Overview
- Interviewee
- Laufer, Nahum
- Interviewer
- Olivia Rosen
- Date
-
interview:
2018 June 05
- Credit Line
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, courtesy of the Jeff and Toby Herr Foundation
Physical Details
- Extent
-
1 digital file : MP3.
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
- Laufer, Nahum.
Administrative Notes
- Holder of Originals
-
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- This is a survivor interview of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Perpetrators, Collaborators, and Witnesses: The Jeff and Toby Herr Testimony Initiative, a multi-year project to record the testimonies of non-Jewish witnesses to the Holocaust.
- Funding Note
- The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 09:41:07
- This page:
- http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn614770
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- This record is digitized but cannot be downloaded online.
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Oral history interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust who lived in India during or after WWII.
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Oral history interview with Flower Silliman
Oral History
Flower Silliman, born on April 20, 1930 in Calcutta (Kolkata), India, describes her grandparents who immigrated to India from different parts of Iraq; attending a Jewish girls’ school; her mother, who was kindergarten teacher; her father, who worked in the port commission of Calcutta; her two brothers; moving around Calcutta a lot; the Baghdadi Jewish community; not being encouraged to spend time with non-Jews; keeping kosher; attending Lady Irwin College in Delhi beginning in 1946; getting a degree in teaching; the chaos of the time, including the fight for independence, the Partition killings in Bengal and Delhi, and the refugee wave from East Bengal and Punjab; her parents’ views of her adopting Indian customs; learning about the situation for European Jews during the Holocaust in 1945; Jews in India assuming the concentration camps of Europe must be like the internment camps that were in India; the Zionist families in India; a small number of Baghdadi Jews in India going to Israel in 1945-1946; celebrating all of the major Jewish holidays with family; her leisure activities as a child; the worry of Indian Jews that they would not do well in an independent India; many Jews leaving India after independence; staying in India with her husband; hearing first-hand stories of Jews escaping from persecution during the Holocaust (she describes several of them); the European Jewish refugees who came to Calcutta and their integration into the Baghdadi Jewish community; how it was common for women in the Jewish community to marry British and American GIs; two Jewish military chaplains she met in Calcutta, David Seligson (American) and Chaplain Bloch (British); visiting Israel for the first time in 1975; the Bengal Famine and the Hindu-Muslim riots and the influence of the events on the feelings in the Jewish communities of India; her humanitarian efforts during college; being in New Delhi at Independence in 1947; meeting Mahatma Gandhi several times; her support for Independence; Pamela Mountbatten, the teenage daughter of Viceroy Mountbatten, visiting the women of Lady Irwin College in the evenings; and the power of the Holocaust museums that she has visited.
Oral history interview with Sunanda K. Datta Ray
Oral History
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