, was a good rapport back.
    That's incredible.
    So until I left I was in the convent school.
    One more question about the Jewish community, the refugee
    community, during the war, and then we go to post-war.
    It's a statistical question.
    It's not one a four-year-old or an eight-year-old would know,
    but maybe now you do.
    I'd like to get a sense of how large was the community.
    There were about 20,000 people, those refugees, there.
    The refugees started cleaning up things, building things.
    So that there is a picture I found in one of the books
    where it said, Zhoushan Road, this area before and after,
    where Europeans had started to fix up.
    They started to create little restaurants, especially
    till as soon as the war ended, until anybody could get out.
    But even during those war years with the Japanese,
    they started a theater group.
    People who had been artists in Europe started.
    I remember and never forget, since we had the big house
    and we had a piano, they were rehearsing for some shows
    and by candlelight sometimes because electricity
    was rationed.
    And I remember singing the song about [GERMAN].
    I can't sing, but it's the "Mack the Knife" song.
    And they would obviously be performing in German.
    And that's all the part of it that I remember in German.
    But there they were.
    And I remember my father at the piano
    because he, too, played the piano, more in the pop area.
    My stepfather played all the classical.
    And there they were rehearsing for what
    was then going to be a theater performance in the theater.
    So what emerged out of that was a very lively refugee
    community, which there were still
    those who were poor as can be and those who got themselves up
    by their bootstraps.
    So my husband, Henry, remembers then some family--
    an uncle started a restaurant.
    And his parents, his mother knew how to cook.
    You got to do something.
    So they started a restaurant.
    And ironically, he tells a story on July 17,
    a bomb went in the courtyard near their restaurant, which
    destroyed the restaurant part.
    But the kitchen was intact.
    So then they started just baking things and selling those.
    They couldn't run the restaurant.
    So it was wheels within wheels because I only met Henry here
    in New York.
    That is wheels within wheels.
    But he was in Shanghai, too, and he was hit
    by the July 17, affected by it.
    So yes, the refugee community was then quite active
    and lively.
    Out of nothing started this.
    20,000, out of nothing, they created something.
    So there were about 20,000.
    OK.
    And now let's go to what is life after.
    How does life progress after August 1945?
    The Japanese disappear.
    Or do you see them taken hostage?
    What happens to them?
    Slowly they disappear.
    There was some things about attacking.
    Somebody punched out Mr. Goya, who went,
    I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, for what he did and what happened.
    I don't know what happened to him,
    whether the Japanese helped him disappear
    or whether he disappeared, because he was quite the despot.
    And then after-- now the war is over, he and my stepfather
    can continue working without needing a pass.
    My dad can move into the French section with my stepmother
    and have his factory running and hiring
    people to help run the place.
    So life everywhere is comfortable.
    Now my father, the entrepreneur, is doing well and feeling well.
    The Nazis took everything away and so forth.
    Now he built something up again.
    So he was getting comfortable to stay.
    My brother, of course, is in New York.
    That's absolutely for his health.
    Yeah, when did he leave for New York?
    What year?
    My brother?
    They got him out, I think, the beginning of '47 or end of '46,
    as soon as possible, to see what can be done for the boy.
    And there is an uncle there, and let's get him out to New York.
    Now, as rumblings start with the communists,
    there are those who say, another warlord,
    there have been so many.
    And then there are others who get a little more worried.
    Were there people-- were there Jews who were
    going back to Europe at this time?
    Very few, only the ones who figured they'd
    have no chance of ending somewhere else.
    So there were those who went back.
    Now, my husband Henry's family decided
    that his father was getting sicker and sicker
    in the tropical climate, so they opted to let themselves
    be repatriated to Vienna.
    And they started a store there or something.
    But anyway, eventually both Henry and his brother got out.
    There are stories about that.
    But Freddy got to New York at Pittsburgh first,
    University of Pittsburgh.
    Henry managed to get to Montreal and then get the parents out.
    So they didn't feel at home there anymore?
    No, not at all.
    And his younger brother, who was quite the whiz kid,
    managed before leaving--
    the teachers gave him the London matriculation exams, which,
    as a 14- or 15-year-old, he passed to everyone's-- not
    to everyone's surprise, but he managed.
    I was too young.
    They couldn't--
    You're talking before he left Shanghai?
    Before he left Shanghai.
    So he passed the matric and ends up in-- they all end up--
    later my husband's family in Vienna.
    This is Henry Tausig?
    Henry Tausig and his brother, Fred Tausig.
    Fred goes to apply to the University of Vienna.
    He's got his matric.
    And they said, we never heard of it.
    By then he's 16.
    We never heard of a 16-year-old being admitted.
    So as Henry tells it, they go--
    if the London matric--
    people who are running the London matriculation
    have passed this young man, who are you not to accept him?
    Got to be a whole to do, but their hands were tied.
    Freddie got accepted as the youngest
    ever student at the University of Vienna.
    And he stayed there till he could
    apply on a student scholarship, which
    he got, to come to the States.
    I see.
    So he came to the States when--
    at first to the University of Pittsburgh, got drafted.
    He majored in chemistry and then in business.
    He said, except for basic training,
    he got put into a laboratory because he
    had majored in chemistry.
    And he would always joke, I've ruined more good steaks
    than anybody can do.
    Because they were doing research on irradiating food to make them
    last for the military and so forth.
    So he says, you do a lot of trial and error.
    He says, I ruined more good steaks.
    Anyway, so he's in--
    he's in the States.
    He applies as a special visa for his brother
    to come down from Canada.
    So Henry, who was in Montreal, where his father did pass away
    but the mother still lived, he comes to New York.
    And he meets me.
    Through channels.
    Any way, I can't tell you all these details
    It's OK.
    --that's too-- no, I mean, they're fun.
    But they'd be boring and this would be going on forever.
    Well, it is that--
    No, not boring?
    Not.
    First of all--
    Not boring?
    Not boring.
    All right, then I'll tell how I got to meet Henry.
    OK.
    Tell how you came here first.
    Yes.
    First time here.
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    And before you come here, first you
    have to tell us about what happened
    in Shanghai after the war.
    Because all this started from my question of
    did the Jewish refugees go back to Europe.
    So my-- all parts of my family went like hell will
    I go back there.
    And my father wasn't even interested in leaving Shanghai.
    But my mother and stepfather got a little nervous.
    And they weren't that enthused.
    I mean, they were comfortable, but they
    weren't that enthusiastic about continuing to live there.
    So they go through the motions of applying to come
    to the States, to New York.
    My mother says, my brother is there.
    My son is there.
    I want to go there.
    So
    They apply at the American Consulate or whatnot.
    And they are Austrian citizens.
    Still got their passports.
    And they apply.
    Now, I do have to backtrack to one thing.
    I lived with them.
    My father, who was back in Czechoslovakia, in Prague, when
    the Nazis move, go in, they ask that people
    have to renew their passports by way of getting whatever
    it is that the Nazis issue.
    Not what happened from the previous government.
    My father of course, is called to come in actions
    and you get your new passport.
    A Nazi passport?
    Hungarian redhead says like hell will I take that.
    Everybody was afraid this man is going
    to get arrested on the spot.
    But what they did do is they took his passport,
    which at that point is a Czech passport,
    and they stamp [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] on every
    single blank page front and back and front and back.
    I found that one now.
    [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] means--
    No longer valid.
    Right.
    Not valid.
    Invalid.
    Invalid is one word.
    Mr. Wasserman is very interested in that passport.
    So he's left as stateless, and when we left Prague,
    we left on something like a Nansen passports were issued.
    I don't know much about them.
    It was based on some Scandinavian politician
    who help people.
    Anyway it was something where you put a transit
    visa or a pet-- or visa into.
    But we are now both stateless, and I'm
    stateless with my father who is stateless.
    And your mother and your brother are not?
    My mother-- my brother was Austrian.
    He got shipped over here.
    And now fast forward again, my mother and stepfather,
    who are Austrians who applied to leave,
    they have to go through the shenanigans of but my daughter
    is stateless.
    But she's just a child.
    Put her on my passport because we want to go to America.
    Well, it's getting very difficult.
    They-- well, the Austrian embassy or consulate,
    they got very picky, but she was only six months
    old when she left.
    Oh, yeah?
    You have to at least live there year
    to be considered a national.
    Really?
    Whatever they were told.
    Nothing doing.
    Well, how do I leave with my daughter?
    Put her-- usually a child goes on--
    gets put on the mother's passport.
    They wouldn't do that.
    My stepfather bribed the secretary
    at the Austrian embassy.
    Shouldn't say that for the internet
    to know but she has passed away I know.
    And so they issue a travel certificate.
    It's a cardboard, you open it, close it,
    but the outside has those Austrian double equals,
    the symbol of Austria, very official looking.
    But if you open it and it asks for name and date of birth
    and nationality, it says [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
    In every language under the sun that my citizenship is unknown.
    But the Chinese guards, who's going to care?
    It looks very official.
    So that's the pass that my mother got
    so she could travel with me.
    With you.
    Right.
    And my stepfather.
    But that goes through the chores.
    We go get medical exams.
    What do I know.
    I go to school interrupted by minor formalities,
    and my-- and we get to the point where the visa is granted.
    Visa is granted, and we are given a date
    to come and pick up our different travel
    documents with the visa in it.
    And by then the--
    By then, the communists are getting closer and closer.
    This is now they marched into Shanghai in I think May '49.
    And under the-- until then, it was ruled by Chiang Kai-Shek
    by the nationalist--
    And Chiang Kai-Shek, yes.
    OK.
    And we tried to go there, and Pastor Wedel puts on his collar
    because there's air raid and blockages.
    They see that.
    They let-- I hear that.
    I wasn't along.
    My mother and stepfather go.
    And he gets them to the door of the embassy,
    and they had it closed.
    They were shredding.
    They were--
    Austrian embassy.
    Getting rid-- American--
    American embassy-- to pick up the visas and the passports.
    And nothing doing.
    You don't get in.
    Sorry, so sorry.
    They are evacuating the staff ahead of the communists
    coming in.
    So this was--
    I don't know January, February.
    I know they came in May '49.
    So nothing doing.
    We don't have the travel papers.
    They-- we don't have the American visas.
    And now the Commu-- now we're into '49,
    and the communists march in.
    And I was liberated by the People's Liberation Army.
    Tell me what was that like.
    Actually the initial impact was very minor because Chiang
    Kai-Shek troops ditched their uniforms and disappeared
    into the popular--
    general population.
    And it was-- actually telephone lines were never cut,
    so my dad was in that section.
    I was in the Hongkou section.
    We could talk.
    We've been liberated-- no, we're not yet--
    as they marched in.
    So the initial impact, if you will,
    was barely felt in terms of turmoil.
    Only the turmoil was about to start because as soon
    as the communists had marched in, so now they have Shanghai.
    They went on to take over the south and Canton.
    Here they are.
    Mr. Chiang Kai-Shek, who was so corrupt,
    whose wife here bamboozled Congress
    that she addressed where aid that was given to him
    was rotting on the Bund, the equipment, and rusting,
    he decided, well, I lost I'm going to retake my fatherland.
    And what is perhaps less well known,
    he embarked on a series of bombardments of Shanghai
    in the area to, quote unquote, retake his country.
    And those bombardments were helter skelter.
    The drums were dropped in heavily populated poorer
    areas where people were.
    There was damage done.
    It was-- he couldn't get to first base with that effort 'til
    eventually I understand the Allies put pressure on him.
    This has got to stop.
    But those bombardments were in a way scary.
    I remember being cool throughout all these other bombings,
    but once it was victory and people ran into the streets
    and were celebrating and this was all over,
    and then the communists come in, but it was initially
    very harmless.
    And as suddenly, it goes bang, bang,
    and I remember where we then lived.
    One of the bombs hit some storage area
    whether it was gasoline or bombs, anywhere,
    some depot got hit.
    And when those bombs went off, one
    after the other, and my mother and stepfather
    said it's all right, sweetheart.
    It's far away.
    I said, no, I want to get out.
    They took-- we all had little suitcase with emergency papers
    and what you had to carry.
    They-- I remember we were out in the lane
    because I would not stay in the apartment.
    That's when bomb, bomb 'til that stopped.
    Even the dog was hysterical.
    We had a wonderful German shepherd
    who had been buried partially in the bombardment.
    He didn't like bombings, and he knew
    when the flyers were coming.
    We didn't hear them, but as soon as the dog started
    getting nervous and acting up, we
    knew the Chiang Kai-Shek bombers were coming.
    Oh, wow.
    So that was an into--
    maybe a short interlude in the scheme of things,
    but in a young person's life, a chunk.
    So that was after the war, and then there
    was the Chiang Kai-Shek bombardments.
    And he tried to hold on to the economy,
    then he officially abdicated in favor of his son,
    Chiang Ching-kuo, who had been raised in Russia--
    I mean in the Soviet Union.
    I think he had a Russian wife, so he
    knew how to-- he was going to do--
    create order, nothing doing.
    So anyway the communists came in.
    None of these Chiang Kai-Shek and Chiang Ching-kuo measures
    worked.
    And finally the bombing stopped.
    And then what?
    That worked.
    So then it was a matter of well let's
    see what we can do to get out.
    So now we are in--
    I still go to school.
    Now we are in 1950, a year later,
    and the United Nations with the help really American money,
    they charter a Norwegian boat.
    And they're going to come in and help
    all the people who would want to get out to help them get out.
    Would this be refugees only?
    Refugees.
    Not Chinese nationalists?
    No Chinese.
    Refugees and some of the Russians
    who wanted to get out who could bribe their way on.
    But anyway, the boat--
    and somebody wrote a book about that boat--
    and now I found newspaper list that articles that they publish
    on a boat and one with a history Fred Wasserman
    is going to love that one as I'm reading it because that boat,
    they said people thought we're going to get evacuated.
    Yes.
    That boat was stripped on the inside
    so that there were double deckers for the women,
    triple deckers for the men.
    The crew was inadequate for all these people.
    The boat originally I read could hold about 800 passengers.
    With all this packing they did, we were 1,300 people on that
    boat.
    It was close quarters, and they--
    the boat's name was the SS Anna Salen--
    S-A-L-E-N, and it couldn't get into Shanghai.
    Whether the harbor was silted over-- it hadn't been dredged--
    for still mine, nobody knew, so we
    were all who were in the process of applying to go somewhere else
    and had prospects, we were going to get on onto that boat.
    By that point, my father had given permission for me
    to leave with my mother and stepfather,
    so they were in line to get on that boat.
    But that boat, by virtue of not being
    able to come into Shanghai, well,
    it had to go dock at [PLACE NAME] near Tianjin
    up north.
    So to get there after many delays--
    yes, you're going, no, you're not, yes, you're going,
    no, you're not--
    it took several months of--
    Negotiations.
    Negotiations and ready to go packed up.
    No.
    OK, unpack.
    That kind of thing.
    Yes, you're going, no, you're not,
    that was because of your father and your mother saying--
    No that-- he had given permission.
    That was with the authorities to let the people out or whatever.
    So off finally the whatever permissions were given,
    and we left by train to go up north.
    They thought a bridge might be bugged or have some mines there.
    We had to get off, get on a raft, get across.
    The bridge held with the luggage,
    so then we got back on the bridge.
    Then we ended up at port--
    at the-- where we were--
    the [? cay ?] where we were going to go aboard the ship.
    Now for that evacuation, people who had prospects to go,
    they were there.
    But there were many people who would
    have no prospects of coming to America or Australia or Canada
    because one member of the family might be sick.
    We were in couldn't get in here.
    So Israel said we will take any refugee from whatever situation
    who has no prospect to go anywhere else.
    So they emptied out the hospital.
    They emptied out the insane asylum with aids.
    They empty that everybody who could
    scramble to get onto that evacuation ship.
    That's how come we were 1,300.
    And what was going to happen and what did happen is that we--
    I will explain and how we got to Naples,
    but at Naples instead of going back down to Haifa,
    Israel sent a boat up to Naples where all the people who
    would have had no prospect got disembarked and went there
    and ended up in Israel.
    Now the trip went--
    and you could look at a globe--
    we left, but we had to go from Shanghai
    through the Sea of Japan where there were two typhoons.
    It's called typhoon there not hurricane,
    which was kind of interesting.
    We went via the Panama Canal to Naples.
    Yes, because at the time Nasser was president of Egypt
    and he said you people who are going to Israel,
    you may go there because a father is infirm and can't
    go to America.
    But you have to able-bodied sons,
    and they're going to be drafted in the Israel army
    to fight against me.
    So he blocked the passage up through the Suez Canal.
    So in other words, you go from Shanghai--
    Through the Sea of Japan.
    Across the Pacific.
    All across the Pacific.
    Through the Panama Canal to Europe to Italy.
    Through Europe along the African coast then
    the other time we went along Gibraltar.
    Anyway we end up--
    we were in total--
    my mother, stepfather, and I--
    we were on that boat for 72 days without any ability to get off.
    Even when the boat docked somewhere
    to take on supplies, many of which
    the crew sold at the next port and instead
    of giving to the refugees on board,
    they-- we could not get off.
    So I was at sea for 72 days.
    That's a long time.
    Yes.
    It took many, many years 'til Henry
    and I agreed that we would go on a boat
    because I really wanted to see Alaska.
    And so by-- it was 1993, that's why I remember that date
    because between 1950 and 1993, I was not going to get on any
    ocean liner no matter what the bribe--
    You had had your fill.
    Right.
    But the luxury boat, hey, I got converted.
    We then went on some Caribbean cruises, Evie and her husband
    and together, so we were on some nice cruises together.
    But up until Alaska, you do not see me on a boat.
    Anyway we in Naples was this switch, then
    from Naples the remaining refugees,
    we went along coast of Gibraltar up north to Bremerhaven.
    And there we were unloaded, uploaded on some trucks,
    but anyway off to a camp.
    What do you do with the people?
    Now Germany was the one place which was full of camps--
    That's right--
    Where they had refugees, survivors
    from concentration camps, survivors from labor camps,
    whatever.
    Yeah.
    So we ended up at a camp, Wildflecken, near Bremin.
    Wildflecken, I've heard of it.
    You've heard of it?
    Well, we were there for about two months It was winter.
    I didn't know how to walk.
    My stepfather-- I still remember him, where's the child.
    And he and my mother had walked a piece, and I was there.
    And I had never seen him laugh so heartily,
    and he was such a serious person.
    I had never seen snow or ice before.
    How do you walk on this thing?
    So here is this old man comes--
    coming back up the little piece of hill, and he holds me,
    and we go walking.
    Mind you, my stepfather is about 63 at this point,
    and they are going mountain air.
    I go the heck with mountain air.
    I like my at sea level air.
    But never mind the air.
    How do you walk on this thing?
    I was slipping.
    Anyway, we were at that camp for about two months,
    and then we got transferred by truck to Camp Foehrenwald.
    Foehrenwald?
    Foehrenwald.
    By Wolfratshausen, the camp by the village of Wolfratshausen,
    which was a short train ride to Munich.
    Wow.
    And all the people who wanted to go somewhere else, which
    was everybody, the beginning of documents because by now 72 days
    plus two months everything is expired.
    Of course, it is.
    Why--
    So we start from scratch, my stepfather and my mother
    and I. The application process and proving
    that there's somebody here who was issuing an affidavit, which
    was a relative of my stepfather's actually,
    and we start the process.
    And anytime you-- they need something, you get on the train
    to Munich.
    And the day you go for your x-ray
    but the machine didn't work when you had come back,
    you go back to Munich for the x-rays.
    It took a year.
    We were free to come and go.
    We were the Shanghai group.
    But if your name was on a list for a next piece of whatever you
    had to do, you better be there, or you
    get to the bottom of the list.
    So it was kind of constrained.
    But there we are in this camp.
    Did you expect that to happen, or when the shift left--
    ship left Shanghai, did you think your next port was going
    to be in the United States?
    Did people know they would be going to Germany
    and having to stay there and only from there go--
    The adults may have known.
    I was not particularly made aware of where
    this thing would--
    not it's like next stop.
    And being 14, I helped because there were all
    these pussy sick women and us kids
    would go scampering off to bring wet washcloths
    to put on their foreheads.
    And the crew that tried to bribe us, here's
    an orange little girl, and I'd grab it, thank you, and bring it
    down to somebody who was trying not to throw up
    when the boat was going all sorts
    of crazy ways in the typhoon.
    So it was an interesting trip.
    I just wanted to say there are published--
    [PHONE RINGING]-- sources.
    So there are published sources about--
    They published somebody who wrote a book about that boat
    trip and all the horrible things that
    happen because some people thought,
    oh, we'll get evacuated now.
    Things will be good.
    They didn't know that the able-bodied people
    had to work on the boat.
    And of the 1,300--
    I just read a figure-- only about 200
    were really able to work who were strong enough
    because people weren't used to certain manual labor.
    And seasickness was pretty prevalent.
    So it was pretty scary sometimes, these huge waves.
    I remember going up on deck 'cause
    you needed air, the stifling air in the compartment,
    and I'm there hanging on to the railing.
    The waves and [INAUDIBLE]-- but, hey, that's exciting.
    And I suddenly I feel somebody grabbing me
    by the scruff of the neck the way you would pick up the cat,
    and it was the sailor.
    And they were wearing boots with thick wooden soles--
    wooden soles so that they wouldn't slide and whatever.
    And he was, little girl, what are you doing up here.
    You get back inside.
    Yes, sir.
    I need some air.
    And so there were some of these experiences.
    And one little aside.
    On the boat, who do we meet?
    A couple and their little son.
    Now who are these people?
    I often talk to ask me what was an amah.
    Yeah.
    After the bombardment, because that
    amah and retired that I had, I get
    an amah and somebody comes in, a mother and daughter.
    And they can't really talk English.
    They're all Chinese, but somebody helps with hands,
    with gestures, with somebody helping.
    Anyway my new young amah who was going
    to live with us was brought there by her mother and somebody
    with pigeon English could help translate.
    So she's bringing her daughter to us
    to take care of me and the house and to be the servant.
    And my mother said but of course.
    What a lovely young woman.
    As we lived there in this house, where by the way
    we had string quartet every Sunday
    afternoon with my stepfather playing the cello
    and people coming in with-- for the other instruments,
    one of the gentlemen who comes in to listen
    goes for this young woman and approaches my mother.
    I'd really-- I'm really interested.
    And my mother says nothing doing.
    This is a lovely country girl.
    You're not going to get her away from here
    and have an affair and then.
    Ooh, was she strict with him.
    Well, he was in love.
    He married her.
    Then she became Mrs. Engle--
    [? never mind-- ?] And lived somewhere else.
    We didn't really-- were in touch.
    I knew she had a little boy with her husband.
    Guess what?
    We're on this evacuation boat.
    Who is there?
    Mr. And Mrs. Engle and their little son George.
    Oh my goodness.
    And everybody calls to my mother, Mrs. Rosenbaum,
    how do you know them.
    And my mother goes why they were neighbors.
    That's my mother.
    None of this [INAUDIBLE].
    They were neighbors.
    And she was so happy because now she
    knew somebody there, her little charge.
    And we went through the camp experience together,
    both camp experiences.
    And she ended up with her husband in California.
    And after I was here, I still went out to visit them once.
    How interesting.
    So sometimes these things.
    But anyway I left you that we were in the camps--
    You were in the camps.
    You were close to Munich.
    You could--
    We were close to Munich.
    Kids went to classes.
    I-- knowing German from home, which not all the refugee
    kids knew because the parents tried to speak English
    in Shanghai or Polish or whatever
    they spoke at home, so they knew English,
    but I understood German.
    So I picked up very soon.
    I was certainly understanding all the Yiddish around me,
    speaking some--
    speaking it.
    And we had to go to class, and I was busy scribbling some things
    for the girl next to me.
    What did he say?
    And so there I was in this Yiddish environment picking up--
    thank goodness because my poor stepfather
    with his proper German was completely
    lost in that environment.
    And we went to school, and that's
    where I learned some Hebrew.
    It's very much easier with the vowels indicated than just
    to read the consonants.
    I learned my chemistry in Yiddish
    and could recite the chemical--
    Table.
    Yeah, yeah.
    And a few other strange things.
    I liked the guy who taught Hebrew.
    The other kids made fun of him because they knew some.
    So I thought that was interesting to learn.
    So I became a teacher's pet, and I learned some more.
    And then-- and we went through all the
    I heard some horrible experiences.
    One girl I was friendly with and we were playing and going home,
    and I said shhh when we went home.
    She needed to pick up something.
    What happened?
    But her mother was in the--
    we lived in these little houses or whatever camp.
    And her mother had candles set out,
    and she said that was for my little brother.
    What happened?
    Oh, Gestapo came in.
    The kid yelled, it was a baby.
    He picked it up by the legs and smashed it against the wall.
    For a young girl to see that and the mother--
    whatever I knew of horrible things that happened--
    and a few horrible things did happen in Shanghai
    and my goodness I'd been bombed and then left with nothing--
    but then to hear a personal story like that was rough.
    Although that was one of the questions
    that I had that during the years in Shanghai,
    did people know much of what was going on in the rest of Europe?
    Not really.
    They tried through illegal shortwave radio sets
    to get some news, but by and large, news was hard to come by.
    When did your-- so was it when you actually got to Europe
    or was it after the war was over and the Japanese disappear,
    when did people find out that there had been
    this Holocaust, this genocide?
    I think a little sooner because as the Japanese are
    disappearing, some more radio sets come into action,
    and they start hearing.
    And then I see--
    I saw pictures where people put up lists of family members
    to see if anybody on their family
    would showed up on any survivor list from a camp.
    So gradually, well, news spread as soon as anybody
    knew anything.
    But when the American bombers came,
    the first few people ran out into the streets.
    The Americans are coming.
    So one bomb missed but--
    the intended target, but people were overwhelmed with joy
    that this looks like this horrible end.
    So it wasn't 'til later that really the full newscast
    and everything came out.
    But for you, you're like a face-to-face encounter
    with the consequences is something
    that sticks in your mind.
    You're in school.
    You meet this girl.
    She goes home.
    She says shhh.
    My mother--
    Yeah, in the camp.
    In that D camp in the-- yeah.
    And what was--
    I guess I have to bring that up--
    is that I was not particularly raised in any one
    religion or the other.
    But if anything, my mother more or less
    identified with the Jewish holidays but as a Lutheran.
    OK.
    She was a Jewish Lutheran.
    So we being officially Protestant,
    the camps were divided.
    There was another camp of Christian survivors.
    Foehrenwald was the camp of Jewish survivors.
    My mother couldn't speak Jewish--
    Yiddish, so that was no problem of any slip of the tongue.
    And I soon figured out that if anybody found out
    that I'm a half breed here, they might clobber me to death
    for what they went through.
    So I didn't-- we went to the Jewish camp, my stepfather,
    and so we were there.
    And I remember-- and I picked up habits or rituals.
    It was fascinating.
    I didn't have that from back home.
    I do remember that we ate in big community dining halls.
    I do remember Passover came, and I do know enough at this point
    about Passover rituals.
    And the youngest person in the camp
    has to recite the four questions at the Passover Seder.
    What did I know about the questions of the Passover Seder?
    Were you the youngest person?
    And they started asking me.
    And at one point, I'm the youngest.
    No, there's so-and-so.
    No, he's a year older.
    So-and-so.
    Finally-- and he was a friend of mine.
    He was kind of nice.
    He was my age and was nice.
    And I remember his name to this day, Manik Zitrenbaum.
    He was a few months--
    he was two months younger.
    And I remember-- never remember having
    been as relieved as scared I was how am I going to learn this.
    I don't know how to behave, how to say it because I
    wasn't taught any of that.
    In Catholic school, I knew the catechism.
    I came home one day when we learned about different people,
    and I came home one day and I said, mom, you're a heretic.
    [LAUGHING]
    She said let's talk.
    What's going on here?
    Well, we had just gotten through Calvin, and we'd reached Luther.
    Well, of course.
    And guess who he is?
    He's a heretic.
    Mom, this is-- she said let's talk because here I
    was in Catholic school.
    Well, from Catholic school, I'm in Jewish school.
    What do I know about that?
    I knew about some procedures because you
    learn that in general.
    And then came the Jewish people, and they needed--
    and Moses asked for them to be liberated.
    And Pharaoh-- then he said let my people go.
    And Moses-- then came the plagues.
    I knew the story, but what I know?
    So anyway Manik was the youngest.
    And he had to--
    And I remember to this day in my old age his name.
    He may or may not be alive.
    I never saw him after we left.
    But he was my best friend after that episode.
    As long as I was in that camp, he was my hero.
    [LAUGHING]
    I was petrified.
    That I remember.
    End of story, we get our papers after a lot of delays
    because they misplaced mine since my name is Flesser
    and my mother and stepfather are Rosenbaum.
    And somehow our papers got separated,
    so they had to get themselves put at the bottom of the list
    'til my papers were found and put together with them.
    So there were various stories that happened.
    One I'll tell.
    That one you've heard.
    We go and my stepfather who had been a bank official--
    and he has some retirement money in Austria--
    and we had to leave with--
    the communists counted how much he had on you.
    He said I could use-- well, they could use some money
    not just here in the camp.
    So they decided-- they tried to go to Vienna.
    They are Austrians.
    And during the Christmas new year
    holiday, who works in Europe during Christmas, New Year?
    Nobody.
    Nobody.
    So let's go there.
    So story started.
    I'm 14.
    Not yet, I'm about to be 14.
    My birthday's December 26th.
    The first thing you asked me was my birth date.
    That's right.
    So they figure out very easily that if they go in mid-December
    to Vienna, there's no problem.
    I'm a child according to them.
    I can travel with my parents.
    But when we come back, I will be more than 14.
    So we went to the American consul in Munich.
    And the popinjay, they-- excuse me, that's not a nice word.
    And, of course, to be nice and make a good impression,
    I get all--
    they doll me all up.
    I get corkscrew curls just to look as nice as can be
    and so forth and were there.
    And he goes I'm sorry there's nothing I can do.
    I cannot issue anything as long as the child is under 14.
    But she'll be over 14 when we come back.
    What do we do?
    Well, he came with a solution.
    He said you'll be going over the Bremer Pass or something--
    I don't know.
    When you go there by train.
    Look, you're going in the evening.
    Put her in the corner of the train,
    put a blanket on her so people will see that she's asleep.
    Don't show her face because you had--
    Vienna was surrounded by the four occupiers.
    That's right.
    And the path from Munich to Vienna
    was through the Russian zone.
    And these soldiers haven't seen a pretty girl in a long time
    as he looks me over from stem to stern while my curls.
    But she'll be all right.
    My mother hears that.
    The Russian soldiers haven't seen a pretty girl
    and keep her asleep in the corner of the cabin.
    Thank you very much, sir.
    Well, I remember a school chum whose parents left and returned
    to Salzburg.
    Oh, remember their name?
    Yes.
    I knew where they were.
    I'd somehow been in touch with her from Shanghai.
    We were still pen pals.
    All I know is there were phone calls back and forth.
    Of course, she can come.
    I spent the holiday in Salzburg with my friend Inge--
    I forget her last name--
    and her parents.
    I just found the photo album.
    I have beautiful postcards and pictures of Salzburg.
    My first trip, I got to go to every church.
    I got to go to all the Mozart places.
    I had two weeks in [PLACE NAME] with my school chum
    while my mother and stepfather went to Vienna,
    met people they knew there who had survived or been there,
    and then they came back.
    And did they get the money?
    And I got a locket as what my mother called [GERMAN],
    which is--
    Substitution price.
    Well, it's to make you feel better.
    That's right.
    A kind of little trinket and I still have that blue thing here.
    Not that I ever get to wear it.
    But that was one experience that literally you can't get the--
    pack-- you can't get the permit.
    But now her birth--
    yes, she is 13 years and 11 and 1/2 months.
    When she comes back, she'll be 14 and maybe two weeks.
    Sorry.
    So I wasn't very friendly with disposed
    as I grew up to any of these whether it
    was the Austrian secretary who had to be bribed.
    And whenever Henry said, well, I was born in Vienna.
    She was, too.
    And I go [INAUDIBLE].
    I'll tell my own story.
    Don't tell people my story, these Austrians.
    But this was an American?
    This was an American?
    Now we are with the American popinjay
    can give you anything to for coming back.
    Sorry.
    So mama said who's going to be open.
    What office?
    What bureau will be open in Vienna around Christmas, New
    Year?
    Well, I don't-- whatever.
    I didn't get it.
    I spent the time in Salzburg.
    But eventually the papers all came together.
    We were ready to leave.
    It was November, 1951.
    We left the camp.
    We ended up I think in Bremerhaven again to go--
    the English Channel is not a fun place in November.
    I believe you.
    But we managed, and we arrived in New York.
    Do you know what the name of the boat was?
    The boat that we arrived on, which was a regular--
    they'd used it often--
    I don't.
    The long voyage was the SS Anna Salen, S-A-L-E-N.
    OK.
    Well, if you know when you arrived there
    were a number of boats that--
    that can be traced actually.
    What I'm saying is if it was November 1951--
    It was now '51.
    OK.
    Was your brother waiting for you at the pier?
    My brother was here.
    And we moved in together 'til--
    first we spend a couple of nights in some hotel.
    My mother was horrified.
    There's not much money there.
    She found a place in a railway apartment,
    what was 90 Pitt Street in New York, which
    was then crummy area.
    Now it's become gentrified with the old buildings torn down.
    Then it was the Lower East Side.
    And we lived there for a year and a half or something.
    It had been five years since you'd seen your brother.
    Yes.
    And then it took another five years 'til 1955 in the meantime
    to finish the sentence.
    Sorry.
    It wasn't 'til 1955 that I saw my father.
    And he-- remember he's still back in Shanghai,
    and he finally gets out in '52 after horrible treatment
    by the cops-- the communists at this point.
    You dirty imperialistic pig.
    You-- where is the materials?
    I can't keep the factory going.
    I have no raw materials.
    This is now the communists.
    You must be hiding materials somewhere.
    Where?
    The held sit ins.
    They came in a whole mass of people into his office
    so he couldn't leave.
    He played a lot of chess games with his--
    as he called it-- his number one man which whom was Chinese.
    He had to publish his name in the local Chinese paper.
    Any disgruntled employee could say something.
    Anyway, he finally got to leave everything behind
    and got out in 1952.
    He got the Canadian visa.
    Americans would not-- he applied here to come join us,
    but this was the McCarthy period,
    and my father is married to somebody
    who is of Jewish parentage.
    Even in getting the visas when we were to Munich and back,
    I remember being interviewed by another person
    at the American consulate, not that one, not that popinjay,
    but another who would say, well, young lady I
    understand you spent some time with your Russian grandparents.
    Yes, I did every Sunday.
    Sunday lunch was with the grandparents.
    Well, what were some of the conversation around the table?
    They were so hysterical about communist influence.
    What do you ask a 13-year-old what was the conversation about
    the grandparents?
    How was-- what can you tell me?
    Well, I can tell you that the cook always
    made my favorite dessert.
    Even when he made something else,
    he always made mine if he knew I didn't like
    what everybody else was eating.
    I just-- what would I know how to answer.
    Well, you're between a rock and a hard place.
    Because if there was real, quote unquote, adult conversation,
    it wouldn't be held in front of the children.
    So asking me what was conversation
    like in the grandparents' home, meaning my stepmother's parents,
    come on.
    It was so far fetched, but it happened.
    People were so paranoid that it happened
    because it happened to me.
    And also your father gets it from the other end.
    Oh, yes.
    He's married to now a Russian lady,
    and there was no outlook for him.
    He just didn't get the American visa, but he got the Canadian.
    And my stepmother had two cousins in Vancouver.
    So if you're going to go anywhere,
    they wanted to go there because they were
    part of that earlier Russian--
    The anti-Bolshevik.
    Migration, and there were two of her first cousins.
    One was a professor at the University of British Columbia,
    and one was in a building industry,
    very well-established by this time in '52.
    When was the Bolshevik Revolution?
    And it somehow ended up in Canada.
    So that's where my father was.
    So it was 'til 1955--
    I'd been here now for four years--
    that I went on a propeller, four engine plane to Vancouver.
    And is that where your father lived the rest of the time here.
    Yes.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    So every year, my vacations were there.
    And in 1960, end do around November Thanksgiving--
    maybe it was '66 that I met Henry.
    And we were getting interested in each other.
    And comes spring, we're really dating, and comes the summer,
    I go guess what.
    I have two weeks vacation.
    That one Evie has heard 10,000 times.
    I'm going on vacation.
    I'm going to Vancouver.
    How long you going to be gone?
    Well, two weeks.
    That's all I have.
    I haven't been here long enough.
    Two weeks?
    Henry goes maybe I should meet your father.
    [CHUCKLING]
    Well, OK.
    Well, if you're going to meet my father--
    we had talked.
    We should get-- you know how men are little,
    well, maybe we should get-- consider getting married.
    Maybe by end of the year, we should get married.
    And I always went OK.
    Fine with me.
    Whatever.
    OK.
    Well, maybe I should meet your father.
    Well, in that case, we're going to get married there.
    And the story of OK.
    What do I do?
    My stepmother is all excited.
    My dad is all excited.
    My mother is in Europe.
    I couldn't handle everything.
    And so I call up the Canadian consulate here,
    whatever the economic department--
    whatever they have here.
    Hi.
    What does it take to get married in Canada, specifically
    in British Columbia because I know the provinces have
    different rules.
    And I guess that poor guy never had a question like that.
    He said, well, you have to be there.
    [LAUGHING]
    I said OK.
    I understand that.
    But what do I have to prepare to be there?
    Oh, you have to be there.
    I guess he thought it was big funny.
    I said, look, there are certain requirements.
    For example, here in New York at that point--
    at that time, you needed a blood test.
    That's right.
    I think it was AIDS or before whatever,
    and you need to apply and get a marriage license.
    So he said, well, you do that.
    You get the license, which is immediate--
    good immediately when you get there,
    and you just have to be there.
    I said you sure.
    He said I'm sure.
    By then he--
    I was explaining that my fiance and I want
    to get married in British Columbia in Vancouver
    with my father and stepmother.
    He said it's all right.
    My stepmother rushed to the city hall
    there to get us an appointment.
    Henry arrives on the appointed day.
    The guy has the flu.
    We have to wait two days.
    And what does my stepmother do?
    Henry has to go to the basement and sleep there.
    And as long as we lived would anything had appeared
    or anything happened, he went can I come out of the basement.
    So that was a family joke.
    None of my room was upstairs in the parents' home.
    He had to sleep in the basement.
    We got married.
    Henry was permitted to join me.
    So that was my story with Henry who always joked.
    And then he joked-- he said you just didn't want to get--
    do a blood test.
    I said that's right.
    That's why.
    So you didn't have to do a blood test there?
    No.
    They had no-- you just registered
    and whatever my stepmother did, my children
    want to come here and get married,
    you just go for the justice of the peace.
    Like he said you just had to be there.
    You just get an appointment.
    Yeah.
    But this guy got sick on the day of our appointment.
    We had to go there two days later.
    Did you ever go back to Prague to Vienna to Shanghai?
    To Shanghai, no.
    OK.
    To Prague.
    I think I mentioned that Oscar's granddaughter lived
    in Prague and then in Vienna and heard
    about us through her father.
    So one time, she decided that if we took a vacation in Prague--
    and she was perfectly fluent in Czech--
    that she would drive us around, show us
    the sights, which really helped to get
    on the trams and everywhere with someone who spoke the language.
    Vienna, I went visiting because after the war,
    there were relatives there from my stepfather
    where they survive there because there was this Jewish ancestor
    that nobody wanted to talk about,
    but the others were musical.
    My stepfather had the musical gene in him
    with piano and cello.
    And so there was this relative who was first--
    At the Vienna Philharmonic.
    And you're either the principal player or back of the orchestra.
    So there was a relative who was with the Vienna Philharmonic,
    and to this day, when they come, I go there.
    And after the war when we're here,
    they went to Vienna quite often because frankly
    if I helped my mother and stepfather at that point in time
    with the currency, it was a lot cheaper for me
    to help them get to Vienna and stay in a pension than here
    in some resort place.
    Sure.
    And they could speak the language and so forth.
    So there were the family who were descendents of someone who
    eventually-- who was at one point,
    I heard that somebody tried to trace that thing and a very
    well-known conductor said you're not doing any of that
    because there were people who were then imprisoned and sent
    to concentration camp who were Jewish members of the Vienna
    Philharmonic.
    That's true.
    So there were quite a few Nazi sympathizers who were there.
    But that family member who was in the principal violin
    section and his brother was a cello player
    and there's a whole group of people
    I can identify who were into--
    some had some musical connection with Vienna, mainly
    the Vienna Philharmonic.
    So when my mother and stepfather went there for visits,
    it was like family surrounding them.
    My stepfather passed away.
    It was still easier to send my mom over there
    so they will continue to welcome her as a family member.
    So up until practically the end-- as long as she could,
    she went to Vienna.
    So now I'd like to find out about the passing of all four
    of your parents, and you said your brother also passed away.
    Yes.
    So could you tell me the years that your father
    and your stepmother passed away?
    I can tell you the years.
    First, I want to say that how I met
    my husband, which was a story.
    When we were in New York and we're
    visiting the widow of a lady whose husband had been active
    in the Masonic lodge in Shanghai as had my stepfather
    and we're visiting her, and in part of the conversation
    she says--
    she's in Queens-- there's a lady who lives down the hall here
    and she, too, was in Shanghai.
    Do you remember a Mrs. Freed?
    She used to have a store in Shanghai
    or men's gloves and scarves and things.
    My mother said maybe I was there.
    Not really.
    But she wants to meet you.
    She hears you here.
    So next time I go with my mother to have coffee and a Lily
    Hoffman's place, Mrs. Freed comes over
    and cottons to my mother and oh my goodness
    becomes a fast friend.
    That lady, who is super energetic,
    she comes to Manhattan.
    She visits my mother.
    We're going to go to the theater.
    I'm going to go get the tickets, and then
    on the day of the performance I'm going to come pick you up.
    We're going to take a cab down because my mother was starting
    to get some heart problems.
    So energetic Selma Freed becomes a friend.
    And then Aufbau has charter flights.
    Aufbau was a refugee paper here in New York.
    They have charter flights less expensive to go to Europe.
    So my mother and Mrs. Freed decide to take one.
    So they are there, and Mrs. Freed
    becomes very attentive to my mother, who's
    a little frail in health.
    And then the story starts.
    She said I need Susie's phone number
    and I need to call her if something happens to you.
    Oh, all right.
    Then comes the story.
    My nephew just came to New York from Montreal.
    He's a lovely guy at this point.
    He doesn't know too many people.
    It would be so nice if Susie would
    agree to have dinner with him.
    And my mother tells me that, and I say, oh, no, you don't.
    You don't do that to me.
    And this goes on for quite a little while,
    and she goes this woman is driving me nuts.
    She has your number, but I'm not giving her permission to use it
    because you don't want to.
    And so my mother begs me.
    She said, look, have dinner with him.
    At least you'll have a good meal.
    You don't ever have to see him again,
    but please go out with that nephew of Selma Freed.
    And so the nephew of Selma Freed called Henry Tausig shows up
    at my door, where I lived at the time near Columbia University,
    and we go out for dinner.
    And then he asked me out for dinner again and again
    and again.
    So that was how I met my husband Henry because his aunt got
    friendly with my mother through a Shanghai connection in Queens.
    What else?
    And then you found so many other things in common.
    You found--
    Yes.
    Yes.
    Do you-- this, people would ask you know how did you meet--
    you were both in Shanghai.
    Did you know each other?
    I said no.
    He would have pulled my pigtails.
    He wouldn't have been interested in me.
    But, yes, there were common things.
    Some he-- some were some of his experiences
    being a little older that were just a little more
    mature if you will.
    And then his experiences that he had to go back to Vienna
    to then get to its Montreal.
    But then he came here.
    So all that to say how I met my husband and how we got
    married because I was going to go on vacation to visit
    my father and stepmother.
    That's a perfect reason.
    Perfect timing.
    And after that, we went there many times and many vacations.
    that we spent there.
    How many years where you married?
    We were married 50 years.
    And when Henry agreed to go to Vancouver,
    that was the fastest decision he ever made.
    To get married after knowing each other
    from the end of November, we got married in July.
    Half a year.
    Half a year, eight--
    not quite eight months.
    Because as Evie can confirm to you,
    he was very deliberate in his decision making.
    If it meant to buying a new used car,
    he would have checked 35 or 50 before settling on the one
    that he was taking.
    Anything.
    He was very methodical and very deliberate,
    so he never made such a quick decision.
    But he said see.
    Well, he knew.
    He knew.
    Yeah.
    And he was the most amazing person I could ever know.
    Ohh, I understand.
    You've lost him just recently.
    Yeah.
    And that would have been in 2017?
    Yeah.
    What month?
    End of-- last day of June.
    Last day of June.
    So it's not getting any easier.
    No.
    And anyway, he made me feel special.
    There was so much love in him as for me that it was incredible.
    So he was super special.
    The biography of my parents started that in 19--
    well, my stepfather was born in '88--
    1988.
    1888.
    1888.
    And he died in--
    at the age of 76.
    So that would have been in the '70s probably--
    or the '60s even.
    '60s.
    '64.
    '64.
    There's the mathematician there.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    And he died while we were living at university of wherever down
    at near Gramercy Park.
    And I had moved to my bachelor apartment.
    I was then at Columbia.
    And so he had just retired because he
    had lied about his age on his first job
    that somebody helped him get here, and he had said whatever.
    He'd taken 10 years off.
    And then when they started to celebrate him
    for retiring at 65, he had to admit he was 75.
    Was he scared.
    Are they going to arrest me?
    Are gonna-- no, you're going to get social security
    retroactively.
    He didn't know.
    He was such a sweetheart.
    Anyway, nobody could believe, and he had struggled
    to keep my mother and me going.
    And it was hard, and he was the kind of person
    if we went out my mother brought me a blouse, he said oh--
    and I would show it off at home.
    Said why don't you buy her two.
    She looks so pretty.
    But when my mother tried to maybe get a job here,
    she said I know--
    I met somebody.
    I could maybe work in the lady's store,
    help people get the clothes on or something.
    That's the only time he threw a fit.
    [PHONE RINGING]
    I can support my family.
    What do you mean?
    This can never happen.
    So my mother gave up.
    She ran the household.
    She left it on her shoulders.
    It was on his shoulders.
    My father when he picked himself up again in Vancouver
    eventually sent a little something for me,
    but that took a while.
    It was my stepfather who carried the whole burden.
    And his first job somebody got him
    was as a night accountant at Mount Sinai
    Hospital with the big ledgers on this stands
    where he had to stand all night to check what was happening.
    Wow.
    After a year, he got with a financial company
    that he could work with.
    So he was all hard everything for my mother and for the child.
    'Til he died, I was the child.
    Anyway, here I am at Columbia, and my mother
    reconnects with a Vietnamese friend
    who lives in this building.
    The friend's husband is an art salesman.
    He deals with artists and travels the country
    to sell the paintings.
    I think some he tried to pass off as poor refugee man.
    He did that, too.
    But he travels all over.
    There's a new pope.
    All the convents, monasteries need him.
    Oil painting of the new pope or whatever.
    I'm making that up, but that was part of it.
    He didn't like his wife to be all alone for days on end.
    He was on a mission that anybody whose apartment was too small
    or who was an empty nester and whose house was now
    too big for them to try to get them to move into this building.
    So we alluded during lunch that there
    were a lot of refugees and others
    appear on the Upper West Side.
    Well, there were a bunch of them in this building thanks
    to Rudy [? Budaben, ?] who made sure he got in friendly
    with the renting agent.
    He heard a part--
    about apartments that were about to be empty
    I think before she reported it back at the office.
    He knew about apartments.
    So there were a whole group of friends
    of friends of friends who were refugees who were now
    living in this building.
    So when there was a conversation that maybe my mother
    and stepfather might want to move up
    from Union Square, Gramercy Park area away because now
    that he was retired at 75, quote 65, and we lived in a brownstone
    and a skyscraper had come up behind, so that
    wasn't that bright anymore.
    So he was on a campaign.
    Why don't you move up here?
    You'll be closer to the child who is at Columbia.
    She can come down for dinner very easily,
    not all the way to Union Square, a few more stops on the subway.
    Well, he was being very persuasive.
    He was a salesman.
    Well, they agreed to move up here.
    They signed the lease.
    Things were being packed by the movers.
    And Luichi collapses in front of the brownstone two days
    before moving day.
    I get a call at Columbia.
    This is Sergeant whatever he was.
    You need to come down.
    Why?
    Oh my God.
    So I get this call, and Luichi is gone.
    First I sit there like I don't want anything more to happen.
    But Rudy, bless his soul and his wife, said look.
    At least we'll be there for your mother.
    Don't drop everything.
    Look, everything is pulled apart.
    It's packed already.
    So it made sense.
    So we went ahead with the move.
    And your mother moved here.
    And my mother moved into this building here.
    She was one floor above us.
    And it worked fine, and we could come down.
    And Henry and I had got married, but things
    got a little difficult that winter
    because my apartment near Columbia was lovely for one.
    But my closet got very crowded when he brought the winter
    coats and the winter suits.
    We had to hang them in the bathroom.
    He said that's-- that we need a bigger place.
    So Rudy to the rescue.
    I know what apartment in this building.
    And I thought for a while do I want
    them to be right with his mother-in-law here.
    But my mother, as I have told you,
    was the loveliest and most thoughtful person.
    And she never ever came in here without having discussed it.
    And, boy, was it lovely.
    We could come home from work, and, mom, we're home.
    OK.
    Dinner's ready.
    Come on up whenever you're ready.
    This is nice.
    So we moved into this apartment in winter.
    November seems to be my big moving month.
    We moved in here.
    My mother lived one floor apart--
    up above us, and it was such a blessing
    because when she didn't feel right,
    I could be just right there.
    It was like living in the same house.
    Just she has the upstairs bedroom so to speak.
    So we lived here together 'til she passed away.
    So now Luichi died in '64.
    My mother, who did the final ceremony, Pastor Wedel,
    who was in New York--
    Wow.
    With tears rolling down his face.
    My mother dies in '75 within 10 years.
    Pastor Wedel is still living here,
    tears rolling down his face.
    He does the service.
    And then my-- so that leaves my dad and stepmother.
    And my dad had had a series of heart attacks.
    I think I-- well, anyway, I had to fly over.
    This is serious.
    You better come here.
    So there were three occasions where you better come here,
    and I picked myself up and flew to Vancouver.
    And my father had being an entrepreneur,
    he had established himself there.
    Nothing doing about opening a textile firm.
    That wasn't going to work.
    Somebody referred him to a business man
    who had different businesses--
    jewelry stores, pawn shops, investments.
    So my father figured, well, I'm getting a lead to meet this man.
    Anything-- he may be able to help me get something.
    And the man says, well, you can't do this.
    You can't do this.
    Here's a balance sheet.
    As my father told this story, a balance sheet I could read.
    And did I tell him what that balance sheet really
    said because the guy was so wealthy,
    he was something of a playboy.
    So did I tell him what that said?
    So you're hired.
    You just come in and you help run this--
    these businesses.
    And my dad, entrepreneur that he was--
    [SIRENS]
    So your father was became the manager of his businesses.
    Of these various businesses and he took to the real estate part.
    The best way I can describe my father eventually in Vancouver,
    do you ever watch--
    there is a program here called Shark Tank.
    Yes!
    Well, people who listen to presentations
    and decide whether they'll invest in them or not.
    Well, before he worked with his own money,
    he worked with that-- this guy's money.
    He was like that.
    He helped-- some young man came to him.
    He wants to open--
    also refugee something.
    A camera store.
    My father said I like this guy.
    He was a good reader of people.
    I like this guy.
    He brought him to the bank.
    This guy-- you need a loan if you're going to establish.
    Well, the camera shop became House of Stein
    all over Vancouver.
    That guy could build himself a beautiful home.
    He even bought Chateau Granville, a big hotel.
    He had to do something with his money eventually.
    As my dad tells it, when I started,
    I was a lousy refugee with this Hungarian accent.
    After a while, I was the gentleman
    with this charming Hungarian accent.
    He said when you owe the bank 1,000,
    they want to kill you if it's not on time.
    If you owe them a million and you get a heart attack,
    the bank manager send you flowers
    and come to see you at the hospital.
    You're so right.
    He was so right, yes.
    And that's how it came about.
    And with one bank manager and another,
    I could go there and go with him to the bank.
    Hi, Miss Flesser.
    How do you do, Miss Flesser.
    Oh, you're his daughter?
    How good to see you again.
    So dad built up a relationship with bank managers
    who were the real sharks.
    Yeah.
    And next thing you know this guy has a whole thing
    going in Vancouver.
    He then came-- there was no good contact
    to get from the old crummy airport to the city.
    I don't know how he got-- he met somebody
    who introduced-- he worked with the Vancouver authorities.
    Next thing you know, dad manages to find a building which becomes
    a little terminal at the time.
    He helps negotiate with them for Greyhound-- no Trailways,
    and next thing you know there's Trailways bringing people
    from the airport to the center of the city.
    I have a picture of my dad.
    He hated the publicity with those big scissors
    to cut the ribbon.
    Then a guy has a taxi business.
    He wants to have another.
    Next thing you know, this guy has multiple taxis to drive.
    So on and on it went, but dad sweated all these out.
    Cigarettes and black coffee and holes in the carpet,
    walking up and down and pacing the floor
    because it's easy to tell the story of afterwards how it
    turned out.
    That's right.
    But while you're hanging in the balance--
    A lot of nerves.
    It took a lot of nerves.
    But that's how his heart attacks happened.
    But anyway, that's how his--
    so back to the dates.
    When father remarried, his wife was 10 years younger,
    very active, very meeting the girls for lunch, and so forth.
    And I have to say she took care of my father, these heart
    attacks and others.
    I once told her haven't you ever heard of women's lib.
    Yeah, I-- yeah, I had heard about women's lib.
    She spoiled my father.
    She laid out his clothes so he'd know what to wear for that day.
    She laid out his shaving stuff in the bathroom
    so he'd know what to pick up and what to do.
    She prepared everything.
    That was her life.
    She just-- that's-- she said, yeah, but that's your father.
    I said I know it's my dad.
    That was-- we called her Minky, but her name
    was Dina Ravve Flesser.
    So she-- we were happy, my brother and I,
    because all through this time, I had introduced him
    to a young lady from Kansas.
    My brother-- I'm doing a very slight detour--
    but we're living off Union Square, and we're there.
    And my brother goes to Columbia at that point,
    and he then needs a job.
    And he has met this young lady, whom I introduced him to.
    She lived illegally as a tenant upstairs but my niece.
    So the lady upstairs asked my mother--
    who knew-- she said, look, I know--
    you know and I know this not my niece,
    but she's such a lovely girl and she's all alone.
    Can Susie come up and at least invite her
    for a cup of coffee or something?
    All right.
    I had an idea.
    My brother was home.
    Peter, I'm going to go upstairs and see if Virginia is there.
    I'm going to invite her down here.
    You mean I have to shave?
    Yes, you have to shave to meet a young lady.
    He met a young lady.
    I had to come watch it when I came home from a date
    because they might be sitting on the steps up there.
    You've never been to the opera?
    Not in Kansas.
    You've never been to the museum?
    Mmm mmm.
    Anyway, long story short--
    I won't go into it--
    she goes, well, Peter sends out resumes.
    She goes I remember my math professor was
    close to retirement.
    Maybe he retired.
    Let's send one to Kansas.
    Well, that's where he got the job.
    So my brother Peter, who's somewhat cosmopolitan
    ends up in Kansas.
    She's from Wichita, they ended up in Ottawa, Kansas.
    I've had more trips to Kansas than any New
    Yorker would wish to have.
    And so he is there.
    I'm at Columbia.
    And mother and Luichi were invited to move.
    Luichi dies.
    Mother is here, and she dies in '75.
    And at the age of 78.
    Then we're happy that my stepmother's
    10 years younger than my dad and she'll take care of him
    no matter what happens.
    She is taking care of him.
    She's practically carrying him on her little body,
    this big guy.
    Well, to make it short, I go with her--
    I'm in Vancouver.
    I go with her for a checkup.
    They find something.
    They call me.
    They think it's just a scar from old bronchitis.
    They do a biopsy.
    It's malignant.
    So at that point, I'm back here.
    Peter is we-- he was up with dad for his summer holidays
    and so forth.
    And they joke.
    Oh, this lady, she's so active.
    This thing, we'll get it out.
    You stay home.
    You don't even bother coming to the hospital.
    You take care of your father, and we'll be in touch.
    My brother says he sees dad's doctor, who at this point
    is the cardiologist but became his doctor,
    come driving up and coming up the steps of the house.
    He says his heart goes into his stomach.
    The doctor comes in to report.
    They called him, of course.
    This was not the first spot.
    It was as they thought.
    It was a cancerous spot, a secondary spot.
    The main spot was along the pericardium.
    They opened her up.
    They closed her up.
    You can't operate when it's around the heart.
    So they close her up, then I fly into Vancouver.
    I now know the doctor takes me aside.
    And while the-- while we're go in for a checkup and the nurse
    is busy with my stepmother, he takes me into another room.
    He says I give her three to six months.
    This is inoperable.
    It's a very-- we took a whatever-- biopsy of that.
    It is a very--
    what do you call--
    Aggressive.
    A very aggressive form of cancer.
    So here I was.
    When we came home, I said explaining to her,
    I know you've got the housekeeper coming twice a week,
    but I think you should have somebody.
    Come on, you can-- you guys are well off.
    I don't know anybody here.
    So nobody told her?
    No.
    I like to prepare dinner for your father.
    I do it just right.
    I know you do it just right.
    But, look, you've just had some surgery,
    and you're a little weaker.
    Ahh, do I keep talking and talking and talk-- look,
    you're still weak.
    You don't want me to worry, then I worry I'll get fired.
    I won't do a good job at the office.
    I played every card I could for her
    to agree to at least interview somebody
    to be a housekeeper to come in.
    I don't need anyone.
    Well, obviously, she got a little weaker.
    So at that point, my brother came.
    I came back more often.
    My brother is there.
    Or no one is there at the moment.
    I get a call from my father.
    He's half hysterical.
    He's at the office.
    He maintained an office.
    He had to get out and--
    Do things.
    And do things even if it was just
    gossiping with his secretary about things.
    And he is there, and the housekeeper called him.
    I can't wake Mrs. Flesser.
    So he high tails at home, and my stepmother
    at the age of 68, the young spring chicken--
    she was bouncier than all of us.
    She-- there was blood on the pillow.
    Something burst, and she is gone.
    So I turn myself around, and I fly out to Vancouver,
    help my dad.
    We had to teach him how to turn on the self-turning on oven
    because unless you set it, I don't
    know how far in advance, we wanted
    to make sure it would turn itself
    on when the housekeeper would put some food in there.
    He knew nothing about running the house.
    He could start businesses, real estate, warehouses.
    Yeah, that's a good location for this kind of warehouse, yeah.
    The guy did well who used it and could then have some more.
    So he needed help.
    Excuse me, what year did she pass?
    She died in 1981, January.
    So he needed help.
    So now this man who's had three heart
    attacks, who I knew-- my brother,
    I had to tell him later.
    My dad after one of those episodes with a full check
    up told--
    was found to have some lung cancer.
    No surprise after all this chain smoking.
    And my stepmother talks to the doctor and says please,
    please don't tell my husband.
    I implore you.
    He is the kind of person when you tell him
    something needs to be done, he's going to go and get it done.
    And if you tell him that there is something
    in the lung that should really be operated out,
    he'll insist on doing it.
    Why not?
    But please talk to his cardiologist
    to immediately agree.
    He said that man has had three massive heart attacks.
    He cannot survive the surgery, period.
    So they didn't tell him anything.
    I knew she told-- confided in me, and that lasted--
    he survived that early detection for eight years.
    Wow.
    And to shortcut it, ultimately he
    didn't die of another heart attack but of cancer.
    And my brother and I agreed we'll
    honor our stepmother's wishes.
    We will not tell Dad anything that's wrong.
    But if it ever comes up, we will not lie.
    So as you would have it, in 1981--
    a year I won't forget because I helped
    pay for a lot of air fares.
    My professor brother didn't have much money.
    There was a young man who started
    on the East Coast of Canada who became quite a phenomenon.
    He lost his leg to cancer or something.
    He was a cancer victim.
    And this young boy--
    young man was going to walk to the West Coast
    to raise money for cancer research.
    So, of course, everywhere he went,
    people came out to meet and stay here and stay there.
    But he walked, and he became--
    it-- I guess you can look it up.
    I don't remember his name, but it can be found.
    He became more and more of a celebrity.
    The more he could do, the more he broke down and had a problem
    and picked himself up and walked again.
    It reached the point that it was the prime minister
    knew about this boy.
    So he made it to some part and had a incident,
    comes a point he needed a break.
    And my brother tells me--
    and you-- that they were watching the news together,
    and you know how it is with the news.
    If there's one air crash, they talk about it
    and then tell you all the air crashes of the past five years.
    That's right.
    If there's one thing-- and this happened.
    Well, when this boy--
    he was just a very young man or boy--
    had whatever he collapsed wherever he did,
    they mentioned all the symptoms he had from the beginning
    and what he did.
    And my dad turns to my brother, who told me about it,
    he says what's going on there.
    This sounds like what I've been going through here.
    I'm eating.
    Everybody's bringing food to the house.
    The housekeeper's cooking.
    All my friends are bringing food.
    They're fattening me up.
    All my life, I've tried not to gain weight.
    And now I'm losing my pants, and this and that.
    He said could it be.
    And I haven't had a heart attack, and I'm getting weak.
    Could it be that I have cancer?
    Yes, father, you do.
    Cat's out of the bag.
    That was the cat out of the bag.
    So dad knew, and that was in to June, July.
    My father died in August.
    I had just been there.
    I had just flown back.
    My brother was there when dad died.
    I turned around and flew back to Vancouver.
    This is 1989?
    '81.
    Oh, your dad dies in '81.
    So they both died.
    My stepmother dies in January.
    My dad dies in August.
    In between, he survived with all the help and whatnot,
    and he dies ultimately of Kansas--
    cancer.
    He was in the hospital.
    They decided it was spreading.
    There's nothing they can do.
    I got a hospital bed.
    I hired around the clock nurses.
    It's his money.
    We need the best of care.
    His cardiologist was wonderful.
    One day I met-- he came up at the door.
    He said I see you're doing all right for your father.
    I'll do my share.
    There was one nurse who didn't give him
    the morphine shot on time.
    She was promptly fired.
    I said so let him die a drug addict.
    Help the pain for heaven's sakes.
    Sometimes people don't think, and it scares me now
    what's going on with the opioid epidemic.
    The doctors are scared to prescribe what's needed.
    Anyway, the doctor prescribed what's needed.
    Dad was coping pretty well.
    At times into pain, got another shot that helped.
    He played the piano.
    Some nurses didn't expect him to be alive
    the next morning for the next shift,
    and he would welcome them.
    He feel-- he felt better.
    He was at the piano.
    That was his hobby.
    So he was at home.
    Played the piano.
    He was home.
    I got him home.
    The last few months-- several months,
    he was home with nurses and my brother
    and I and my sister-in-law.
    We took turns.
    I had a list.
    When are you on--
    you got vacation days.
    You got vacation days.
    Coordinated who goes where when.
    Got my cousin to come, the adult cousin
    whose daughter just left here.
    Ilus, please go.
    Stay a week with your uncle.
    So she came.
    So we had people there with him up until the end.
    And he passed away then in August '81 at the age of 78.
    All of them died fairly young.
    So the youngest at 68, the oldest two at 78.
    My stepfather, a year after he officially
    became 76 from 65 to 76 in that period of time.
    So just to tell you because it's the Holocaust museum, I
    with my quote, mixed background, Jewish, Protestant,
    whatever, Chinese from my friends, I'm in Vancouver.
    My dad was totally assimilated, but it's a small community.
    You contribute.
    So, of course, he contributed to a local temple
    because whoever told him that's the one to give to.
    So he gave.
    I go-- first my stepmother died.
    I go to that temple to that rabbi.
    Oh, I'm so sorry.
    How can I help you?
    But of course.
    And what cemetery will I hold the second service?
    And I said you won't.
    My stepmother, according to her will, which was my father's--
    in my father's will and his wish,
    she is going to be cremated.
    Suddenly, the back stiffened.
    This is now not an Orthodox rabbi.
    I don't know-- not quite reform.
    It's what he said.
    It's a small community, and I don't think so.
    The funeral home sends me to somebody who is an ecumenical
    like we have here so that I write eulogies to do that
    because it's a small community and they cannot deal with
    somebody who's going to be cremated and my father wanted
    to be cremated.
    He didn't-- and whatever he wants, she wants.
    He didn't talk about it too, much
    but I know that he wanted to be cremated
    because he had no feelings otherwise one way or the other.
    He said when you're dead, you're dead.
    Was-- here was feeling some sense
    of what happened to his family.
    They got burned in the gas chambers.
    He's going to be cremated.
    Oh, dear.
    And after he died a few months later and I'm back again--
    I must have talked to a cantor or somebody.
    I had talked to that rabbi.
    I'm sorry.
    Your father's also being cremated.
    There's one relative who was-- had gotten so important
    in the community, he wouldn't come to the service
    because there was going to be a cremation.
    And how would he look if he attended?
    And I want you son of a gun, you're a cousin.
    Anyway, my feelings about religion-- practicing religion
    got colored by some of these episodes,
    but that was a final straw.
    You are asked to preside over just the service
    for heaven's sakes.
    I'm not asking you to go do anything else.
    And you won't agree to do that.
    You took his money all right.
    Well, you didn't know what he wanted.
    I-- sorry.
    These were assimilated people that were part of my life.
    I respected all religions from my friends.
    Here were my Chinese friends with their Confucian and Taoist
    beliefs.
    Here was my best friend in school who was raised Catholic.
    My other friend, she was part of the Lutheran community.
    I respect your beliefs.
    But you are so buried in your rituals
    that you don't see the humanity of things?
    I'm sorry.
    So I'm afraid even if it goes on the internet
    or wherever, people know I am now
    member of the Jewish JCC, a Jewish community group here.
    I love those people.
    They couldn't have been more supportive to me now
    as anybody while I was going through what I'm going through.
    But I cannot in good conscience go and join with the prayers
    and the hullabaloo of what goes on.
    Some of them don't even understand the rabbi, what
    he's saying, but they go because holidays,
    you have to go to synagogue.
    And they don't understand everything that's being said.
    And some of my Catholic friends, they
    certainly don't understand the Latin mass.
    But it's the incense, and it's so forth.
    So I will go.
    I have gone with friends, and I admire
    their-- the sincerity of their beliefs to practice it.
    Unfortunately, I cannot get myself into any organized
    religion.
    Faith is something very personal to me
    like my Chinese friends see religion as something personal.
    But anyway, end of sermon about what happened in Vancouver,
    both my parents there were cremated.
    He did not agree to an urn even.
    My mother and stepfather wanted to be cremated,
    but they are in an urn here at Ferncliff cemetery.
    I've never gone there, I don't have
    to look at a marble wall with their dates on it
    to remember my mother and stepfather, the kind
    of wonderful people they were.
    And in Vancouver, he didn't even want an urn.
    I know it hurts some of the others who are there.
    They like to go to a cemetery at holiday time,
    put down some flowers, and pay their respects.
    I'm sorry that was his wish.
    It was written into his will.
    I was the executor of the will.
    I have to follow the wishes.
    Well, that's a very bitter pill.
    It's a heartbreak to hear that that's
    the experience that you had.
    And I thank you that you shared that with us.
    Maybe it doesn't cast the nicest light on things,
    but there were so many people who helped.
    As I told you earlier, the Protestant minister
    who's running to meet the American chaplain to meet
    the surgeon to get the medicine to the hospital
    and the young rabbi on whose shoulder as I sat who helps me--
    tutors me after my illness so to catch up in school,
    there were these wonderful people no matter what
    their religious beliefs were.
    They were human beings who offered empathy, sympathy,
    empathy.
    And then there are those who don't.
    So that was that experience.
    Anyway, I'm in New York.
    Time passes.
    I work here.
    I finish graduate school.
    I'm graduate from Columbia.
    I go to Hunter College.
    I graduate school is Columbia.
    I then-- my first job out of Colum--
    out of school was at the UN, so I worked for a couple of years
    at the United Nations.
    What did you graduate as?
    Hunter was 1957-- '57.
    Bachelors?
    Bachelors.
    And Columbia was--
    In sociology.
    I then go back to graduate school.
    Sociology.
    Sociology, I get my master's in sociology.
    Actually I continued with courses
    so I could possibly go on for my PhD,
    but I decided I was going to work
    and enough of work and study and everything else.
    So I did a lot--
    I did all the coursework for my PhD but I decided no more.
    And continued my life.
    Then from after the UN, I got to work in--
    what did I do?
    Oh, well, I was at graduate school, so I was a--
    I worked with my professor, and I became his teaching assistant
    and his graduate assistant.
    And one day, a young man during office hours that I held
    showed up, and I help him with his problem.
    And then he turns around to me says, Miss Flesser,
    can I ask you a personal question?
    I thought, oh, boy, what's happening now.
    He said I spent a few months in Israel
    at the University of Jerusalem, and I met a Professor David
    Flesser.
    Is there any connection that you know?
    I go I don't know, but I'll let you know.
    Dad, I met a student.
    What's the story with the David Flesser.
    Oh, yes, [INAUDIBLE] he knew how he might be related,
    and there is the professor who is professor
    of historical whatever.
    He with the Dead Sea Scrolls and all that.
    Anyway, my brother couldn't resist.
    Writes to him.
    That man writes a long letter back
    about how we are all related.
    And I never talk to him, but I know that if Flesser ended
    up in Israel way back when to become an honored professor
    of whatever--
    and I looked him up on the internet [VOCALIZING] all that
    about him--
    and so there was one relative.
    And then finally I go, I see students coming in,
    and I see Richard Flesser entering Columbia.
    Dad, what's a Richard Flesser doing here at Columbia?
    Let me think.
    Oh, yes.
    There was- you know how it was in Europe.
    The eldest inherits everything.
    So what does a younger son do?
    He said there was a whatever Flesser.
    He had to get out of whatever, out of the country
    or find his way wherever he could.
    One somehow went to sea, and he ended up on some merch--
    whatever ship way back when.
    The bottom line is there was one man on an SS
    Flesser in the civil war.
    Oh, you hear the sound.
    I go back to the student who enters,
    and I find out that there was, in fact, a younger son.
    I don't know, a grandfather or something.
    My father had her tell about him,
    the young man who went to sea.
    And thank goodness he shuffled things around on the Union side,
    not on the Confederate side.
    And he settled when he retired in Newark or someplace
    what is now New Jersey.
    That was before.
    And therefore anybody-- and sure enough Richard Flesser
    comes from somewhere in New Jersey.
    So, yes there were Flessers in New Jersey,
    and there was an Alan Flesser who competed unsuccessfully
    with Hilfiger who became better known as a fashion.
    But Alan Flesser had some men's clothing,
    and I know nothing about any other Flessers.
    So the one on the Civil War and the professor in Israel.
    But I finished at Columbia, worked there for a while.
    When you work there, you're always under grants
    that they get grants and so forth.
    And as one grant was expiring and they
    were writing for another looking where could
    I work and they found another grant.
    And that one meant studying the impact of environment
    and poverty and so forth.
    And my mother got hysterical, and Henry
    went you can't take that.
    Knowing you, you're not just going to get the reports.
    You're gonna go into Harlem at all hours,
    and you're going to go look for yourself how these poor people
    live and how their health is.
    I don't think we would like you to accept that grant.
    I say, yeah, but I am going to keep working at Columbia.
    And the professor I'm with reaches into his back pocket.
    He says there was a guy who graduated here
    about two, three years ago.
    He now works at a place called Grey Advertising.
    And it's spelled e-y not a-y.
    Why don't you go talk to him, see
    what market research is like?
    Just go interview him.
    Yes, sir.
    I will go interview Mr. Weiss at Grey Advertising.
    That was a very interesting meeting.
    And next thing I know, I get a call would you mind coming back.
    There's some more things I have to tell you.
    More things I have to tell you.
    Would you be interested in working here?
    And so--
    That's your market research--
    That was my first marketing research
    job at Grey Advertising.
    And how long did you work in market research?
    For the rest of my working life.
    Not that Grey.
    He went somewhere to a research company.
    He got me to follow him.
    And then from there, I got stolen away
    to Interpublic, one of their agencies.
    And that's from where I officially retired,
    and then I still kept on working on a consulting basis.
    Somebody I had worked with there who
    had her own company come now and work with me.
    So I worked up until I was 73, so that's eight years ago.
    There were no more projects, and we
    weren't going to go try and sell more projects.
    So I've been retired.
    You have laid out such a world of people,
    such a panoply of the people in your life
    and painted such a vivid picture of them all.
    I really, really thank you.
    You're very welcome there.
    This is-- I don't--
    I didn't put on my watch, so I don't know what time it is.
    I'm sure this has gone past many of your interviews,
    and there are--
    it's like trying to barrel through the core of something
    where there are so many--
    We'll never catch it all.
    Tendrils.
    Can't catch it all.
    When I think of what my mother went through
    of coming there and going through a divorce
    and finding someone who's taking care of her and then the house--
    and then I get sick with their meningitis in the epidemic--
    oh, and I got encephalitis while being sick with meningitis.
    So I had a double whammy, so that's why I was so sick.
    And then pulling me through at the cost of most of her jewels
    that she had to sell and then the house gets bombed.
    And we lived in smaller temporary quarters
    because we were always told the communists are coming
    and we'll try and get you out, and you couldn't really
    settle in.
    And then was a year of DP camps and then coming
    here and my stepfather, God bless
    him, working away at his age with emphysema
    because he had, of course, smoked and taking care of us
    with such a full heart.
    And what she must have come through
    and her son lying in the hospital
    there in Shanghai dying of sepsis and this last minute
    save of the penicillin injections that pulled him
    through, unfortunately not early enough
    that his leg could be saved.
    And so what she suffered and still was smiling and enjoying
    her opera, she lived in this building
    with all the refugee friends.
    And it was-- it reached the point where I'd go to work
    and she'd go--
    I'm-- I said, mom, just tell me what apartment do I find you in.
    Well, Mrs. Reich in this one and Mrs. Somebody Else
    and that when.
    The building had about a dozen people who knew each other,
    played canasta and bridge together, or went out together,
    and my mother was the kind, gee, I want to see you all.
    I don't feel right.
    Everybody come to my place.
    You play cards.
    I'll kibbutz.
    If I feel better, I'll step in, but I'll kibbutz.
    Or with the famous aunt who introduced--
    Henry's aunt, she'd go I really went to that opera but I don't--
    I feel a little weak.
    She dressed all day so she could go to the opera at night
    with her friend, her new friend from Shanghai who
    was my husband's aunt.
    Well, you're describing in many ways what people
    would say are true survivors.
    They live with insecurity for such a long time.
    They escape with their lives by the hair--
    we're using these phrases-- the hair of their--
    by a hair's breath, the skin of their teeth.
    Oh, yeah, when the bomb, hit it was less than a hair's breath.
    And your mother having that sense to leave Prague
    early enough, early enough.
    Yeah.
    And then also have that sense to say Shanghai is no longer as
    secure as it should be.
    Time to move on.
    All of that speaks to survival and then to still enjoy life.
    She did.
    God bless her, she did.
    And she was in that sense an amazing lady.
    All four of my parents were amazing people
    in their own right.
    I had the best relationship with all four of them
    I guess by virtue of being so little when they came in--
    when I came into their lives.
    Well, I'll say this that I think you
    have paid an enormous tribute to them
    today in telling us about them.
    Well, they were wonderful people.
    They were survivors in their own right.
    But it was-- there were many good times.
    I tried to--
    I was reluctant to talk about all this because their memoirs
    that I have read or I even recognized
    some of the names, that wrote about the experience
    in Shanghai, they are the pictures
    of the horrible things that happened to some people
    in Shanghai.
    There's one lady at the JCC that somebody
    said, oh, you must meet Helga.
    She comes to the same classes that I do,
    but now she knows that we both share the Shanghai experience.
    But I could tell she was one of those who lived in the building
    where the bed sheets separated families,
    and she doesn't really want to talk about it.
    And I had this--
    mixed or different experience of, yeah, nothing more horrible
    can happen to you than your house falling around you.
    Yeah.
    But earlier, my stepfather was able to have a house where there
    was music in the house, where there were chamber music was
    happening every Sunday afternoon,
    where there were, in spite of problems, things were all right.
    And then right after the war that my father did
    well and certainly my stepmother's parents were
    extremely well off, so, yes, so my life was this was tough
    but this was amazing.
    And not everybody could have had this duality,
    so I guess that made my story a little different.
    But I empathize with the ones who
    really suffered during these times, who got
    slapped by Mr. Goya just to--
    and if they don't get that permit, they can't go to work.
    Well, that's what the magic is of individual stories
    is individual stories let us in and give us
    a glimpse into the destinies of specific people.
    And they're as valid as the next person's.
    And so I'm very glad that you overcame whatever reserve--
    I thought I didn't have a concentration camp story.
    But you had a story.
    I had a ghetto story.
    Well, and you also had a story of several lives being affected
    by the policies of the Holocaust, which were upended
    for a good decade and longer.
    So between--
    A lifetime really.
    A lifetime.
    Yeah.
    Otherwise, they would all have lived happily forever in Vienna
    and gone about their middle class lives
    and continue with their families.
    This way different things happen.
    Well, we've come to the end.
    Thank you.
    You must be exhausted listening to that.
    He must barely be awake back there.
    No, no, no, thank you.
    You are, as I said earlier, a wonderful storyteller.
    And it was a fascinating, fascinating journey
    that you took us on.
    So I really, really appreciate it.
    Before I--
    I thank you.
    You are welcome.
    And before I send--
    say the final ending, is there any final thoughts,
    anything you would want people to take away from all of this
    that you would want to share?
    Regardless of your background and how you were raised
    and your own beliefs, be kind to each other.
    Don't prejudge people by something
    you've heard about them or so forth.
    As I think I said in somewhere along the line,
    I did not know of Jew-- being Jewish being an ethnicity 'til I
    came to America because my Chinese friends
    couldn't fathom--
    religion is personal.
    So you're a religion.
    You're Jewish, but Jewish what?
    And here very often I heard this one
    is Italian American and this one's Jewish even when
    it was mentioned in a kind way.
    And it made my hair stand on end.
    How can you judge someone overall by what
    their religion might be, and especially they
    might be a very active believer or more assimilated
    and really just go to synagogue, keep Yom Kippur and nothing else
    or go to mass on Christmas Eve and do nothing else.
    And it took me a while to internalize that
    and to know that what is going on in the world
    today, what the Muslims are fighting each other based
    on something that happened 500 years ago when you're
    both in the same faith and in Africa
    when in Rwanda the Hutu and the Tutsis
    were slaughtering each other and you're
    both from the same ethnic heritage or racial heritage,
    it took me a long time to understand it
    and to be horrified that it still continues today.
    And unfortunately, anti-Semitism is alive and well and growing,
    and Jews are such a tiny minority
    of any country's population, and how can you abide that?
    How can you have people in Charlottesville
    saying no Jew is going to take my place
    and have these Ku Klux Klanners and these racists
    even in our own country being tolerated
    in the name of free speech?
    Hate speech should not be free speech.
    I couldn't have said that better.
    Thank you.
    Thank you.
    And I will say this concludes the United States Holocaust
    Memorial Museum interview with Susan Flesser
    Talsik on April 26, 2018 in Manhattan, New York.
    Now would you like something to drink?

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Susan Tausig, born in 1937 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her family lived there until the late 1930s; her mother and brother sailing to Shanghai, China from Genoa; leaving with her father from Austria at the age of four in 1941; taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok and a boat to Japan; arriving in Shanghai, where her family lived for 10 years; how the war and political situation in Europe impacted them in the Far East; the political changes in China in the late 1940s, and the evacuation of her family out of Shanghai and her family’s return to Europe; being at sea for 72 days and encountering two typhoons in the Sea of Japan; staying in Europe for a year before immigrating to New York; and being 15 years old when she arrived in the US.
    Interviewee
    Susan Flusser Tausig
    Interviewer
    Navazelskis, Ina
    Date
    interview:  2018 April 26
    Geography
    creation: Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    1 digital file : MPEG-4.

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Keywords & Subjects

    Personal Name
    Tausig, Susan Flusser.
    Corporate Name
    Trans-Siberian Railway

    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 Susan Flusser Tausig on April 26, 2018 in New York, NY.
    Funding Note
    The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:05:50
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn611756

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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

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    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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