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Oral history interview with Herman Malvet

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2018.223.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.0971

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    Oral history interview with Herman Malvet
    Transcript
    We're rolling now.
    OK.
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Mr. Herman Malvet on June 5, 2018
    in San Francisco, California.
    Thank you Mr. Malvet for agreeing to speak with us today
    to share your story, to share some of your experiences.
    I appreciate it.
    Thank you for interviewing me.
    I'm going to start our interview as we do with all of them
    at the very beginning with the most basic questions.
    And from there, our story, your story will unfold,
    and we'll explore all corners of it
    that you wish for us to know about.
    So my very first question is this one.
    Could you tell me the date of your birth?
    January 1, 1935.
    New Year's Day.
    Yes.
    And excuse me for a second, can we cut?
    Cut?
    I lost my mic.
    OK.
    We're rolling.
    And what was your name at birth?
    Herman Majerovic.
    It was a different spelling.
    When I became citizen, since people have problems pronouncing
    my name, friends suggested I simplify it which I did,
    not necessarily simple, but simplified.
    And Majerovic was spelled how?
    M-A-J-E-R-O-V-I-C.
    And would that have been a more Polish or Czech or Slovak
    spelling?
    Czech.
    Because Polish, my uncle who kept his name,
    the ending was W-I-C-Z. And the original name, supposedly,
    was the German spelling W-I-T-Z.
    Ah, that's right.
    It would be that way.
    So it depended who was the ruler of the country.
    Yes.
    Or where one was born or kept a name.
    Well, that brings me to the next question.
    Where were you born?
    In what is now--
    Czechoslovakia.
    What is now Slovakia.
    And what place in--
    City called Bardejov.
    Bardejov?
    Yes.
    And would that be more to the Eastern part--
    The eastern part of Slovakia.
    OK.
    So this is part of that region of Europe
    where you could be born and grow and live your whole life in one
    city, in one place, and yet have lived in five countries.
    Yes.
    OK.
    Five citizenships.
    Yes.
    Five citizenships or more or less but, basically.
    Yes, it could be, yes.
    OK.
    What was your father's name?
    Julius.
    Juda Majerovic.
    Julius Majerovic.
    And your mother's?
    Bertha.
    And her maiden name?
    Tier.
    All right.
    French, right.
    Were they both also from--
    what was the name of your town?
    Bardejov?
    No.
    My father was--
    I don't remember exactly where he was born.
    I heard often the name Dukla, but I'm not
    sure that was the place.
    My mother, I don't know.
    Do you know anything about her side of the family?
    Yes.
    Know she had several brothers in the United States.
    Some of them came here before World War I.
    OK.
    One was in what was known as the Czech Legion.
    That was he was a POW World War I where the Russians and a Czech
    Legion fought their way from Russia, from Europe, all
    the way to the Pacific.
    Oh, my.
    And he made it to the Pacific.
    In the interim, he married a woman in Russia.
    And she had a child.
    His brothers did not know that he had family,
    so they sent for him.
    And he made it to New York.
    And later on, his wife and daughter followed.
    What a story.
    The daughter that was born what was had
    to be in Manchuria, now China.
    You know, because we talk about World War II so much,
    the stories and the drama and the tragedy of World War
    I is often eclipsed.
    Yes.
    But there were so many.
    George Soros' father was actually also fighting,
    I believe, with the Hungarians, that
    is part of the Hungarian army.
    And was a prisoner in Siberia for many, many years.
    And that influenced him and then influenced his son.
    Yes.
    In very profound ways, those experiences.
    So what was the name of this uncle?
    Tier.
    There were four brothers.
    And his first name, do you know?
    Adolf.
    Adolf.
    Adolf Tier.
    Yes.
    And then they moved in Buffalo.
    They were in New York City, but mostly in Buffalo.
    Did you ever meet him?
    Yes.
    I did meet him, and I knew his children and his wife.
    Was this after the war?
    After the war, yes.
    OK.
    So what about your mother's other brothers?
    What were their names?
    One was Irving, whom I never met.
    I do not remember, I just met--
    Leo was one another, and the others, I don't I
    don't think I met.
    They were not in Buffalo.
    They were not because we went to Buffalo shortly
    after we arrived in the United States.
    That was in 1949.
    So we spent Thanksgiving in Buffalo.
    I can imagine that must have been memorable.
    Yes.
    OK.
    We'll come to that, that's part of the story.
    Right now, what I'd like to do, and we started it,
    is try to find out as much about your family background
    as we can.
    So I'm repeating just so that I make sure that I understood it.
    Your mother had four brothers, Adolf, Irving--
    Leo.
    Leo, and the fourth one you don't know.
    I don't remember.
    Maybe, there was a fifth one.
    OK.
    And her first name was?
    Bertha.
    Bertha.
    Exactly.
    Did she have sisters?
    Possibly, but I don't know.
    OK.
    And do you know what place in Europe the family came from?
    Her family?
    One was, after World War I, was Poland,
    but which part of Poland, I don't know.
    OK.
    OK.
    So it was Poland even though you were born in Slovakia.
    She had come from some place in Poland.
    Yes.
    Do you know whether or not where you were born
    was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?
    Yes.
    OK.
    So she might have been from the part of Poland
    that also came under the Austrian Hungarian Empire.
    Yes, most likely.
    Most likely, but not sure.
    And my father, also, because he served in the Austrian army
    in World War I.
    Interesting.
    OK.
    And did you ever know your grandparents
    on your mother's side?
    No.
    I knew someone who was they called Babchak, grandmother,
    but who it was, I don't remember.
    It could have been on my mother's side.
    I don't know my father's, I don't remember.
    Do you have any memories of that person who you called Babchak?
    Elderly woman, and in that was in Zakopane.
    That's a pretty part of Poland.
    But that's about it.
    OK.
    And so can I assume that you really
    got to know your mother's side of the family after the war?
    Yes.
    Because whoever was still there was here in the United States.
    She had nieces, and a niece and two nephews.
    So that may have been from a sister possibly
    and whom I got to know.
    They actually they were living with, also,
    working for my father before the war, and I got to know them.
    One survived the war, and the other,
    there were two brothers and a sister.
    The sister and one brother did not survive.
    The other brother did survive, and he also
    had quite an interesting history.
    So we're talking about your mother's nieces and nephews,
    not other siblings of hers?
    Right.
    But they were children of these--
    Possibly a sister.
    That's what my assumption, although I never--
    unfortunately, I did not inquire, and never--
    Well, if you were born in 1935, you
    were a child when everything broke out.
    Yes.
    When the world collapsed.
    When the war started, yes.
    And I'm asking you a lot of questions
    that presume a knowledge of family
    that you would gain after age five or as you grow up.
    But bear with me that I ask anyway.
    Do you have memories of your mother?
    Yes.
    OK.
    And pre-war memories of her?
    Brief pre-war memories and beginning of the war memories.
    Yes.
    OK.
    Until 1942 when she was deported.
    OK.
    So basically, six years, seven years.
    I was seven.
    Yes.
    You were seven.
    Let's turn to your father's side of the family.
    His name was Julius?
    Yes.
    Julius.
    Julius.
    And he also was not native to the town that you were born in.
    No.
    I think, as I mentioned, he was born in Dukla
    or, I'm not sure, really, because that word was
    often mentioned.
    Dukla, Rowen, and some other names.
    Also in Slovakia?
    That was Poland, I think, the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
    but after the war was Poland.
    Did he have brothers and sisters?
    Two brothers and a sister.
    And what were their names, do you know?
    I guess, Majerovic, yes.
    Yes, but as far as first names.
    One was Irving, also.
    The other one was--
    the Jewish name was Mendel.
    Mendel.
    And the sister's name, I don't know.
    OK.
    Did you ever meet this aunt?
    The sister, I did not meet because she
    was in the United States.
    She married and emigrated to the United States in the early
    '20s or whatever, well before the War.
    One brother, the oldest one, I met, he survived the war.
    He lost all his family.
    He lived in Belgium.
    OK.
    The other brother, the youngest one, I did not meet.
    He lived in France.
    He was also, well, supposedly he was in a resistance in Lille,
    and he was shot and killed or shot and died of his wounds,
    and his family was deported.
    Him, I did not know.
    He lived in Lille, and my uncle had a business
    in Brussels and Antwerp.
    I see.
    Remind me, the one in Antwerp survived the war.
    Yes.
    OK.
    His name was?
    Mendel.
    Mendel.
    Mendel, yes.
    And the other one was Irving?
    Irving, yes.
    In Lille.
    In Lille.
    He worked for his older brother.
    So your father was the middle brother?
    Yes.
    Did you know your paternal grandparents?
    No.
    OK.
    How is it that your father and your mother
    came to this part of Slovakia?
    My father survived World War I, and his parents
    survived briefly, but what I understand,
    they died in that Spanish flu in [INAUDIBLE].
    1918?
    Something like that, yes.
    And he went to Vienna to study night,
    this may have been when he was mobilized
    even before the war ended.
    And then, he ended up and traveled
    a little bit around Austria to try to settle
    in Germany, in Berlin.
    Didn't work out, returned to Poland.
    Had some money or inherited some money
    and started a business, textile.
    My other uncles, the oldest one, was also in the Austrian army.
    On the Italian front, he was captured.
    Mendel.
    Mendel, and he was highly decorated
    because he saved some general from--
    but he was eventually captured.
    Sent to Sardinia.
    And after the war, ended up in France and then Belgium.
    And I guess he brought a youngest brother over.
    Because we had some relatives in France.
    I don't know much about them.
    That's how they ended up in Western Europe.
    And my father stayed while the group became Poland.
    And he started a business, a textile business.
    And eventually, a factory.
    It speaks of a very international family.
    Sort of, yes.
    What was the main language at home that you remember?
    I think, my father's first language, I think,
    was German then Polish, Slovak also, and Yiddish.
    OK.
    My mother, I think, was Polish and possibly German,
    but I don't know because I just remember speaking to her Polish
    or Slovak a little bit which was very similar.
    But I don't remember having any conversation just as a child.
    So when you were growing up, the language
    you were taught, the main language that you were speaking
    was--
    I think I started with Slovak and was Polish because we lived
    in Poland in Katowice which was German,
    Silesia, but a lot of German speaking.
    It was on the border of Germany before World War II.
    So you didn't grow up in Bardejov?
    Bardejov?
    No.
    I spent some time there, born there, and for whatever reason,
    there was a spa close by, so maybe that's
    why they spent the holidays.
    And then, we spend in Poland, in Katowice.
    So actually, your early years are in Katowice?
    Yes, Katowice and Krakow because we
    also had an apartment in Krakow for whatever reason.
    Because my brother and my sister were supposed
    to study at the University.
    So I don't know the reason why my father also
    had an apartment in Krakow.
    Well, that was a question I hadn't come to yet.
    We talked about your mother's siblings,
    your father's siblings, and now your siblings.
    You had a brother and a sister.
    Yes.
    Older or younger than you?
    Older.
    Were you the youngest of the family.
    Yes.
    My sister was about 10 years older,
    my brother is seven or eight.
    And I was maybe afterthought, accident,
    whatever you want to call it.
    What were their first names?
    Helen.
    Helen.
    Or Hela.
    And my brother's name was Henek or Joachim.
    Ah, Joachim means Henek.
    Or Henek.
    They called him Henek.
    I think-- I don't know why they call him Joachim.
    Maybe that was on his certificate-- birth certificate.
    You know, from the little bit that you've told me,
    I am making a few assumptions.
    And I am--
    I'll field those assumptions to you.
    Tell me whether I'm right or wrong.
    Your family was more assimilated into Gentile culture
    than most, because Yiddish was not the primary language.
    Is that true or not really?
    Not completely, no.
    We were not religious at all.
    That was my second assumption.
    Except my mother observed.
    She did not want to have ham in our house.
    So my father would eat it outside, as I would.
    But he would?
    That is, he would?
    Oh, yes.
    And kosher, someone who was very kosher
    would not eat probably in our house,
    because things were mixed.
    So in that respect.
    Friends, yes.
    I was never told as a child not to associate with someone
    and so forth.
    I don't know about my siblings.
    But given the atmosphere in Poland,
    it was mostly they clung to their own.
    Now, as regards to language at home,
    I don't know what language my father spoke to my mother.
    To my sister it was either Polish or German.
    OK.
    OK.
    Well, there's also the difference
    between most of the time from--
    this is a wide generalization, but Jews who
    were from Poland most often--
    not always-- spoke Yiddish amongst themselves.
    Jews who were from Germany, Yiddish was never spoken.
    It was always German.
    So we were in between sort of.
    You were in between.
    Silesia, Germans.
    First language of my father was German.
    And the environment was also conducive to German.
    And I learned Yiddish actually in Slovakia,
    after we fled Poland.
    But at home I don't remember speaking Yiddish.
    Or maybe I picked up a word, but at the age of four--
    Of course.
    --you can tell the difference between German and Polish,
    but not German and Yiddish.
    No, no. (LAUGHS) So--
    Oh, I got a little bit of a--
    a question was in my mind and it flew out,
    and it has to come back.
    I may have interrupted it.
    No.
    No, no, no.
    You grew up then in--
    ah, I know this was.
    Did your father-- you said he studied in Vienna,
    is that right?
    Supposedly in the war he went to Vienna
    to study before he was mobilized.
    And that was already towards the end of the war.
    So do you know if he finished a University education?
    No, he did not.
    He did not.
    He may have started, but he was mobilized, sent
    to the front, and the war--
    wounded after two weeks on the front, and survived the wound.
    But then by the time he recovered, the war was over.
    He did not inherit a business from his parents.
    He built a business.
    No.
    He built up his business.
    And his business was?
    Textile factory.
    So producing textiles.
    Producing textiles, yes.
    Do you know what kind of textiles?
    Whether it was for men's suits or whether it
    was for household goods?
    Men's suits, I believe, mostly.
    Yeah.
    And that was in--
    the factory was in Bielitz, Bielsko.
    Bielsko.
    Bielitz is the name of the place.
    The German-- Bielitz, Bielsko.
    Bielsko may be the Polish name.
    Bielitz is the German name.
    That's not far from Katowice.
    Do you remember what the factory looked like?
    No.
    if I was--
    I don't remember at all.
    Do you remember-- did he name it after his own last name?
    No, it was called Wool Products.
    V?
    Wool Products-- English name.
    Wool Products.
    Yes.
    So in Poland it would have been called Wool Products.
    Wool Produkcja maybe.
    Wool with a V.
    With a W.
    With a W that will pronounce as a V.
    Yes, right.
    OK.
    Wool Produkcja.
    Because I came across some documents
    that we claimed from Germany and so forth.
    So that's what I remember.
    But about the factory, how it looked,
    where, and what, I don't know.
    What about your own early years, those first years,
    where you lived.
    Do you have memories of your home?
    In Katowice vaguely and in Kraków.
    OK.
    Tell me what's in your mind's eye.
    Vaguely, in Katowice, I remember the name, because I found it
    after the war--
    quite a few years after the the ware, the street, building
    was still there.
    And I remember just a big apartment.
    I liked to play soccer, and I know
    what I played in the apartment.
    I must have done some damage, broken things.
    And naturally, I got punished.
    The punishment I remember.
    What I broke, I don't.
    What was the punishment?
    Spanking.
    Ay-yay.
    Ay-yay.
    My father rarely spanked me.
    Apparently I was spanked only once as a kid
    because I did something.
    I don't remember.
    And afterwards, just when he told me not to do it,
    it was like a military order.
    It was a large apartment.
    We had, I had what they call a maid for-- not a Maid.
    We had maids, cooks, and I had a girl for me as a child.
    In Kraków, I remember, vaguely, also a large apartment.
    But when you stepped out, to the left were there planty.
    And the planty was in Kraków.
    They demolished the old defensive wall
    and they planted trees.
    It was like a ring of trees of parks around Kraków.
    That sounds pretty.
    Yes.
    And I remember that.
    And somewhere I still have a picture-- a pre-war picture.
    Do you remember the street names?
    In Katowice, it was Moniuszki.
    Moniuszki.
    And in Kraków it was Sarego.
    Sarego.
    And do you remember the street numbers?
    I think it was in Kraków Sarego 6.
    And Katowice maybe 12 from Moniuszki [POLISH].
    Can we stop for just a second?
    Sure.
    One of the things that's happening is I'm pickup up--
    When I'm rolling to--
    [INTERPOSING VOICES]
    OK.
    At this point now, we have switched audio
    so that channel 1 is the boom microphone.
    It is on the right side as well as the lavalier
    on the interviewer.
    This means that Herman's lavalier is isolated
    on the left channel audio 2.
    OK.
    Thank you.
    So we were talking about your childhood homes, the apartment--
    your two apartments.
    Yes.
    In Katowice and Kraków.
    And Kraków.
    And the family had maids.
    Yes, we had maids, cooks, and--
    So there's a number of questions that I usually ask--
    I'm picking up the siren.
    Yeah.
    We'll cut.
    This is the noon--
    Cutting.
    OK.
    So where was I with my questions?
    Oh, yes.
    There's a number of questions that I ask,
    which bear with me if they sound almost self-evident,
    but there's a reason why I ask them.
    Did you homes-- do you remember that they had electricity?
    Yes.
    Did they have indoor plumbing?
    Yes.
    Did they have-- did you have a telephone?
    Yes.
    Did you have a car?
    Yes, more than one.
    More than one.
    A radio?
    Yes.
    A cook.
    Yes.
    OK.
    To me that says your family was rather well-off.
    It was.
    OK.
    OK.
    So your father was quite successful in his business.
    Yes.
    Was he prominent in Katowice or in Kraków?
    That is, one of the more prominent businessmen
    in the town.
    In Kraków less so.
    Possibly in Katowice.
    But that I don't know.
    Do you know about how many people
    he employed in the factory?
    No.
    But from their main accountant who survived the war,
    he told me that he distributed Poland in two sections,
    and he gave salesmen material to sell, like just salesman.
    And he had about 300 or 400 salesmen.
    He told me that my father operated the business
    as if it was a German general staff, with German discipline
    and order.
    Which was also sometimes the children
    were raised that way-- very strict.
    Well, then it was something that sounded familiar to you.
    Yes.
    I inherited some of these traits.
    Was that the kind of personality that your father had,
    of somebody very strict?
    He could be strict and very generous.
    Strict.
    And jovial, but also strict, yes.
    Was he a storyteller?
    No.
    So when you were telling me about his World War I life,
    is that something that he shared with you,
    or you learned from other people?
    I learned from him, because he had a wound,
    and I kept asking him what that was.
    And he told me how it happened and the consequences of it.
    So that's how I know something about that experience in World
    War I.
    What about your mother?
    What kind of a personality did she have?
    Apparently, what I know from friends, and my father's
    friends, and others who knew the family, different personality.
    More easygoing, more reserved, more of,
    I would say, more of a Sephardic disposition.
    What does that mean to have a Sephardic disposition?
    I would call it Mediterranean.
    Not as-- perhaps I wouldn't say aggressive, but more subtle,
    more relaxed.
    But you don't have these memories yourself?
    No.
    Because I remember just vaguely, you
    know, from before the war a little bit.
    During the war when we fled, it's basically fear
    and so forth.
    But not much really.
    What did he look like, your father?
    You know, pre-war.
    My father was, I would say, solidly built,
    fair hair, I think green eyes--
    green, bluish, or something.
    He looked more Slavic.
    My mother, olive complexion, dark hair, dark eyes.
    And favorite music was Spanish music for whatever reason.
    Really?
    Yes.
    Did your older brother and sister--
    were they prominent in your first years,
    or was it that it was nannies and people who took care of you?
    Before the war, they were not prominent, no.
    When the war started, then we sort of left
    the nannies, everything, and it was my brother and sister.
    Do you have any earliest memories, even if they're
    episodic or vague, aside from--
    like the one where you're playing soccer in the apartment.
    Which, if it's big enough, why not?
    Other memories from being a few years
    old, something that sticks.
    No, I just remember September 1st, when the war started.
    You do remember.
    We were in Katowice, and my father did not drive.
    We had a chauffeur and others-- we had, I think, two cars.
    We had a chauffeur and somebody else always drove the other car.
    And when the war started, my father
    knew someone, apparently-- that's
    what he told me-- he knew an intelligence officer that
    told him that the Germans already invaded.
    And we were fleeing from Katowice, abandoning everything.
    And I remember crying that I wanted to take my ball with me.
    And naturally, I was told just to get going,
    and we fled Katowice towards Kraków.
    The whole family abandoned the apartment,
    and we are fleeing eastwards.
    I mean, war was sort of expected.
    After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,
    people expected that something will happen.
    They did not know the timing.
    So when it happened, unfortunately it happened
    September 1st.
    Well, it happened very fast.
    Yes.
    One week after they signed it--
    Yes.
    --Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
    So that was-- and we first fled.
    You have memories of fleeing?
    Yeah.
    That I have.
    Because for whatever reason--
    I don't remember the cities we were, but apparently,
    in those cities we were fleeing were also
    certain segments of the government,
    and there were frequent bombardments.
    And I remember often at night being woken up
    and just run down the stairs to the cellar or whatever, wherever
    we were.
    And on certain occasions, when we were on open the road,
    they said we have to jump out of the car into the ditch--
    how to fall, and how to cover--
    how to curl up basically, just in case it happens.
    So either if a plane is flying low--
    if you'll be shot or if they drop a bomb.
    Bombs or strafing.
    You know, the Stukas and so forth.
    Well, that's quite a bit for a four-year-old kid.
    Yes.
    And then we are fleeing eastwards,
    hoping to get to Romania.
    But when we came to a certain part of Poland, I remember--
    I think I remember the name of the village where we were,
    Kopietkow.
    And then the Russians came.
    In the meantime, one car was abandoned because gasoline
    was hard to get.
    I remember sometimes the car being pulled by horses.
    That was the newer car.
    I think it was a Buick or something.
    I don't remember.
    That was going to be my next question.
    Do you remember the make of the cars?
    One was a Chevy, and I think one was a Buick.
    I don't remember which one it was.
    But I remember it was a new car, and I
    was jumping on their seats.
    Naturally, I was scolded and told to get out of the car.
    That was not during the war.
    It was before the war.
    That's what seats were for.
    I would say I was not very passive.
    I was curious and lively.
    Because I remember fighting sometimes with the cook.
    Because before the war end, the girl whose German name was
    [GERMAN].
    [GERMAN], so it's sort of like, oh, a chambermaid?
    No, it was governess.
    But she was not a professional governess,
    just someone taking care of a little brat or a kid.
    Yeah.
    And was the chauffeur still around when
    you were driving away eastwards?
    No, he left somewhere along the way.
    So someone-- who was driving, I don't remember.
    Did your father know how to drive?
    No, he did not.
    That hampered him.
    He was hampered.
    So there was some family members or acquaintances who
    didn't fall, didn't stop somewhere, or stay, or whatever.
    Do you remember the number of people who were in the cars
    or who they were?
    They were my family, immediate, which was five.
    Five.
    There may have been one or two more
    people that fitted in the car.
    OK.
    So you get to this small village.
    Kopietkow.
    And then the Russians came.
    So what was that--
    what was your first impression?
    Well, I was surprised, and then my father was surprised also.
    And since there was a small village,
    he somehow decided to go to Lwów, Lemberg.
    May have been not far from Lwów.
    Which would have been further in the North.
    Yeah.
    It was a city occupied by the Russians, Soviets, whatever.
    And he found an apartment, and that was difficult,
    because the city wasn't bombed apparently.
    I remember an apartment, being there.
    And in the building, I remember, it was a little bit damaged.
    It was cold in the apartment.
    While there, the car was confiscated by the Soviets.
    It was taken by--
    it was a good car--
    by the GPU, the predecessor of the others.
    NKVD and KGB.
    NKVD, that's right.
    And he was given an old car, some old jalopy--
    exchanged it.
    But he knew how the Russians operate,
    so he wanted to have a piece of paper
    that he did not steal the car.
    The old Jalopy.
    Yes.
    It was an exchange.
    And what I remember--
    I don't Know how much time later--
    couldn't have been much later-- it was in the winter--
    the apartment some GPU was showing up.
    Because I remember in uniform in the green caps,
    coming for my father.
    That's what he told me--
    To arrest him?
    To arrest him.
    Apparently-- that's what he told me--
    he stole Russian property.
    But he showed the papers, and the officer
    who gave him the papers was fortunately still there.
    So they did not arrest him or send him to Siberia on the spot.
    Although when they took him, I was crying and figuring
    I may not see my dad or that he's being arrested.
    But apparently that experience was so searing and so fearful
    that he would be sent to Siberia, that he decided
    to return to occupied Poland to Kraków as a Volksdeutsche
    or Reichsdeutsche.
    In other words--
    An ethnic German.
    --an ethnic German.
    Because the language for him was no problem.
    I guess my sister may have spoken a little bit,
    my mother possibly, though my mother did not
    look typically Aryan.
    My father, yes.
    My sister also.
    I don't remember how I looked.
    My brother was resembling more my mother, who
    was more olive skin, dark hair.
    Does this mean you had to get false passports for everybody?
    It was-- I don't think you needed a passport,
    you just had to register with German authorities.
    And there was an assembly point where they would ship you
    back and so forth.
    In Lemberg?
    Close to Lemberg, whenever he decided
    to register as Volksdeutsche.
    Whether that was Lemberg, or some other, close by to Lemberg,
    I don't know where the assembly point was.
    But your memories then, are they these episodic ones,
    where you remember this apartment in Lemberg, in Lwów.
    Yes, yes.
    You remember that it's winter time.
    Yes.
    You remember what the old jalopy looked like.
    That, I don't.
    OK.
    You remember the-- so the GPU, which was the secret police.
    Yes.
    In the apartment, yes.
    And green hat, was he alone, or were there more people with him?
    Well, with the GPU?
    Yeah.
    At least two others.
    At least two.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And you remember them taking your father?
    Yes.
    And you remember him returning?
    That I don't, when he returned.
    But obviously he returned.
    Do you remember leaving Lemberg?
    Vaguely, yes, to that assembly point.
    OK.
    And this is kind of interesting, in that
    whether that assembly point was within the city
    or further away--
    It was outside the city.
    How far or where exactly, I don't remember.
    It was interesting whether it would
    have been a repatriation point for Volksdeutsche
    throughout the region.
    It could have been.
    Throughout that the Soviets are controlling.
    Well, throughout a local region, yes.
    Whatever the Volksdeutsche-- wherever there were enough.
    OK.
    And he was then successful in convincing them
    that he is a Volksdeutsche?
    Well, we were in that area, whatever that
    was, with buildings inside.
    And he realized that sooner or later they
    will discover that he is not what it claims to be.
    So I remember, in winter, with a sleigh, the immediate family--
    mother and so forth--
    managed on sleigh to get out from there
    and take the train to Kraków.
    Because he had to escape.
    Otherwise, he could have been either shot or whatever
    the concept.
    But he realized that it won't fly,
    the claim that we are Volksdeutsche.
    But he fled from the Russians.
    He was more fear--
    it's like, from the frying pan into the fire.
    We took the train.
    I remember the train was not heated passenger trains.
    And there were Germans and German officers,
    because some of them brought us some cover and some warm drinks.
    I remember I was given a little bit warm drink.
    I remember German uniforms in the compartment.
    And then we arrived in Kraków.
    The trouble is we arrived in Kraków at night, or at least
    after curfew.
    So being on a station after curfew and civil, we took a--
    I think it was a sleigh, not a [INAUDIBLE],
    because it was winter snow.
    And we tried to get away from this station as soon as possible
    before any police asked for identification.
    Went to our apartment, came to the apartment,
    the concierge or the [NON-ENGLISH] was still there.
    And she almost-- when my father rang the bell she opened--
    passed away.
    My father told her keep quiet, and we
    managed to get into the building, off the street
    and so forth.
    So we were, in a way, safe.
    And then and the woman, the concierge,
    told my father that my cousin or a niece on my mother's
    side with her little daughter was in the apartment still,
    but part of the apartment was occupied by two Germans.
    Military?
    Apparently they were intelligence.
    Oh jeepers.
    Oh, jeepers.
    And they took over the apartment,
    what they called beschlag [NON-ENGLISH].
    They put a sign up.
    And they were at the front at the entrance.
    I remember, when you entered the apartment, to the right
    there was a room.
    Before the war, I don't remember what it was,
    but that's what they occupied.
    Naturally, when we came to the apartment,
    they being officers of not uniformed or Abwher probably,
    although that's what my father found out, German intelligence,
    they must have heard people coming in.
    Anyway, they did nothing.
    We stayed in Kraków with my father's niece.
    The apartment was ours--
    In your own apartment.
    Yeah.
    But then there were frequent razzias.
    So my father--
    I want to stop you for a second.
    These two intelligence officers knew your real identities?
    They knew that someone came in.
    They knew the real identity of my cousin,
    who was in the apartment.
    That she was Jewish?
    That she was Jewish, yes.
    When we came in, they must have assumed something.
    I mean, when five people come in with some luggage, noise,
    and so forth, and a kid-- maybe I was crying--
    they must have heard it.
    But it wasn't that--
    they were able to, at least from your memory of it,
    the owner of the apartment has returned home,
    and they know that this is the owner of the apartment.
    No.
    They did not know.
    I don't know, but it doesn't seem like.
    Possibly, they did.
    They may have inquired.
    But that I don't know what they knew.
    Another question.
    Your apartment, this was in Kraków,
    was it in a central area?
    Was it in a residential area?
    Residential area.
    It was a second or third building
    from what I call planty, which was sort over
    like the ring around Kraków.
    And was it a mixed area ethnically?
    That is, Jewish, Polish?
    Or was it mostly a Jewish neighborhood.
    I don't know.
    OK.
    Or was it just maybe a well-to-do neighborhood.
    It was a well-to-do neighborhood.
    Because that's where they would mostly requisition.
    It was a well-to-do neighborhood, yes,
    because it was not far from the castle either.
    But mixed, I don't know.
    I'm also wondering, in that time that you
    were gone, how many of your neighbors
    who would have been Jewish would have been taken away.
    Was there a ghetto already established?
    That I don't know.
    You don't know.
    That was the beginning of 1940.
    Winter could have been March, February.
    Half a year after the war starts.
    Approximately.
    It was still winter, already 1940, yes--
    February, March.
    And did the apartment look different to you?
    Not really.
    I did not remember that, vaguely what it looked
    like before and all that, no.
    Did you have your own bedroom in that apartment before?
    No, I don't think so.
    I don't remember, but I don't think
    I had my own apartment-- or bedroom.
    No.
    So now, when you were there and your cousin
    is living there with her child?
    With her child.
    With her child, and it's the five of you.
    What part of the apartment do you go to?
    Not the two front rooms.
    No, there are other rooms-- a sizable apartment.
    Where, I don't remember.
    The layout of the apartment, I don't remember.
    Tell us, what is a razzia?
    What is a razzia?
    A razzia was sort of they surround an area
    and catch all the people.
    The police surround us and circles a certain area,
    and they just grab all the people whom
    they suspect, semi-suspect, than others are let go.
    So those things were happening around--
    Already Kraków.
    So my father decided that it was too dangerous,
    so he and my brother decided to flee to Slovakia illegally.
    And your brother is about 13, 14.
    My brother was about 13, 14, yes.
    I was-- he was--
    Yeah, I was 5.
    He could have been 13, 14.
    Right.
    And his name again was?
    Henek.
    Henek, Henek, Henek, of course.
    And Hela is your sister.
    Yeah, Hela, Henek, Herman.
    All H.
    So--
    Hang on a second.
    --like a motorcycle.
    Let's cut for second.
    OK, cutting.
    All right, we're going?
    Yes.
    OK.
    So it's just the two of them, your mother, Hela,
    and you stay behind.
    [INAUDIBLE] and stayed behind.
    Right.
    And they want to go to Slovakia because?
    To escape the fear of being caught in a razzia.
    OK, OK.
    So was it generally men and older boys
    who were the ones that were taken away?
    Yes, yes.
    And the women would be let go?
    That I don't know, the woman would
    be let go, but it was the men, primarily Jewish,
    but also Poles whom they suspected of--
    they had lists all being in their resistance or someone whom
    they wanted.
    But the razzias were quite common.
    Do you remember your father leaving?
    No.
    Do you remember him being gone?
    Not really.
    What do you remember from this time
    when you were in your Kraków apartment?
    Being restricted, you know?
    Where we could go, not being outdoors much.
    Did you cross paths with the two Nazi intelligence officers?
    Not that I remember.
    I heard them come and go, and maybe they
    bumped into my brother or someone.
    But I do not remember them, no.
    OK.
    And about how long were you in this apartment
    without your father?
    A few weeks, I think.
    Because shortly thereafter, he sent for me.
    Someone came, picked me up, and then took me also
    illegally across the border.
    Do you remember any of that?
    Yes.
    We were taking side roads, and it was an acquaintance
    who had his horse--
    horses and sleigh.
    We were going across fields.
    But that was a time when snow was melting, and in some places
    this the horses were slipping.
    So I remember just being scared.
    And I used to tell my father, don't be afraid.
    So your father was with you.
    Yeah.
    At a certain point, he met me.
    He met you, and--
    He got me across the border.
    Although somewhere along the way, there was still a control.
    And it was a German--
    must have been in officer, because he was that big cap--
    and he spoke to him, and he let us go through.
    So that may have been somewhere a point where
    the fields were impassable.
    And I ended up in Slovakia.
    And shortly thereafter, my mother and my sister
    came across also illegally to Slovakia.
    Do you know why it was in such a sequence?
    Maybe the person-- the smuggler or whoever it was--
    could not take more people.
    Or whatever the reason was, I don't know.
    And do you remember how your brother and sister
    were behaving at this time?
    That is, were they taking care of you more?
    Were they showing fear?
    Were they--
    Fear, I wouldn't say.
    They were taking care of me, my sister more than my brother.
    Me and my brother used to have occasional fights.
    Even if it's wartime, kids will still have fights.
    Well, because I guess he was smoking illegally.
    My father wouldn't allow it.
    So, he somewhere nice, occasionally wanted
    to have a puff.
    And he wouldn't give me, so I would threaten him
    with blackmail--
    expose him that he was smoking.
    And that happened not on the beginning of the war,
    but throughout occasionally.
    I wanted to have some sweet candy in exchange.
    I had a sweet tooth-- anything sweet went.
    You know, you have to learn.
    You have to become streetwise very early on.
    Oh, yes.
    I grew up very fast.
    Yeah.
    Do you remember feeling fear from September 1st, '39?
    Yes.
    When there were air raids and that, of course I was afraid.
    Already, we were told in a car, in case something happens,
    if there's a noise, stop the car, jump in a ditch,
    and so forth.
    And then when we left that German Reichsdeutsche,
    Volksdeutsche-- assembly point--
    I felt some fear.
    And also, when we arrived during curfew in Kraków, because I know
    everybody was afraid.
    It just transmitted, you know?
    And I don't remember--
    maybe later or during there, I saw,
    when we arrived, someone passing by,
    which was the German Feldpolizei.
    It was a German uniform with a shield here.
    I don't remember whether I saw it
    or that was a dream only-- or a nightmare.
    And then when we came to the apartment,
    it was just cold, tired, hungry.
    So it was a combination.
    But I did know fear after September 1st.
    Perhaps more than my share.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    Well, one of the way children experience such events--
    I'm fine.
    I just had to stand up.
    That's OK.
    My feet were falling sleep.
    The way children experience such events is completely different.
    I mean, all can feel fear, but a child
    is in a certain developmental stage in life.
    And so the way that that impacts that child
    is going to be different than the way it will impact somebody
    who is older, even if that older could be adolescent,
    or teenager, or so on.
    It is a very vulnerable stage of course.
    Yeah, of course.
    And for most children it is, was my mother or my father close by.
    They could be going through most horrible things,
    but if these secure people are there, it's not as horrible.
    That's the little that I've been able to glean
    from other interviews.
    Yeah, that is normal really.
    Yeah.
    So you remember the snow melting and your father
    taking you through a checkpoint in Slovakia.
    And then, what's the next scene?
    What happens to you next?
    We were in Slovakia.
    Somehow we ended up in a small town in a border town
    for a few days called Medzilaborce.
    Medzilaborce.
    OK.
    And then I ended up, for whatever reason,
    in Bratislava, which is Pressburg.
    There was a nephew--
    my father's nephew-- the brother of who
    was in the Kraków apartment.
    How he got to Bratislava, I don't know?
    So that's where I ended up.
    Separated from the family?
    Yes, my mother wasn't.
    It was my father and my brother.
    And you.
    And me.
    Because he would-- that cousin, which was my cousin--
    take me places.
    You know, I remember him vividly.
    And then, afterwards, we stayed there a short while.
    I don't know how long.
    Then we moved to Bardejov, back to my birthplace,
    where my father had friends from before.
    And that's where I remember my mother--
    seeing my mother again and my sister.
    Possibly they were in Bratislava,
    but I don't remember that.
    And we had an apartment and stayed there.
    I wonder how your father paid for all of this,
    because it was an apartment in Lemberg, it was getting back.
    Well, before the war he was very well off.
    He actually had money in the United States.
    Because I was told as a child, during the war,
    in case something happened, doesn't survive,
    the name of the bank where he had the money.
    Do you remember the name of the bank?
    Manufacturers Trust Company.
    Well, either that was very prescient or extremely lucky,
    you know, that he knew to transfer money.
    Because that was a huge probably
    Generally, people in those countries
    knew something may happen.
    So they wanted to have money outside and jewelry which
    would fit in the pocket.
    In case they have to leave everything, they could flee.
    That was the experience, unfortunately,
    quite often in that part of Europe.
    Land you couldn't take, property you couldn't take--
    whatever you could carry.
    And do you remember such things being, as you ran away,
    that there was jewelry taken?
    No, I don't remember what it was.
    But it must have been--
    Yeah.
    Dollars, currency, and jewelry, and so forth.
    He had his work cut out for him, didn't he?
    Yes.
    So you're in Bardejov--
    Right.
    --and you have another apartment that you were living in.
    Yes.
    It was a small city.
    Cost of living was low.
    Apartments were inexpensive.
    And we stayed there until 1943.
    So that's two years--
    no, more than two years.
    More than two years.
    More than two years.
    We were in hiding sometimes.
    And other times my father-- because my mother,
    what I was told, went to Bratislava for medical reasons.
    The local hospital was either not qualified, inadequate,
    or whatever it is.
    So she went to Bratislava.
    And from Bratislava apparently she was deported to Auschwitz.
    So I saw her--
    the last time was in '42--
    spring or summer '42.
    Do you remember that last time that you saw here?
    Vaguely, because I did not know she was leaving
    or that she won't be back.
    I had already some friends.
    I was seven years old, playing with friends, you know.
    So toys and so forth were my primary concern.
    And '42 wasn't too bad.
    But then towards the end of '42, they
    started also deporting the Jews.
    So my father, and sister, and brother
    went into hiding, sometimes in the forest.
    And I was given to a family friend who so
    called supposedly adopted me.
    They apparently had a child from before.
    The child died.
    So I was--
    In the place of that child?
    Yes.
    I mean, the building or the house
    that they lived, in the front of that building
    was also a Slovak couple, and he was
    a member of what you would call the Slovak military.
    And he knew the story.
    He could have informed.
    He could have arrested us.
    He didn't do a thing.
    So when you were in Bardejov for those three years,
    people around you knew you were Jewish.
    Yes.
    And your father and siblings would
    go into hiding when there would be some special event?
    When they were afraid that there could be a razzia or a roundup.
    A razzia, you could call it a roundup.
    I was quite known in this city.
    Because for whatever reason, at that age,
    I was a mathematical prodigy supposedly.
    Really?
    OK.
    When I started school, I knew multiplication,
    division in my head.
    When it came to writing, I did not
    know how to do it, because I was just learning.
    So people would stop me--
    say this figure, that figure.
    And it was popular, yes.
    So I was sometimes in hiding with them in some cellars.
    Because some of-- when the roundups happened,
    it was mostly by the Slovak police.
    There were no Germans.
    And some of the policemen informed us beforehand.
    They informed some families to be careful.
    Some were very helpful, others not.
    Others did, supposedly, their duty, you know?
    And that's how it was.
    And one time when they had to take to the forest
    because it was more serious, so I was given beforehand
    to that family, where I stayed for a while.
    And in '43--
    Excuse me, did you assume the identity of their dead child?
    Yes.
    My name was different.
    My name suddenly became Schoendorf.
    Schoendorf.
    Yes.
    First name?
    Herman.
    Oh, still Herman.
    Still Herman.
    I think it was Herman.
    Otherwise, I wouldn't know to respond.
    OK.
    Did you have any other aliases during the war?
    Yes.
    What would they be.
    Martini and Malecki.
    Did this come later?
    Later, yes.
    Then we'll get to those later.
    In fact, after the war I asked my father,
    should I use my real name or some other names?
    Which name do I use?
    Well, it could get confusing.
    So your mother, do you know how your parents--
    how your parents-- how your father found out your mother
    was deported?
    Do you know how he got news of it?
    No, that I don't know.
    I guess he was in contact with some people in Bratislava,
    maybe with my mother through letters, possibly telephone.
    But I found out much later, because I
    kept asking about my mother.
    And then, after a while, I stopped asking.
    I realized something happened.
    I did not know about deported.
    Maybe the term deportation I knew,
    but I did not know about Auschwitz and so forth.
    That I found out a little bit later
    when some escapees from our Auschwitz came through our city.
    There were some Polish Jews who escaped,
    and they managed to get across the border, came to the city,
    and we helped them.
    And they knew who your mother was?
    They did not know, but we knew about Auschwitz by then already.
    I see.
    That it was.
    And people were still thinking, some of the Jews,
    that they were being deported to assembly point-- labor camps.
    Because the correspondence, the cards
    said they were sending back were lies basically.
    That was still in '42 I think.
    You got some of those cards from your mother?
    We did not, but our acquaintances did.
    OK.
    The kind of cards that would say--
    That they were working and so forth.
    And my father told the people, don't believe it.
    And hide-- run whatever you can, but don't believe these stories.
    And some people still said, well, it may not be so bad.
    Because the facts of what was happening were not known.
    It slowly started seeping through into Slovakia.
    Into Hungary, among the Hungarian Jews,
    they did not believe it until it finally happened.
    And what were your sister and brother doing during this time?
    Those three years that you're in--
    We had various-- we had to make a living.
    My father was buying condiments by the pound or by the kilo,
    and making small packages out of it, and selling it.
    Then also packaging candies from volume to smaller things,
    selling it.
    And also, I remember, there was apparently,
    making trench coats or something like that--
    anything to make a living to pay the bills.
    And also, there was a dentist whose son
    was in the United States.
    And he was selling the money we had here at a discount
    with this guy.
    This guy was good enough to pay something,
    because he did not know if the money will be transferred
    somehow to his son.
    But it was transferred--
    So in other words, he was taking--
    your father had dollars.
    Yes, in the bank.
    He was issuing checks or whatever it is.
    So that the son in the United States
    could benefit from those dollars--
    Yes.
    --and your father--
    And the son's father was paying us in Slovak crowns
    at a discount.
    He was selling, you might say, $1 at $0.70.
    As the war progressed, $0.60, $0.50.
    But something he was getting-- he was using it.
    I don't know how much it was.
    But I remember the dentist, because he survived the war,
    and he did some of my dental work.
    And that's how much of the money was spent.
    Then in '43, my father did not know
    that my brother was trying to acquire weapons
    with some of his friends for the partisans.
    Your brother was then 15, 16?
    15, 16, yes.
    That's about the age that a kid wants to get back at-- he wants
    to fight against those who are--
    Yeah.
    I assume.
    What the motive was, I don't know.
    But what happened, there were several friends,
    they had a pistol--
    yeah, it was pistol, not a revolver--
    and they removed the magazine from the handle.
    The only thing is a bullet was stuck in the pistol.
    They did not know it, and one fellow aimed just toyfully
    at someone, pulled the trigger, and he shot him--
    wounded him in his stomach.
    Naturally, they called a doctor and so forth.
    The doctor said, he has to go to the hospital.
    It was a stomach wound.
    In the hospital, they tried to pretend
    that it was appendectomy.
    It worked for a short period.
    But in those days you kept someone
    in the hospital a longer period, and somehow it came out.
    Maybe there were also some German soldiers recovering
    or recuperating, but it came out that this was not
    an appendectomy, that it was a bullet wound.
    Therefore, where did the bullet come from?
    Where did the bullet come from.
    It pointed to my brother, and maybe someone else,
    and to my father.
    So suddenly, even on the radio or in the newspapers--
    Slovak newspapers-- appeared-- I somehow lost the article from
    the paper--
    that terrorism, arming, and so forth.
    So we had to flee to Hungary on very short notice.
    It was winter.
    I still have somewhere a picture of me and my brother
    just before leaving.
    And I see the snow around, so I know it was winter.
    And we fled to Hungary.
    How?
    Illegally, across the border.
    By foot?
    We fled to another city--
    By car?
    By?
    By car up to another city, and from there by sleigh
    to the border, till a smuggler took us-- the whole family--
    over.
    I remember it was nighttime crossing the border.
    Snow was deep, and I was tired.
    I wanted to fall asleep.
    They wouldn't let me.
    Made it to Hungary, a city called Satoraljaujhely.
    I don't know what he English term-- there is such a city.
    And there was a Jewish community.
    We stayed there aw few days I think.
    Then we went to Budapest.
    Let me interrupt just for a second--
    Actually, if I can interrupt you,
    I'm getting a squeaking noise that's--
    From outside?
    All right.
    Am I connected?
    Yeah.
    What was I-- was there a large Jewish community in Slovakia
    during those three years that you were living?
    Yes.
    Especially in that city there was a sizable Jewish community.
    And that city is quite historic, because it's
    on the entry to the Dukla Pass, which over centuries was
    a strategic passage.
    So there was a sizable Jewish--
    proportionately, yes.
    So were there dangers of people being taken away
    while you were there?
    Yes.
    All right.
    So those things were part of daily reality.
    Yes.
    And that's why your father, and brother, and sister
    would sometimes hide, and you were then given up to someone.
    I would hide if it was in the city in some cellar.
    But otherwise, it was more serious.
    When they took to the forests or something, then
    I was left with some family.
    And then when the situation became serious,
    that's when a friend of my father's family, so-called,
    adopted.
    I was his long lost son.
    Did your father's demeanor change from someone
    being very strict from your early years,
    or did it become more strict?
    I mean, he's now the only parent,
    and he has three children he needs to take care of.
    I think he became less strict.
    Less strict.
    Yes.
    I mean, other preoccupations probably predominated.
    Survival, and not how I put my clothing or shoes when I went
    to bed, that they were proper.
    But that had been the case before.
    Before, yes.
    OK.
    And what about your brother and sister?
    Did they then become--
    in the early years, it was the [NON-ENGLISH].
    It was the young girl who took care of you.
    Yes.
    What about now when you're in--
    They're my sisters.
    My mother was absent, so my sister
    was taking care of me a little bit more.
    And my brother.
    But my sister, she was a big sister.
    She was--
    She wasn't somebody who was bribable or blackmail--
    you know.
    No, no.
    She didn't want to have a smoke.
    She didn't smoke as far as I know.
    All right.
    So the four of you then are the ones--
    you have to leave fast because of your brother's--
    [NON-ENGLISH].
    [NON-ENGLISH] or stomach wound--
    bullet wound.
    Who had that bullet wound by the way?
    Who got the bullet wound?
    The fellow's name was Biernbaum.
    Biernbaum.
    The irony is there were two--
    it my brother, him, and there were two others I believe.
    None of them survived except the guy
    who had the bullet wound, through various things,
    you know?
    That's the irony.
    There are ironies.
    Or fate or whatever.
    These were all then Jewish boy.
    Yes.
    OK.
    So you're in Hungary.
    You're in a small town where there's
    a sizable Jewish community.
    You stay for a little bit, and then you go to Budapest.
    Yes.
    And what do you find in Budapest.
    In Budapest we are registered as Polish.
    As Poles.
    So we changed names to Malecki.
    And the Hungarian government historically
    had good relationship with Poles, with Poland.
    So they gave us--
    there was a Polish committee, and my father
    managed to get papers from them that we were Aryans, not Jewish.
    I mean, some of them may have known,
    but they were quite helpful, because they were also
    running from the Germans.
    And because we were refugees from Poland,
    for whatever reason, the Hungarian government
    was giving us a certain financial support.
    And we stayed in Budapest till about the summer of '44.
    Which is quite long after Germany marches
    in, because they marched in March.
    When they marched in, in March or April,
    then they had the list of the Poles from the government.
    And then we realized that our time is up.
    So we fled back--
    that was about April--
    to Slovakia.
    Same place, same town?
    From Budapest.
    OK.
    But to the same town back to Slovak?
    Back to Bardejov, yes.
    To Bardejov.
    Yeah.
    We fled across-- illegally again--
    the border.
    And we lived in not--
    at first we stayed in Budapest for a short period,
    then we lived outside Budapest in the suburb.
    About how long were you in Budapest--
    I mean in Hungary?
    Till about April.
    From what time?
    From the winter-- that could have been November or December.
    I don't remember when we went, but it was already severe,
    because there was snow.
    So it could have been--
    So it was the fall of 1943 to the winter of '44.
    No, to April.
    So about half a year, one could say.
    Roughly from December to April.
    Four or five months, yes.
    And we fled back to Bardejov.
    And that's '44.
    Then, after a few months in Bardejov,
    the order came that all the Jews and others
    had to leave Eastern Slovakia, because the front was
    approaching.
    So we moved to Bratislava.
    [?
    Just to close to Vienna.
    ?]
    Yes.
    We stayed in Bratislava from about June
    also July until we were caught.
    Tell me about the places you lived in Hungary,
    if you remember them.
    First we stayed in Budapest in the pension.
    I remember the name because there was a street that I lately
    passed when I saw this.
    And it was Nador Pension.
    Nador Pension.
    N-A-D-O-R. And these people did not--
    when we told them the stories of deportation,
    they did not believe that it could happen to them,
    to the Hungarian Jews.
    They were sort of not better, but it's not
    going to happen to them.
    Denial of reality-- unpleasant reality.
    And then we stayed there for a while.
    Then we moved out of the city to a suburb called [PLACE NAME].
    And that's when we are living with the Germans--
    the German units came to Hungary.
    Do you remember seeing them?
    No.
    And that's when we fled back to Bardejov.
    From Bardejov, later on in July or so, to Bratislava.
    Bratislava, we lived, and then we knew the war is coming.
    It was after the invasion.
    It was also after the plot on Hitler, which
    unfortunately did not succeed.
    And we managed to get phony paper--
    fake papers.
    Did you hear the news about the phony plot--
    not the phony plot, the real plot on Hitler,
    but that it was a failed plot.
    Yes.
    You heard that?
    We heard the first the invasion, June.
    Which is now coming up.
    OK, D-Day.
    D-Day.
    Tomorrow.
    Yes.
    And that was good news, positive news.
    And we knew the Russian front is moving forward.
    So I wonder how you found out these things.
    BBC.
    When we were in Slovakia, between '41 and '43,
    we had a family.
    We took out a room or two rooms.
    The name was Szada.
    One of the apartments, brother-in-law I think,
    he belonged to that Slovak--
    the black uniforms.
    That was a guard.
    He knew who we were.
    Same story-- he could have arrested us.
    He protected-- he did not protect us,
    but he did not arrest us.
    He had a radio, and we listened to his radio to BBC.
    He must have known that someone was using it.
    When my brother-- with his fantastic memory,
    and he could sort of recite verbatim things--
    when he was listening, I was the one
    outside watching that the police--
    there were no Germans yet--
    come by [INAUDIBLE].
    It was forbidden, you know?
    So we had this signal.
    I wouldn't throw pebbles on the window.
    I would just throw the little rubber ball.
    I was the--
    The watch.
    The watchman on whom depended so much.
    So that's how we heard news.
    And in Bratislava, later on, there
    were people who had access to--
    Radios.
    --radios.
    illegally and so forth.
    So it was known not instantly, but within a reasonable time.
    It's interesting to know that.
    It's interesting to know, how does
    such information in wartime, in territories
    that the normal information channels would never
    have publicized this, how you find out.
    That was from BBC.
    The BBC.
    OK.
    I remember occasionally hearing the bells from Big Ben.
    Because sometimes I stayed a little bit to listen.
    And in Bratislava we managed to get--
    there were various phony papers from neutral countries.
    But the good quality and from countries which were,
    let's say favorably disposed, like Argentina, the identity,
    the passports were difficult and expensive to get.
    My father managed to get those and again a new identity.
    Except it wasn't Herman, it was Harry Martini.
    So now you're Harry Martini.
    And Argentina.
    Not from Buenos Aires, just in case somebody
    knows or was in some things.
    So it was on the city Rawson, in Central Argentina
    on the Atlantic.
    It's on the map.
    A decent size.
    Not a big city, but a decent size.
    Did you ever go there?
    To Rawson, no.
    But in Argentina, a few times, yes.
    To see these places that you were from, you know?
    To Rawson, it was down almost North of Patagonia.
    So I decided not to [? use. ?]
    So it was a Martini family, or were you
    all different last names?
    No, the same.
    Martini family.
    All right.
    And what was your father's fake name?
    That I don't know.
    Or your sisters or your brothers?
    I don't know.
    But you were Harry Martin.
    I just knew Harry Martini.
    So you were Schoendorf.
    That was before.
    Before Martini was Malecki in Poland, in Hungary.
    And then, for a while, Schoendorf.
    I have to say, I'm impressed with your father,
    that he managed that.
    Because of him and because his advice and his urging,
    many people survived.
    He saw them hide.
    And later on, he said, fight.
    If you can get a weapon, a pitchfork, a knife, resist.
    Quite a guy.
    I mean, but truly.
    When you think of it, he had his wits about him.
    Yes.
    That's how-- wits and luck.
    Because during bombing and so forth.
    And that's not the end.
    So we have these papers.
    And then during the holiday Jewish High Holy Days--
    September.
    --we were planning to go to Hungary.
    And why would that have been?
    To flee closer to the Russian front
    and use some phony identities.
    But a friend of his show had parents
    lost but several siblings, he asked them
    if he could go with a smuggler the night before.
    And he figured, yes, go.
    Because we did not expect any major razzia.
    Germans were in Bratislava.
    And the following night, late at night, early in the morning,
    knocks at the door--
    Slovak police.
    A soldier in uniform, police-- there was about three of them,
    maybe four, came to the apartment.
    Identity papers.
    So you give them--
    So we show the papers, you know.
    And we had a guest, a friend or someone staying.
    He was not-- he didn't have the papers.
    He had some other papers.
    And we showed them.
    So the police checked it and so forth, excused themselves,
    and left.
    Shortly thereafter-- we didn't go back to bed yet,
    we're all exciting--
    they come back with a man in a long leather coat--
    brown leather coat.
    Not a big man, but a man.
    He looks at the papers and confiscated them.
    I remember my father telling me, he said [GERMAN]--
    I know it already.
    He confiscated the passports and told us to come with him.
    And they took us to what was then a school.
    I remember that building.
    And in the school there were already other families--
    Jewish families.
    And in the morning, from that school and other places,
    they marched us to what in Bratislava was
    called a small train station.
    There was a major train station.
    This was a small train station, I guess for freight.
    And then we were assembled there.
    And I remember some of the Germans patrolling
    with submachine guns.
    And one of the guys patrolling was a rather dark-haired man.
    His name was Brunner--
    the infamous Brunner.
    Someone pointed out to him, and it was then others.
    We were sitting on the ground outside.
    And in the evening, we are put on trains
    to an assembly point in Slovakia where
    there was a bigger [INAUDIBLE].
    It was a concentration camp but not a death camp.
    I don't remember whether it was Sered or Nováky, one of the two.
    There were big buildings-- not big buildings, many buildings.
    It may have been a former army base or whatever.
    Barracks and things?
    Barracks, yes.
    They were put in so many.
    Then we realized that the transports
    are going to Auschwitz.
    Did anybody say Auschwitz?
    No.
    Did anybody tell you-- did the official-- did they tell you,
    we're taking you here or there.
    No.
    Nobody said.
    No information.
    We just knew, because some of the trains
    and others they heard from before where those were going.
    That was in '44, I think, October, during the Jewish High
    Hold Days.
    September or October.
    Can I interrupt for a second?
    I'd like to ask--
    I was not aware of Brunner.
    Tell us who he is.
    Brunner was a high official in the Gestapo,
    and he survived the war.
    Eventually, through various identities, ended up in Syria.
    No kidding.
    Egypt first, possibly, but in Syria.
    The Israeli intelligence wanted to get hold of him
    or assassinate him.
    They were not successful.
    Eventually, he passed away.
    He was unlike Eichmann.
    He was a high officer.
    And so he was known already at the time.
    Some people knew already of him apparently, yes.
    What was his first name?
    Do you remember?
    I think it was Adolf Brunner.
    I'm not sure.
    B-R-U, Double N, E-R.
    And did he have Gestapo coat?
    Yes, the uniform.
    And I think, SD--
    On his cuffs.
    On his cuff, and maybe another sign.
    And maybe SS here, but he was [INAUDIBLE].
    And in that camp we realized, Sered or Nováky, not sure
    which one it was, we knew where the transports were going.
    But at that time there was partisan activity in Slovakia.
    So the trains, instead of taking the direct route to Poland,
    they bypassed.
    They went through Bratislava, Austria, and then up.
    So it was safer.
    Because some of the trains were occasionally
    attacked by the partisans, and some were liberated--
    stopped and so forth.
    Since we knew where we are going and what
    the situation was in Auschwitz, my father
    decided that we have to escape.
    Whatever it takes.
    Whether to the door, and then cannot open the doors,
    through the window, even if the window is barred.
    Because for me it would have been certain death
    and for others.
    So we managed to procure a metal saw.
    How?
    Somehow.
    That I don't know-- in the camp.
    And, I think, a screwdriver.
    And that metal saw was sewn into my winter
    overcoat and the screwdriver.
    So I was the one who carried the tools.
    And as soon as the trains were loaded--
    the freight trains-- almost 100 people-- and some of this Slovak
    train guards, or whatever you call it,
    they said, discreetly, that's where it's going,
    to Poland, maybe not Auschwitz.
    So that was my father, sister, brother, me,
    and future brother-in-law.
    Your sister's boyfriend.
    Yes.
    Boyfriend.
    They were not married.
    He was also in the apartment, and he also
    had an Argentine passport.
    So we were all taken together from that point on.
    Trains were loaded.
    And as soon as they started moving,
    we tried to get to the door so that--
    didn't tell anybody, just those who were in on it.
    And there were two or more people who also were in on it.
    Should not spread, and then someone betray or scream.
    So six or seven people knew that during this trip
    you were going to try and escape.
    Yes.
    There was four, five--
    seven, possibly eight.
    There were other people in the car, in the freight car.
    It was my future brother-in-law's sister,
    and her husband, and their son who was my age.
    And there was someone else later on, a friend from Bratislava,
    his uncle was in that carriage also.
    That man was a giant of a man.
    I remember, as a kid, we used to look up.
    He may have been 6'6"--
    huge.
    But he had problems walking.
    We didn't tell anybody.
    Once in the car, we tried to get to the door.
    And about how many people were in that care.
    About almost 100.
    It was squeezed in.
    Would it be about as large as your apartment?
    It was a much narrower.
    Much narrower.
    The car, I think in Jerusalem in the museum or somewhere,
    there is a railroad car.
    We have that in Washington at the museum.
    It was a car like that.
    So we tried to get a place by the door
    so that eventually we could do what we needed.
    And the train started going.
    And then people, as they realized what we
    want to do, some where afraid.
    Some tried even to prevent us, because they'll be punished
    and so forth.
    And others were afraid.
    My brother-in-law's sister and brother-in-law,
    they were afraid.
    So they asked my father to take care of the child.
    He said, he cannot.
    The other man, an acquaintance whom we knew, that giant,
    he realized what's happening.
    But he realized he would not jump.
    There was another-- my brother-in-law's brother
    was dead.
    His name was Kot--
    K-O-T. And we worked out a sequence, who will jump first.
    And you had to be careful not to hit a power pole.
    First, tell me, why was it that you were chosen as the person--
    Because the least likely to be maybe searched.
    OK, OK.
    Although they did not search us.
    I did not notice as we are mounting.
    And we knew that the last compartment,
    the German soldiers, it was a passenger car.
    In which compartment-- which of those cattle cars were you in?
    In the middle, towards the end, towards the beginning?
    I would say in the middle.
    Although that's guessing.
    No.
    How would you know.
    They wouldn't--
    Not close to the car, because, as the story continues--
    OK, please.
    And then past a certain point, we tried the door.
    Someone tried to open.
    We worked out the sequence, who was going to jump first,
    to be careful with a post, with the power pole.
    And once you're down--
    fortunately the night was fairly dark.
    stay down, just in case a guard is watching.
    Someone tried the door, and luckily the hook,
    the latch was closed, but it could be lifted.
    It wasn't padlocked.
    So that was a tremendous relief.
    You didn't have to saw anything.
    Didn't have to saw.
    The windows were not barred, so as the worst
    case would have been difficult to jump
    through the little window.
    Door was opened, and other people were not screaming,
    but they were getting nervous that they'll be punished.
    And the escape began.
    The first one who jumped was my brother
    in law's brother, his sister's brother.
    Now let's put it that way.
    That I just found out much later.
    He timed it badly, apparently, and he hit a pole.
    So the crash of the bones, instantly killed,
    was heard in that compartment.
    That frightened the others.
    But then it again began because the train was moving,
    and we wanted to jump in Slovakia,
    where we knew some smugglers that will get us to Hungary.
    And then I think the sequence was my brother-in-law--
    I call him brother-in-law-- my brother, me,
    my father, my sister, and two or three others.
    One was-- the name, I remember, was Ernberg.
    He was an attorney, Polish Jew.
    Another one was Reich, a dentist.
    And there could have been another person.
    And this would have been something
    that had been discussed while they're already on the train.
    Before the train.
    Before the train.
    It was organized before we mounted the train, yes.
    Got it, OK.
    So you're the only child, really.
    I am the only child.
    So my brother-in-law jumps.
    My brother jumps.
    My turn comes to jump, I get to the door, I'm scared.
    I'm frightened.
    I told my father, talking in Polish--
    Say it to me in Polish.
    [POLISH]
    So my father said, jump.
    I said, I'm afraid.
    So he said, jump or I'll leave you.
    I said, leave me.
    You save yourself, you leave me.
    And then I said, maybe you'll find a rucksack or something,
    put me in, throw me out.
    He was physically quite strong.
    So my coat was buttoned up, winter coat.
    He grabbed me by the collar and bent
    and threw me away from the tracks.
    And the thing was once you land, stay down.
    What I remember seeing and hearing
    the last car passing with lights on
    and the Germans carousing because there were noises.
    Luckily no guard.
    And after that, my father jumped.
    Then my sister, then Ernberg, Reich, and maybe someone else.
    That eighth person somehow is vague.
    And when the train passed, my father calls me, Herman, I say,
    "Tak?"
    He says, get up and come to me.
    Tried to get up.
    I couldn't.
    My arm was broken and I had a head injury.
    Some of my friends and others claim your head injury
    hasn't healed properly.
    So mean.
    Anyway, I couldn't get up.
    So he comes to me, lifts me.
    What is it, he says.
    My arm is hurting, my left arm.
    So then we assemble and we try to get away from the tracks
    as fast as we can because first, the escape
    could have been discovered and could have sent patrols.
    And secondly, it was partisan activity,
    so there could be patrols on along the tracks anyway.
    So we moved away.
    But by the time between when my brother jumped and I
    was supposed to jump, a few minutes passed.
    A few minutes meant a few kilometers.
    OK.
    I'm getting a noise.
    Something like--
    OK, go ahead.
    And the mistake, afterthought, we assemble.
    But your brother is there.
    My brother and brother-in-law are not dead.
    It was several kilometers.
    We were afraid.
    We failed to make the provision if we get separated,
    where to meet what smugglers.
    We did not meet, so we figured they'll make it somehow.
    We cannot stay where we are.
    We have to move.
    On the fields I could not walk.
    Sometimes we thought we saw something so we had to crawl.
    I could not sort out.
    Mr. Ernberg was strong physically.
    I was on his back.
    He would crawl, and I just held on to him with my right hand.
    And then we walked.
    I was in terrible pain because of the arm,
    and you know, over fields, it's not a smooth walk.
    Then we come to a river.
    I think the name was Wach.
    I'm not sure what river.
    And there is a bridge, a railroad bridge.
    And a train passed.
    And usually those were patrolled or guarded.
    So we figure if it's guarded, we somehow
    have to get across the river.
    Swimming is not an option.
    First, the current.
    Not everybody.
    And then with wet clothes, where do you go?
    Someone reconnoitered, and fortunately, the bridge
    was unguarded.
    It may not have been that important a bridge.
    So we cross the bridge.
    And daybreak starts, so you have roosters and dogs barking.
    Fortunately, we made it to the smuggler's house.
    So was the jumping timed so that you
    would be in a location, a particular location?
    Yes, close to the border.
    Oh, I see.
    It wasn't like a random now we have an opportunity
    and now we jump.
    It was we knew more or less how the train was
    going, what the trains were.
    That was close to the Hungarian border,
    or still in Slovakia near Pezinok.
    So at that point, it is your father, yourself, your sister,
    and those two.
    Two, at least two, maybe a third person.
    And the giant of the man stayed on the train.
    Stayed on the train.
    And so did my brother-in-law, sister,
    and brother-in-law and the kid, and other people
    who saw the door open.
    Of course, if they jump, where do they go?
    Or you know, fear.
    Fear.
    Of course.
    So we did not meet.
    We enter the smuggler's house.
    He said I'll keep you.
    So there were four of us plus two or three.
    No, three, Father, sister, me, Ernberg, Reich, and maybe
    someone else because my brother and brother-in-law, they met up.
    That we found out after the war.
    So you didn't see them then.
    No.
    That was the last we saw my brother.
    Ever?
    Yes, because they were caught later on again.
    That was an interesting story how they were caught.
    Tell me.
    Before you would continue with your story,
    what happened to him?
    They met together, and they managed
    to cross the border into Hungary.
    And during the day they hid in some bushes pretty well.
    Then whatever reason, a gypsy came by
    and started playing around.
    And my brother-in-law spoke Hungarian, so he told him,
    go away.
    We had a good night's drinking bout.
    Just go away.
    He was like a pest.
    So my brother-in-law had some money, Hungarian money, pengoe,
    and he gave him what was a big denomination.
    The guy took it and my brother-in-law
    asked him to bring back change.
    He never brought back change.
    Instead, he brought back Hungarian police.
    He got reward for the informing.
    The police arrested them, ask them to drop their pants.
    They did not discover that they were Jewish.
    They did not?
    Not, for whatever reason.
    And they were interned and then handed over--
    I'm not sure-- to some Germans and then
    sent to Auschwitz again.
    They arrived in Auschwitz.
    Then the whole thing, evacuation.
    When the Russians came, they were evacuated to, I think,
    Buchenwald or whatever it is, then ended up in Austria
    in the summer of '45, before that.
    I'm not sure when they ended up in Gusen, which is near Linz.
    And then they were there.
    The two of them, working in tunnels, drilling tunnels.
    They were getting at the end of their strength.
    My brother lasted a few more days.
    I wouldn't have made it physically.
    My brother was in a little bit better shape.
    And then my brother told him--
    that was in May sometimes--
    Well, it would have been the first days because afterwards
    was liberation.
    In May, part of May sometimes, the Red Cross
    was going to take him to Switzerland in a couple of days.
    My brother-in-law envied him.
    As it turned out, instead of taking to him to Switzerland--
    wasn't the Red Cross--
    they took him to some forest clearing
    and shot him and others.
    That was about three or four days before May 8.
    So we did not see my brother.
    That we found out from my brother-in-law
    because he survived.
    Oh my goodness.
    Us, we ended up in that smuggler's hut.
    And then he said, I cannot arrange for all of you to go.
    So I'll have to break up the group.
    My father said, take us first.
    The boy has a broken--
    not compounded, but broken arm, and so [INAUDIBLE] in bad shape.
    I said, OK.
    My father, my sister, and me he'll take first.
    And the others he'll take the following night
    to his contact that will get us across the border.
    He took us and to a certain point.
    And someone else picked us up and left us in some place,
    in a vineyard that was already picked in melons.
    That was at night.
    And he said you wait here.
    A fellow from Hungarian side will come and pick you up.
    We wait and wait.
    We wonder if he'll ever show up.
    And the question was, if we leave, where do we go?
    What's the option?
    So we waited, waited.
    Finally he showed up.
    He took us to his house.
    And he said, I cannot take all of you.
    Same story.
    My father said take him--
    me-- first because I'm in the worst shape.
    And he gave him an address in Budapest, friends
    or acquaintances, and he will pay you.
    And the smuggler said, OK, I'll take him-- me.
    He said, play that you're mute in case people talk to you.
    You are mute.
    You cannot talk.
    So we are on a train to Budapest.
    It so happened was a heavy raid.
    Heavy raids on Budapest in those days.
    It was a hot day.
    We left in the morning, came to Budapest in the evening.
    That guy didn't give me any food or any drink.
    Hang on a second.
    You were arrested during the high holy days.
    So September, October.
    '44.
    '44 in Bratislava.
    Then you're taken to a sort of like a holding camp.
    That's where you see Brunner.
    Then eventually you're put on that train from which
    you escape.
    About what time?
    Is that still October?
    Yeah, three days in that.
    Still October, I would say.
    Still October.
    So when you are now in Hungary at the smuggler's house,
    it's still like a hot October day.
    Yes.
    All right.
    So it's sort of like an Indian summer day.
    Could be, yes.
    OK.
    So we're talking about that kind of time of year.
    And he had not fed you.
    Not fed me, not given me drinks.
    Then he took me to the family and the family paid him off.
    And a few days later, my father and my sister came.
    I don't know how.
    By train, naturally, with him, you know.
    But their story how they made it to Budapest, I don't know.
    In Budapest, in my condition, my father tries to get a doctor,
    take me to a hospital to see what is what.
    First the Jewish hospital, they're full.
    Other hospitals are full.
    They would not take me.
    I remember the hallways being with people wounded
    through the heavy bombing.
    So then he decides to take me to a German military hospital.
    Oh my goodness.
    And what is his logic for doing that?
    The story is, we are escapees from Ukraine, from the Russians.
    So you're ethnic Germans again.
    No.
    We are Ukrainians.
    You're Ukrainians.
    Fleeing the Russians.
    Not the Russians, Ukrainians fleeing the Russians.
    And my arm was damaged by debris, falling debris.
    My father's language is German, first language, no problem,
    because I remember the hospital was
    German soldiers, German guards in front,
    German soldiers inside.
    But it was originally a German hospital,
    but it's German, all German uniforms.
    So I remember the doctor.
    He spoke to the doctor.
    I don't remember the doctor's face,
    but he treated me so gently, I am sure.
    In fact, I think I may have told my father,
    I am sure that he did not believe the story.
    Doctor could tell whether something fell on the arm
    and broke it like that.
    He treated me gently.
    My arm was died to my body in something.
    And that was it.
    My arm was saved.
    We left that place.
    And then we took an apartment in a Jewish section.
    That's where we could get.
    It turned out to be Jewish section.
    It was Ukrainians.
    To get food you had to have coupons.
    So we registered that.
    But we knew that area where we lived, as it turned out,
    was a large-- if not solely Jewish, a close
    to a largely Jewish section.
    Turns out to be today that it is that part of the synagogue
    and so forth.
    Then we also took another apartment, a room,
    mind you, outside.
    Outside Budapest.
    No, in Budapest.
    I remember the address and so forth.
    It was on Vag utca, which abuts Vaci ut, which is Vaci ut.
    Ut is a avenue, utca is street.
    In that place we took her room.
    The girl, the woman who sublet us the room,
    she was of mixed parents, and her boyfriend
    was a member of the Hungarian Nazi militia.
    The Arrow Cross?
    Arrow Cross, Nylas.
    And we stayed there.
    They asked were we registered with the police?
    We said yes.
    Look, we have stamps and so forth.
    That was an address nobody knew except some friends, very
    close friends.
    Your address, that's where we got the food stamps
    to get the coupon.
    And we waited, pretending.
    That was already starting, I think,
    November because not far off was Christmas time.
    And then we said we'll conduct the services.
    In that building was also a friend of ours, or close by.
    He came by and he said, we'll conduct the Christmas services,
    which we did.
    Christmas dinner was prepared.
    But Christmas dinner, I remember noises, bombs, Russians,
    first Russian air raid.
    Maybe not the first, but a Russian air raid on Budapest.
    The next day, Christmas day, we went, my father.
    It was a clear day.
    We walked towards the center.
    And you know, you already could see damage.
    Not heavy damage like after American or English bombs
    that were heavy blockbusters.
    These were lighter bombs.
    But already there was nervousness.
    Then after a few nights, as the bombing and shelling increased,
    we decided to go spend time in the cellar, bring a mattress
    and spend time in the cellar, as other occupants were
    doing the same thing.
    Next to us, or maybe one mattress over,
    was another Hungarian.
    He was also a member of the Arrow Cross,
    or [NON-ENGLISH] in the party.
    He had a big pistol and he said, if I
    would know someone who is Jewish,
    I would kill him right here.
    And we were almost next to him.
    We were Ukrainians, you know.
    And we had some food.
    And we stayed in the basement from about December 27
    till February 15.
    Sorry, till January 15.
    But still, that's a long time.
    Because Budapest-- the fight for Budapest was long and bloody.
    Street by street, sometimes house to house,
    sometimes cellar to cellar.
    An acquaintance of ours--
    to sidetrack the story-- she was in a cellar
    where they heard from the other cellar
    people hitting and banging.
    So they helped to break through.
    Russian soldiers came through from cellar to cellar.
    And what we heard another story, one Russian soldier
    supposedly saw a chess board.
    He delayed and played chess.
    In other cases, there were Germans came to the [? side ?]
    and Russian side was firing.
    An acquaintance of ours, he and his wife
    were sitting next to each other--
    no lights in the basement, firing.
    He was shot and killed, and she not because firing was blind.
    Anyway, we were in the cellar till that time.
    There were already some Russian soldiers who came.
    But my father was afraid to say anything
    because he did not know whether these were Germans or Hungarians
    in disguise or others.
    So they came.
    And then a few days later, more front line soldiers who came.
    There weren't that many Germans defending Budapest.
    It was mostly Hungarians defending Budapest.
    Were in Pest, not Buda.
    And then after a few more days, more Russians came.
    So when he felt safe, he went out.
    And when there was still fighting
    going on, and after a while, when Budapest was occupied
    there was pillage and rape.
    So my father protected my sister by hiding her in a building.
    I remember screams, not shots, but screams, women being raped
    or people being robbed or whatever.
    And then it stopped.
    By then, I think much of Pest was liberated.
    And across the street there was like a yard.
    Not a junkyard, a mechanical yard.
    They were Russians.
    So I used to go across the street
    because I saw them working, and ask, beg for bread.
    They had that Russian bread.
    And I remember asking them, [RUSSIAN].
    And usually they gave me a piece of bread, sometimes
    a whole loaf, that sourly bread, and a piece
    of speck, which is lard.
    Yeah, not fat, not [INAUDIBLE], but heavy lard.
    And once I was lucky.
    The guy had on a carriage even sugar.
    So I took my cap off and he filled it up with sugar.
    So I was begging for bread, brought it home.
    It was quite welcome.
    And once I remember standing on a street corner.
    Were you in the cellar at that point?
    At that point, may have been [INAUDIBLE], but we moved up.
    When it was occupied, we moved up to the apartment
    because it was warmer.
    Not warm-- there was no heat, but it was warm.
    And we are not among other people.
    There was, I think, maybe toilet was functioning.
    Can you hold on just a second?
    Somewhere here I saw it's 1:29.
    OK.
    OK.
    I'm rolling.
    OK.
    So before the break, we had come to the point
    where for you, the war is over.
    And even the danger from Soviet soldiers
    seems to be over because you go across the street
    and you ask them for bread.
    Begged for bread.
    You begged for bread.
    And the soldiers sometimes even give you
    a cap full of sugar and so on.
    But during the break, you said that there were some episodes
    that you had left out.
    Yes.
    There was an episode in Budapest.
    It's cold.
    I'm standing on the corner of [NON-ENGLISH] and [NON-ENGLISH].
    And is this the second time you're
    there, or the first time that you're there?
    The second time, when we are already liberated.
    And two Russian, well-dressed, seemed like officers, go by.
    And they have loaves of bread under their arms.
    I approach them, and I'm polite.
    I said, could you give me some bread?
    You have so much?
    They gave me a loaf.
    It was still warm.
    And before I reached home, which was not far,
    I finished half of it.
    Well, I can tell you you're not alone.
    Just a month ago I interviewed a lady
    who had to go out and get food for her family in hiding.
    And amongst that food was raisins.
    The raisins would be gone by the time she got home.
    She was hungry.
    People were hungry.
    That you got food at all for anybody else
    is quite achievement in those circumstances.
    So do you know the moment of liberation when soldiers--
    did they come into the cellar?
    Did you go out on to the streets, or what happened?
    My father went out after the first few.
    So he was afraid they were in disguise.
    But when the polite fire-- you might call it rifle fire,
    not artillery-- moved further down, and he saw more Russians,
    then he felt at ease.
    Didn't say who we were because, you know,
    fronts moved back and forth.
    But at least we felt a little bit better.
    And much later, I think there may not
    have been any more combat, although in Buda, there
    was the Resistance.
    Finally, he met an officer who was highly decorated.
    I think he was captain or major.
    Somehow he looked Jewish, or whatever he made somehow.
    And we became acquainted with him,
    he brought us quite a bit of food.
    He was the sole survivor of a family.
    And my father asked him.
    He says, we are not only fighting.
    I joined the Communist Party because there was pressure.
    You reach a level.
    And I'm just fighting for vengeance
    because my family was destroyed.
    And he was highly decorated because at one point,
    in some areas--
    I don't remember which one--
    he suspected that the Germans were planning an offensive.
    He was in command of an artillery battery.
    And he opened fire first.
    And he sort of nipped the attack in the butt after the battle.
    It was not the big battle, of course, or anything, just one.
    And my father, he asked--
    he said, if I survive, I will not be a Communist
    or stay in the Soviet Union.
    So he asked him for a civilian suit
    if he could have, just in case everything happened.
    He said, otherwise I'm staying till the very end.
    He said I don't know if I survive or not.
    But in case.
    My father never heard from him later on.
    So he asked your father for a civilian suit.
    Yes.
    Do you know what part of this Eastern part of Europe
    he was from?
    Poland.
    Oh, so he was from Poland.
    He was from Poland.
    He was not Hungarian or Slava.
    He was from Poland.
    So his family had perished in Poland.
    Yes.
    And he ended up in Soviet Union.
    I had a friend in LA similar.
    He somehow ended up in Soviet Union.
    Can we cut the camera for a second?
    So you mentioned earlier that--
    had you gone to the Swedish Embassy at any time,
    or had your father gone to the Swedish embassy?
    Yes.
    My father went with me in Budapest
    to the Swedish Legation, where Wallenberg was.
    And this would have been after the war or before?
    Late '44 in Budapest when the Germsn were there.
    We were living as Ukrainians.
    There was a rumor that they were issuing
    Swedish passports, turned out to be, after the war, true.
    But while we were, waiting among other people,
    there was a rumor that Eichmann is coming.
    So naturally, the building, all the people waiting, emptied.
    We never tried again.
    You never tried again.
    Was Wallenberg there?
    Wallenberg was in Budapest.
    That's where he disappeared.
    Raoul Wallenberg.
    Well, Wallenberg, and there was Bernadotte also, you know.
    I have a close friend in Sweden.
    Once we're walking in Stockholm.
    He greeted a lady, and I greeted her also.
    I didn't know her.
    And then he talked to her briefly and we continued.
    He asked me, do you know who that was?
    No.
    That was Mrs. Bernadotte because he
    comes from an old Swedish family on his mother's side.
    There were an Admiral, senators.
    On his father's side was more commercial.
    So when your father had gone there,
    had you gone there with him?
    To the Swedish Legation?
    Yes, that's what I remember.
    Did either of these gentlemen cross your--
    did you see them?
    No.
    I did not see either Wallenberg--
    I just remembered the name.
    Especially later on it came so often.
    And I didn't see Eichmann.
    Or Bernadotte.
    No, Bernadotte was, I think, in Sweden then, but to providing--
    On the other end.
    Yeah, OK.
    I had not been familiar that he had not been at the Legation
    itself.
    No.
    I think Wallenberg was head of the Legation, possibly.
    There was an embassy.
    So let's go back, then, to a certain sense of security,
    feeling that the border could change again.
    But for the time being, you are safe.
    How does your life, your father's life, your sister's
    life-- how does it progress?
    What happens then?
    After we liberated, Budapest is liberated,
    which was, I think, in February or March,
    we decided to return to Czechoslovakia to see
    who survived, what's there, and so forth.
    We came back.
    To which town?
    To [NON-ENGLISH] from Budapest.
    Stopped in some places because transport was sort of irregular.
    Some trains, some trucks, some buggies.
    Anyway, made it back.
    And then I was left with my sister, and my father said,
    I'm returning to Poland to see what's what, who survived,
    what happened to the factory, what is what.
    He returned to Poland, and he looked for the authorities
    for his factories.
    And they told them, yes, you can get your factory
    back, not as an owner, as a manager, and others to manage.
    And he knew what that meant.
    Sooner or later he'll be told that he's sabotaging things.
    He could not say no because it was in the army,
    and you volunteer.
    So he said yes, he'll accept, but he
    wants to bring his family back with him.
    He said OK.
    He found our old chauffeur was alive.
    He, I think, was Reichsdeutsche or Volksdeutsche or whatever.
    He had a car, and he managed to get him out of Poland.
    The old chauffeur managed to get your father out of Poland.
    My father out of Poland.
    And then he went--
    that was May-- April, May.
    Then he went to Germany looking for survivors.
    In the interim, my brother-in-law appeared.
    He was liberated in May.
    He made it back to Czechoslovakia, skeletal.
    But he made it back.
    And he told us about my brother, and then
    how, after separation from jumping from the train,
    he told us the story what happened to them.
    And my father said, well, maybe there is hope in spite of hope.
    So he went to Germany looking for his son, for my brother,
    and for other relatives.
    Didn't find anybody, and reached the conclusion
    that probably he's not alive.
    By that point, was it pretty sure your mother had not
    survived?
    Oh, yes.
    From '42, that was almost-- they knew for sure.
    They just didn't tell me.
    There was an incident, a small incident before.
    When the Germans invaded Russia, many German units
    were passing through Bardejov because that
    was an entry to the Dukla Pass, and it was a strategic point.
    And one day my father received a notice
    that a German from a certain unit wants to see him.
    Between '40 and '43.
    This is in '41, before the invasion of Russia
    shortly, when the German troops were moving through continually.
    So he went to that village.
    The unit was already gone.
    I don't know it was an SS unit or a Panzer unit.
    And he asked the guy who brought him, well, how did the guy look?
    He said he was tall with wavy hair.
    That was a man who worked for my father.
    And I remember him and remember his name.
    He worked for my father.
    He was a Volksdeutsche.
    Didn't belong to the Hitlerjugend but was pro-Hitler.
    Used to wear white socks, which was a notation that they were,
    you know.
    And this was the guy.
    How he found out on my father is puzzling.
    He probably perished.
    That was one small incident.
    Another incident, in Budapest, when the Russians occupied
    our block--
    that was the Army, the front army--
    they took most men from the basement who were strong enough,
    healthy, to carry ammunition to the forward lines.
    My father took ammunition.
    The street we were in was abutting--
    not abutting the Danube.
    It was at a 90 degree angle to the Danube.
    On the other side were Hungarians, mostly Hungarians.
    And they were shooting.
    He said he had very close calls, bullets whizzing about his head.
    So he said, I survived the war.
    I'm not going to die carrying ammunition.
    So he cut himself and put bandages around his head
    so next time he won't be taken.
    And there are small incidents during the war, I guess,
    you know.
    But he had luck, as you said.
    He had guts and he had luck.
    And wits.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    Because as it turned out, had he stayed in Lemburg,
    had we been shipped to Siberia, the chief accountant
    who followed us with his family had three children also.
    He was eventually sent to Siberia,
    and the whole family survived.
    And he came back.
    That's why I heard stories because he made it to New York.
    And I heard stories from him about my father's business.
    Some other stories about my father's business and my mother
    I heard from his friend and associate
    in the company, who was in Germany.
    And he was saved by the German who had a factory--
    what's his name?
    Schindler?
    Schindler.
    Well, he and his wife were saved by Schindler,
    although at one time, there was a fire in one of the detention
    camps where he was.
    They were taken out, told to sit at a ditch.
    They pulled the triggers but there were no bullets.
    Fake execution.
    It's a pity that he's not alive, or his wife,
    but they had fantastic stories.
    The same thing like I told you I had
    a cousin, my mother's nephew, probably from her sister.
    He came to visit us once to Bardejov.
    That was in '42.
    And happened to be a razzia.
    And he was taken, train sent to Auschwitz.
    He and a friend, who was a dentist, managed
    to escape from Auschwitz, made it to the Polish--
    to the Slovak border, and then they were caught,
    sent back to Auschwitz.
    And as far as is known, they were the only escapees
    who were not executed.
    That was the first question in one's mind is, of course,
    becaus--
    They were not executed.
    He survived and his friend both survived.
    His friend, he was--
    for whatever reason, spoke German.
    My cousin did not speak German.
    The other spoke German.
    And so once his wife was caught later on, somewhere else
    in Poland or whatever, sent to Auschwitz.
    Was a strikingly beautiful young woman,
    but she held a child by the hand.
    He could not rescue her.
    For whatever reason, the German-- he worked as a doctor--
    they sort of liked him, tolerated him, whatever,
    until he escaped.
    And he also survived the war, ended up in Israel.
    So are the stories that you then grew up
    with, these post-war stories?
    Yes.
    Some of the stories I just heard post-war.
    And my cousin with a little child in Krakow,
    her husband managed--
    they were in Breslau in Germany, he and his father.
    And they escaped from Breslau because fellow Germans told them
    that the Gestapo was looking for them.
    So they made it to Poland.
    He married my cousin.
    But when the war started, he was moblized,
    captured by the Russians, sent to a camp
    near the Finnish border somewhere.
    OK.
    In Karelia.
    Yes, in Karelia.
    And when the war started, they were marched--
    they literally marched from Karelia to Uzbekistan.
    He said the soldiers walked with us.
    If someone fell by the side, was left.
    No torture, no punishment.
    From village to village we made it.
    Officers sometimes rode horses.
    He spent their war years in Tashkent.
    working in the mines.
    After the war where there was repatriation, he made it back.
    He realized nobody survived.
    He found us, he stayed with us, and then
    he had a sister, Uzbekistan.
    Surviving relative.
    So he went to Chile.
    But before he reached Chile, his sister passed away.
    So he settled in Chile, lived there.
    I visited him.
    He visited here.
    He passed away some years ago.
    And you mentioned that medical student.
    We had a friend.
    Similar thing.
    It was architectural student.
    So the Soviets sent him to Kazakhstan or somewhere there.
    And he knew sooner or later he'll make a mistake.
    So once we're close to the Iranian border,
    he managed to slip over to Iran.
    Well, there was an exodus that was allowed.
    No, he was not allowed.
    He escaped.
    He escaped.
    OK.
    Border was not so well guarded because he
    knew that life was impossible.
    In Iran he eventually joined the army of Anders,
    sent to South Africa.
    In South Africa he ended up in a brawl in a bar
    because something.
    So he missed the boat.
    The boat was torpedoed, no survivors.
    Oh my goodness.
    Became an architect in LA.
    That's how we found out later on his story.
    Very nice guy.
    Oh my goodness.
    So you have these disparate incidents outside.
    His whole family perished, naturally.
    He was from Krakow.
    And you know, you can't make this up.
    No.
    Truth is stranger than fiction.
    The other story-- because I used to like
    to listen to these stories, even after the war.
    And then you formulate your own opinion
    of things, Poles being often criticized.
    True.
    But I asked some people, if you and your family
    were to be shot for harboring a stranger, would you do it?
    No.
    But to accuse someone, there were anti-Semites, naturally.
    But there were people who risked their lives.
    So the officers in our apartment in Krakow,
    they could have arrested us.
    Even had they shot us, they wouldn't
    have faced court martial.
    Of course not.
    Of course not.
    The same thing in Slovakia.
    People who wore the uniform of the nationalists,
    they were fascists, fascistica.
    If they knew what that is, could have arrested us,
    informed on us.
    So you know, there is no black--
    I mean, there are some black characters,
    some white characters, naturally.
    But sometimes it's difficult.
    There's a lot of shades of gray.
    Yeah.
    Whereas in Hungary, many people, they
    would not help their fellow co-religionist, even in '43,
    until the deportations started.
    When [INAUDIBLE] was in Budapest,
    we survived and made money on the black market.
    How did you make money on the black market?
    You bought dollars, you sold dollars.
    And I was often making the calculation
    because I was faster.
    And you were good in math.
    Yes.
    You bought dollars on the black market?
    Yeah, it was black market then, free market.
    And then you sold it.
    This is after the Russians.
    After occupation of Buda, yeah.
    But man, that's clever.
    So actually, even during the war, the dollar.
    But there was not an open market.
    Some people changed it because it was like currency,
    if you survived, you left someone,
    if you gave someone something, they would do something for you.
    So in other words $1.00, the US currency,
    was one that was stronger than--
    Anything else.
    The Deutschmark would have been the currency.
    In Czechoslovakia they had the koruna.
    Hungary they had the pengoe.
    And other countries, I suppose, similar.
    But in that part, if you had a dollar-- even after the war,
    was still--
    Aside from the assets your father
    had had in the United States, by the time the war is over,
    does he have anything left?
    He may have had something.
    How much, I don't know.
    Not much, probably.
    Do you remember being hungry?
    Yes, in Budapest, because I don't
    know where we got the food in the basement, how we heated it,
    and what sanitary facilities we used.
    It was a cellar with a metal door for an emergency exit.
    But just for such things in case bomb, against bombing.
    They had these provision cellars against bombs.
    And blockbuster would have knocked down the whole building.
    And about how many people were in that cellar
    when you were there?
    The building was four or five stories, an and floor,
    I think it had two or three apartments.
    The cellar was full.
    Would you say 50, 60 people?
    Yes.
    Mattress one next mattress.
    And someone too much is larger [? family ?] did as much
    as they could.
    Where my father--
    I know getting out, food, water was a risk
    because you were out in the open.
    And by the time the war is over, you
    had just turned 10 years old.
    Yes.
    And then a friend of mine, not the one who was demining things.
    He had weapons.
    He pulled a pin on a grenade.
    We were standing around like this.
    Luckily, he had the the absence of mind of throwing it
    somewhere behind--
    not a ditch, was a berm, and that's where it exploded.
    When we were talking about demining, was off camera.
    Tell us on camera now, what was this incident about mines?
    And place it in context.
    Were you in Budapest still?
    No, that was in Slovakia.
    Slovakia, after the war already.
    And that area was heavily mined by the Germans,
    so there were mines all over.
    And some people were removing mines.
    There weren't enough military units to clear the area.
    Farmers were afraid to go into fields
    because either their horses or cows or they would blow up.
    And some kids, some individuals went out and thought
    they could neutralize the mine.
    So they pulled the detonator switch.
    Were small pieces, little bit from black plastic and a pin.
    If the pin moved, hit a spark, and the mine blew.
    So I was buying these detonators from these guys.
    These little pins.
    Yes.
    The pins and the detonators, basically,
    because it made noise.
    You could do it summer.
    Just something, you know, kids making noise, scaring others
    and scaring a horse or anything.
    Those were from black plastic.
    The brass ones were anti--
    those black plastic were anti-personnel mines.
    The others, from brass--
    looked like brass or something, were much bigger
    mines, heavier mines.
    And occasionally I bought those from them.
    So you knew your pins.
    I knew the difference, yes.
    I wasn't a mining expert, but I knew what was what.
    And then one day, just because a family lived up the street,
    and they said, they didn't come home all day,
    found on the outskirts a leg from one of the two boys.
    So that was our friends.
    And there were other people who were getting hurt.
    But different thoughts come through my mind
    as you're telling this episode.
    Number one, kids will be kids.
    The war is over, and kids don't think
    they'll die because that's something that is--
    It's an abstraction.
    And there are no toys.
    And there are no toys.
    And those are easy to discover, easy to play.
    From ordinary bullets, you you move out the led.
    You melt the lead, so the bullet becomes
    on an arrow, a pointed thing.
    You make toys.
    You make deadly arrows.
    Oh, geez.
    My goodness.
    So tell me, at age 10, the war is over.
    What kind of a child are you?
    What kind of a personality do you have?
    I think I was normal.
    I like to play, degree of mischief.
    But otherwise, I was not wounded.
    My arm healed properly.
    Had you ever seen a corpse during all this time?
    Yes, in Budapest, before the war was over.
    After liberation, we went one of the main streets
    where the black market was.
    And there was a woman laying--
    a truck must have hit her-- with a split skull.
    And that's the only corpse you saw throughout the war.
    I think it's the only corpse I saw,
    that I was aware was a corpse.
    But still, you are, from age four,
    when September 1, 1939, till then, the majority
    of your childhood is spent a hair's breadth
    away from not being here.
    Yes.
    And it didn't have any mark on you?
    No, because when the war started, the fear I had
    was when they were carrying me to shelters and so forth.
    The idea of death is different and a later on concept.
    So you cry and so forth.
    And then from '41 to '43, I had moments of fear
    when I had to hide.
    But afterwards, you're older, you
    understand more, because you hear stories
    from people who escaped from Auschwitz, others,
    that it's death.
    But it did not have the same effect as if you are grown up
    and you reflect on these things.
    And your father, at the end of this time, did you see him--
    his personality change?
    Possibly.
    Before the war, I remember he was
    very energetic, very vigorous, unlike his youngest son,
    and very dynamic.
    At the end of the war, he aged more than by six years
    because loss of family, the events, it took its toll, yes.
    And he had a heart condition.
    In fact, I think he had a heart condition
    even from before the war because I would go out and buy
    certain medications.
    I forgot the name of it.
    And he told me of a doctor, whom I still remember the name,
    that he had in Vienna, Wenckebach.
    Wenckebach.
    Yeah, Dr. Wenckebach in Vienna.
    And I would buy certain medication
    that he had prescription pills.
    I forgot.
    I've come across that name.
    And he was also allowed to buy cognac sometimes,
    which was, for me, almost a fatal flaw
    because I tasted it occasionally.
    You have to know if the medicine's are any good.
    I was allowed, occasionally, when I had a cold,
    to have had tea with a little bit [NON-ENGLISH] and aspirin.
    Wines, yes.
    Well, I was allowed to drink a little bit, but never
    anything stronger.
    Did your father become a very hands on parent
    once the war was over?
    I would say yes.
    Because you are still the child.
    Your sister is 10 years older.
    She is a young woman.
    Yes.
    He still was--
    I would say still hands on, yes, still
    was inquiring sometimes, approving, disapproving
    in strong terms and so forth.
    So he was still in that respect, yes, very--
    not only European, I wouldn't say Prussian, but German.
    Yeah, traits were still there, but not to the same extent
    as before the war, obviously.
    Now let's take up his story right after
    your old chauffeur, Volksdeutsche--
    Probably.
    I'm not sure.
    His name was Keller.
    He survived a war in Katowice, and he found him, yes.
    He takes your father to Slovakia.
    Yeah, he manages to get him.
    He had a car, some kind of a car.
    He drives him, and the borders but were not that--it was fluid,
    but he managed to get him out of Poland.
    So he returns back to you in--
    Slovakia, in Bardejov.
    Yeah.
    In Bardejov.
    And then what happens?
    It's you, your father, your sister, and her fiance.
    She got married in '45.
    Then my father went again to Germany
    to see, maybe, who is what what.
    And--
    Couldn't find your brother.
    Couldn't find anybody, really.
    Nothing.
    Poland, he was afraid to go.
    So he comes back.
    And then what happens to the two of you?
    We stay in Slovakia.
    That's '45.
    '46.
    In '45, when Czechoslovakia did not,
    under the pressure of Russia, accept the Marshall Plan,
    he said, you know, I'm afraid this country will not
    remain neutral.
    Besides, the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia
    is the single strongest party.
    So he told my brother-in-law, who
    inherited a bottling plant of beer, where after a while,
    I wasn't allowed because some of the dark beer was sweet, also,
    but it was strong.
    So he told my brother-in-law, try to liquidate.
    I have no confidence that this will remain.
    And we leave for Belgium in September '46.
    He was prescient.
    He was very prescient.
    He said I just don't trust it.
    Then in Belgium, he couldn't work.
    Belgium was expensive.
    And just about everybody my brother-in-law saved.
    And then he had a brother.
    My father had a brother in Brussels.
    That's right.
    And he had survived.
    He had survived, lost his family.
    Very embittered man.
    You remember him.
    Yes, because he passed away, actually, quite some time ago.
    But I remember him after the war.
    How did he survive, and his family?
    Somehow in Brussels, his family--
    he went out to shop something in '43.
    and while he was out shopping, the police,
    the Belgian police and others, came, took his family.
    When he returned home, he wanted to join them.
    But his neighbors restrained him, and that's how he survived.
    The other youngest brothers I told you, in Lille,
    he was apparently shot not by the Germans,
    but by the French police But he was in the Resistance,
    or he helped the Resistance.
    And I'm sorry that I'm interrupting,
    but how did you find out these details about the brother?
    From my uncle.
    That's why he knew from the people
    because he was in Brussels and Lille,
    and he knew people in both cities.
    He had businesses.
    He had bus lines, and he was an importer and exporter
    of raw fur from Russia to Western Europe to the United
    States.
    So he had business contacts here, too.
    And was it his situation that he hid in plain sight in Belgium
    during the war?
    Somehow he survived.
    He never wanted to talk to him.
    I didn't delve that deeply because when it reminded him
    of his family, he just went crazy.
    He became very emotional, let's put it that way.
    Even after he remarried, had a child,
    he still had pictures of his previous family.
    How long did you and your sister and your father and her husband
    stay in Brussels, or in Belgium?
    In Belgium, we stayed till April the following year.
    My brother-in-law and sister, he returned.
    Couldn't make a living in Belgium.
    He was allowed to work in [NON-ENGLISH],
    returned and took up his business again, and made,
    supposedly, good money.
    He had a bottling plant.
    In Czechoslovakia?
    In Czechoslovakia.
    In Slovakia, in [NON-ENGLISH].
    And he also manufactured liquors, things,
    because alcohol was available and he somehow managed to do it.
    Then he had a child in April, my nephew.
    So then we returned, hoping to stay briefly.
    And then my father again put pressure
    on him and on his relatives.
    Look, things aren't going to get better.
    Try to leave.
    Liquidate whatever you can.
    Finally, because my brother-in-law
    was making good money, it was an attachment.
    And we applied for a visa to the United States.
    My father had a cousin, a close cousin,
    very well off in New York, sent him an affidavit.
    But it took time.
    And finally he managed to persuade my brother-in-law
    and sister and asked to leave.
    We left in the nick of time.
    Passports would not be issued anymore.
    And the border, while not sealed,
    they held you up for tax reasons and so forth.
    So we told our friends, except one exception or two,
    in case they are interrogated, that we're going to Prague,
    and then probably to Carlsbad for Christmas and New Year's.
    I wasn't allowed to take anything, my toys and so forth,
    chess and so forth.
    And we left for Prague and then bought a ticket to Carlsbad.
    When came to Carlsbad, we stayed on a train,
    hoping we won't be taken off.
    Carlsbad is close to the German border, American-occupied part
    of Germany.
    We came to Cheb and Arz.
    Once we crossed the border, it was the first time
    I saw an American uniform.
    And I knew we were safe.
    I think I've seen American uniform in Belgium,
    so that's not accurate, really.
    But I've seen an American uniform in the train,
    so we were across.
    What was the border town?
    I think it was Cheb or Arz.
    One is on the Czech side, one German.
    I don't know.
    I think Cheb is Czech, Arz, because I
    took that train much later.
    Did you?
    To retrace the steps?
    Well, I took the train from Prague to Bayreuth
    because a friend was in the orchestra and Bayreuth
    orchestra, you know.
    Then he told me I'll get you a ticket somewhere,
    but it's so hot that I almost fainted.
    I said, forget it.
    But listening to Wagner and fainting, it's not for me.
    Opera, yes, but not Wagner's Ring.
    And so that's how I knew the border.
    And then we continued on, paid for the ticket,
    ended up in Brussels.
    Oh, so you continued by train.
    Yes.
    So you're back in Brussels.
    And at the end of '47.
    And how is your father making money during those two years?
    Well, my uncle helped him.
    I'm not sure there was a black market, not in Western Europe.
    I don't know.
    He was dealing in some things, and I
    think he may still have some money in the bank.
    Oh, there was a black market in Western Europe, and quite
    a strong one.
    For dollars?
    Ah, well, you're talking about dollars.
    No, there was a black market for cigarettes and other things
    which were imported to Germany and so forth.
    And I know one person--
    I knew the person my father knew him--
    he made a fortune with cigarettes and food,
    because each time we went, we lived in Paris after m
    where we waited for an affidavit.
    Each time we went to Paris by train,
    we had to give to the guard, to the customs
    a little bit of coffee, Nescafe, because in Paris,
    coffee or other things were--
    in '48 and '49 were precious commodities.
    I know he gave to the Cafe de La Paix next in the opera--
    there was-- still is outdoor coffee shop.
    He gave the maitre de something.
    So each time I went there as a kid-- by then I was already 13.
    I traveled Paris on my own.
    And I would get something not to eat, either,
    or something sounded sweet, sitting waiting to meet him.
    But we lived in Paris, and that's
    where we got the affidavit to come to this country.
    But the Czech passport expired.
    So what happened?
    So the Czech Embassy said you can get it when you return.
    We'll renew it.
    So he knew that meant a one way ticket.
    So true.
    We got a French passport because my uncle was [INAUDIBLE].
    They knew the conditions, so they gave us not a full-fledged
    passport, but a titre de voyage, which is a travel document.
    And then my father was still afraid of the Russians,
    that they'll come to Western Europe.
    You know, the tension was there with Stalin.
    So he was afraid before he get a visa to this country.
    So he said, anywhere.
    So he got a visa to Bolivia, which
    he knew he was not going to go.
    And then he got even a visa to Rhodesia.
    And when they told him it's black Africa,
    he said, do you really expect me to go there?
    But there was a visa and a passport.
    So in other words, he had a plan B and a plan C.
    Yes, because the way he saw it, he
    said if the Russians decide to advance, no one will see.
    He said there's no French army, no German army.
    The Americans, most of the soldiers were brought back home.
    So he was afraid.
    He did not want to live under the Soviets again.
    I get that one experience with a [NON-ENGLISH],
    which may have been a mistake.
    But you can never know.
    Well, an experience writes itself on a person's mind.
    And it is what it is.
    So did you come to the United States from Paris, from France?
    Yeah, from France.
    And how?
    By boat.
    Le Havre to New York City, where he had
    nephews from his sister, who he wanted to meet,
    but she also didn't make it.
    She passed away before we arrived.
    We arrived in May '49 [INAUDIBLE].
    In all that time, aside from when
    you were talking of going to school
    and you were a math whiz and known in Bardejov,
    did you go to school anywhere?
    There was a Jewish school for a year or so.
    And then it was disbanded.
    Where was this?
    In Bardejov.
    In Bardejov.
    So I went to first grade, maybe to second grade.
    And that was about it.
    And from then till '49?
    After the war, I went in Slovakia.
    After '45, I went to gymnasium.
    Gymnasium.
    Yes, sixth grade.
    Somehow skipped these.
    I was a certain age, and I made it to first gymnasium.
    In '46 when we left, I ended up in Belgium,
    so I went to a French school, a city in Belgium till '47.
    And '47, when we returned, I also start--
    well, we came in April.
    It was too late to go, so I started second gymnasium
    in September.
    Then we left December and came to Belgium again.
    In Belgium I didn't go to a school till next year.
    Same thing in France.
    Came to this country in New York City.
    Since I didn't speak English, they
    put me in a grade school, third or fourth class.
    So with eight-year-olds, and you're 13, 14.
    Right.
    And they made me a guard where you let people cross the street.
    And I told my cousin, who took me to school.
    I said, they're speaking English there, too.
    I don't understand.
    So finally my father and she went, they said, look.
    He had friends going to gymnasium.
    So they put me in high school, George Washington High School,
    because we stayed with my cousin who lived in Manhattan,
    Washington Heights.
    And then there I learned English,
    and then I took a French class.
    Teacher asked me, how come you're taking French?
    You speak French.
    I said, well, in my French class I learn English.
    I remember that teacher was very nice.
    Alfred was his name.
    He told me in French, [FRENCH].
    I had a math class.
    I had to do things on the board.
    I could not explain it.
    And from the math I had in Belgium,
    which was advanced math already, I knew shortcuts.
    And the end results of the formulas was correct.
    The teacher said, you have to do it.
    I said, I don't know how to do it.
    I just know these cuts.
    He says, you're stupid.
    I told the professor, I'm not stupid.
    The result is correct.
    And that was New York.
    Well, people can be very pedantic.
    Teachers can be very pedantic.
    Math teachers.
    Yes.
    And then I came to Los Angeles.
    How old were you when you came to Los Angeles?
    15.
    And your father too?
    My father stayed in New York.
    Then he moved to New Jersey, remarried,
    and had a farm, chicken farm.
    I don't know how he ended up on a chicken farm.
    I remember vaguely in '49 or '50, the price of eggs
    was almost as high as it is today.
    There was a big profit margin.
    Maybe that's what tempted him.
    Your father really had good instincts.
    And after a while, he didn't like it.
    I was helping him, but I didn't like chickens per se.
    So occasionally I would hit him with the chickens.
    So he said, look, you're killing my business, literally.
    I said, I don't like those animals.
    He said, don't collect eggs because in the hopper,
    when you went to co--
    I would-- you know.
    So anyway, I ended up in California.
    And why Los Angeles?
    My sister moved here because her husband's brother
    and brother-in-law were already here.
    and they left also early Czechoslovakia at my father's
    urging.
    He told them, making money, you may have
    to run and leave everything.
    Yeah.
    Is that what happened?
    They left in time.
    They left with money also, they left some money.
    And did your father--
    did he have anything left in his American bank account?
    He had some things, but very little left.
    Very little.
    So you move in and you live with your sister.
    In Los Angeles.
    Go to high school.
    And after two years, I want to skip the third year.
    I'm repeating many things which I took in Czechoslovakia.
    I took calculus in Belgium in the seventh grade, things
    which I took here much later.
    Same thing with physics.
    Same thing happened in LA.
    I knew the formulas.
    I could not properly explain it.
    So I told the professor.
    He understood.
    He was not like the one in New York.
    I tried to skip last grade to go to UCLA or Berkeley.
    But I don't have a high school diploma
    so I had to go through various rings with a friend.
    He made it.
    I did not.
    So I graduated high school, I went to UCLA.
    And what did you study UCLA?
    International relations.
    And then I had a draft deferment.
    You had to register in those days for the draft.
    So I registered, but I was a full-time student
    to avoid the draft.
    The only thing I thought university is really something.
    So the first half of the semester I studied hard.
    I got good grades.
    But then I was often in a club or whatever playing chess
    because I played chess in high school.
    I was a very good chess player.
    So I played chess, and I didn't even attend some classes.
    One of my professors--
    I took a Russian, the simple reason
    I thought it would be easy, which was not.
    And he used to see me occasionally.
    He says, come and visit us sometime
    because he saw me play chess and skip class.
    So he'd say, come by occasionally.
    And he told a friend of mine, because he didn't know where I'm
    from, he said, this Mr. Majerovic, what he speaks
    is not Russian or Ukrainian.
    He invents a language when he writes.
    So I had to explain to him I was confused between Polish, Slovak,
    studying Russian, and my friends were Serbs and Croats--
    not Croats, Slovene.
    So I was completely mixed up-- and Czech, naturally.
    So some of the conjugation and grammar was just confusing.
    He says, he understands Russian.
    What he translates--
    I explained to him so he knew.
    Then he said, I see your problem.
    So but tell me, at this point, how many languages
    were under your belt?
    Polish.
    Slovak.
    Slovak.
    German.
    German.
    Yiddish.
    Yiddish.
    And French.
    And French.
    And Czech?
    Czech I get by because it's similar to Slovak, you know.
    OK.
    And so the Balkan languages, Slovenian.
    Well, just from my friends I picked up some things.
    What I learned since is Spanish because I spent quite a bit
    of time in Mexico and in Spain.
    And it's similar to French.
    Russian I studied.
    Same thing.
    When I was in the Soviet Union they couldn't figure it out.
    They don't speak Russian.
    They thought I'm Armenian or Georgian.
    I'm in Kiev.
    Yes, it's Kiev.
    Actually, I didn't leave.
    I just start.
    And then I'm walking around by the [NON-ENGLISH].
    There's a promenade here.
    And someone approaches me, [NON-ENGLISH].
    I don't know why I answered in Russian.
    Then a conversation starts.
    Well, then I switch to English.
    He spoke [NON-ENGLISH].
    And he wants to buy things from me.
    Of course he wants to buy from you.
    I don't want to sell anything.
    [NON-ENGLISH] Armenian?
    Are you Armenian?
    I said no.
    In the hotel I stayed, I sit at a table.
    Next table is an American couple.
    They look Jewish, and they talk to someone
    who I think was living in Kiev.
    Somehow I talked to him briefly before.
    Then they tell him in Jewish they are afraid of me.
    They think I'm a spy.
    You don't sell anything.
    That's in a restaurant.
    And I told the guy, tell your friends I'm not.
    I'm just a tourist here because you know, Soviet Union.
    What year was this?
    '70.
    Ah, well, that's still deep dark into the Soviet times.
    I'm in Minsk.
    And the hotel is supposed to wake me up because of my visa.
    I got a tourist visa in Helsinki.
    St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Minsk, and then train out.
    I stay in the hotel for two nights.
    Once in the elevator, I get up.
    Guess who fills in the elevator?
    North Vietnamese officers.
    Oh, jeepers.
    I think to myself, here I am an American facing North--
    they don't know I'm American.
    They greet me Russian.
    A day later I'm supposed to be woken up about 3:30 or 4:00
    to catch the train Minsk Warsaw.
    Nobody wakes me up.
    Luckily I woke up myself, come to the lobby,
    and the clerks, the guards, everything,
    easy chairs falling, sitting asleep.
    They're all asleep?
    Finally I woke someone up.
    I had to go to the train.
    So they found someone took me to the train.
    Train compartment I share with two Russian women and kids.
    It was already early morning so I didn't sleep.
    One woman, her husband must have been
    a high office in East Germany.
    The other one, maybe a lower officer or maybe enlisted man.
    So in Russian they talk to each other discreetly, you know,
    how things are so much better, especially the lady
    who is the high officer's [INAUDIBLE], how it is.
    When we cross Poland especially, they say,
    here it's better, but in Germany so much better.
    And you hear that.
    I understand everything, but I--
    I do and I don't.
    Yeah, of course.
    Did you go back to [NON-ENGLISH], to Krakow,
    to all these other places?
    Yes.
    I went back the first time, get off the station.
    I think I remember how to find my address because where we
    lived, if I go to the right and then to the left,
    there is a [NON-ENGLISH] square.
    And on the left there is some kind of museum and so forth.
    I get off the train station.
    There is a [NON-ENGLISH], so I just followed the directions
    in the opposite way.
    I find the building, neglected, but I found it.
    In Krakow, the same way.
    When you get out of the building, you go to the left,
    you find [NON-ENGLISH].
    So I start with the [NON-ENGLISH] where my hotel
    was.
    And I go close, check the name of each street.
    Finally I find it, which was at the other end where I started.
    And I look at the building.
    It's painted.
    I look at it.
    Well, it's probably either owned by a Communist or Communist
    headquarters.
    They're well-maintained buildings,
    were official government.
    And this was what year?
    That was in the '70s.
    First time I was in Poland when I came from Russia,
    I just had a three-day transit.
    So I stayed in Warsaw.
    Didn't know anybody.
    Walked around.
    And then I stopped then [NON-ENGLISH] for one day,
    and then Berlin.
    The second time I came from Sweden,
    and that's when I had more time.
    I had longer visa.
    Did those trips back give you anything?
    Did they speak to, in a way that is beyond just like a tourist
    visa?
    Yes.
    In what way?
    When I saw the building in Katowice
    where I lived as a child, I to turned back the clock
    to September 1.
    I think to myself, here I kicked a ball.
    Hasn't changed that much.
    Those tennis courts stand [INAUDIBLE],
    but they were neglected.
    I remember there were tennis courts
    you could see from our balcony.
    So it hasn't changed much.
    I just walk around.
    The air was horrible, the pollution in Katowice.
    In Krakow, less sentimental, but still.
    What about Bardejov?
    I went back much later because first time I
    went back to Czechoslovakia, from Vienna to Bratislava,
    I just felt lousy.
    Soon as I got off the train, I remember seeing a black--
    the Tatra, the Czech car with a fence in the back, big car.
    And I knew that was the security police.
    So I attached myself to two American tourists.
    So we looked for a place to stay.
    Everything was prohibitively expensive for them and for me.
    But wherever we went, I see a black car like that.
    So I think to myself, to heck with it.
    Finally, I found a place in a campground.
    And that's where I stayed for two nights.
    What year was this?
    That was '71.
    Still very early on for people going back.
    After '68, it was still unpleasant.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    The deep freeze.
    Yeah.
    And so did that meant you could go back to Bardejov, or not,
    really?
    That time, I felt bad.
    And you didn't.
    And I went to Prague with these guys.
    And they were incredibly naive.
    Attending some chemical congress.
    Both were chemists.
    One had an advanced degree of chemist.
    They come to Prague.
    They said, can you point out to me a Communist?
    I said, what do you mean, point out to you a Communist?
    They look like any human.
    Some of them are in uniform.
    They may serve the government.
    But they don't look different.
    And then I realized.
    So I stayed in Prague a few days and then left.
    Well, off camera-- saying this brings me up
    to another question.
    Off camera you said that you had had the opportunity
    from very early on to have your story recorded, and you said no.
    Did you ever tell people that you
    got to know just personally all that you had been through
    as a child?
    Yes, my friends.
    Not the whole story like I told now, just told
    the story I escaped from the train,
    and sometimes joked about it, my head wound and so forth.
    Yes.
    So in a personal circle, you did.
    Yes, I did.
    In fact, it was a fellow I knew in high school, very
    nice fellow, American fellow.
    And he told me, Herman, you have to write it down,
    publish, make it.
    His name was Nathan Nagle.
    They were originally from Indiana.
    Hw said, who's going to be a listening in?
    Forget it.
    Besides, I'm too lazy to tell stories.
    And then later on, other people have told me.
    My sister was after me because there
    was a time they were recording things.
    Did she tell her story?
    No.
    Maybe she did a little bit, but I'm not sure she did.
    Oh, you mean you don't know if she
    had it recorded by, let's say, the Spielberg archive?
    No.
    That she did not.
    What was her married name?
    Roven, R-O-V-E-N.
    So it would have been Hela Roven.
    Helen.
    Helen Roven, yes.
    Helen Roven.
    And how long did your father live?
    Passed away in '58.
    1958.
    '58.
    I was in graduate school.
    That's pretty early.
    Yeah, he was young.
    He was 58 or 60.
    I was in graduate school my first year going for a PhD.
    Then I realized without him, I just won't hang around.
    And I wanted to go to Europe.
    I didn't like LA.
    So I decided to go for a master's.
    And I just didn't have the discipline,
    and I just took off for Europe hoping to study in Cambridge.
    Because of the army, I came late.
    So instead of going to college, I traveled around Europe $5.00
    a day.
    When that book actually reflected reality.
    Yes.
    I made it.
    It took more than five, but $200 a month, yes.
    And I traveled quite a bit.
    Today, pay for a half decent hotel in Paris
    that much, if not more.
    Was your father, would you say--
    let me rephrase this because I was going to kind of put words
    into your mouth.
    Who, from your early years, was, let's say,
    the major influence in your life, what person?
    My father.
    It sounded that way.
    It sounded that way.
    My brother wasn't around.
    My sister, I don't care that she slapped me
    if I did things I wasn't supposed to.
    But yeah, she had some influence.
    My brother-in-law, less.
    And then I did not have any relatives, really.
    Some friends, yeah.
    But friends were more or less my age or a bit older.
    It wasn't that much.
    Well, when you say that you moved to LA when
    you were about 15 years old, it's
    more or less from 15 years old, you might live with your sister,
    but you're kind of on your own.
    Yes.
    Then my father came two years later, moved here.
    Moved to California.
    Moved to Los Angeles, yes.
    So then I moved, too, with him.
    OK.
    And in what way did he influence you?
    What did you get from him?
    What kind of legacy did he leave?
    About manners, morals, perseverance.
    I mean, general.
    And respect for others.
    He was a gentleman.
    Yes.
    I often went to church, not so much for services,
    but in some churches, especially orthodox churches,
    they had good [NON-ENGLISH], good cookies.
    And sometimes, because some of my friends were Catholic,
    so I went to Catholic.
    And I have been going.
    The only place I really attend to, if I do,
    people ask me do you attend services, religious services?
    And I say regularly.
    They say, every Saturday?
    No, every four years.
    I say regular.
    I didn't say often.
    The only place I really go to--
    I used to go to-- now with the tourists-- is Notra Dame.
    There's something spiritual about it, I found.
    Maybe because I like Paris.
    I like the place I've lived in Paris.
    There was a time also in Cologne,
    which is next to the train station where--
    So big cathedral.
    When I was in business, I often had to change trains in Cologne
    because I was representing aerospace companies in Europe,
    traveling.
    So often I had to change trains in Cologne.
    So I would go there.
    There were windows, yes, glass, but nothing special.
    And the emptiness of it, the austerity of it, had an impact.
    Notre Dame, yes.
    St. Peter's in Rome, the beauty, you're
    overwhelmed by the beauty rather than anything else.
    So that's the only place.
    Otherwise--
    Was your father a religious person?
    No.
    He observed the high holidays.
    Oh, that's right.
    He had ham.
    Ate ham, and didn't go to synagogue.
    Maybe on the high holidays, did go.
    Didn't force me to go.
    And I wanted to go, OK.
    And my mother, I understand, was maybe ham, maybe milk.
    And sometimes social pressures.
    When you lived in a small city like [NON-ENGLISH] there was
    a greater pressure to, quote, be a little bit more observant.
    That's when I went to a religious school.
    Sort of hey there, you know.
    I didn't know about anything, and put on a cap.
    I put on the cap.
    What I vividly remember once, I used to bring sandwiches.
    But once he found out in my sandwich a bit
    of butter and salami.
    So he started screaming, I didn't know why,
    that I'm making his school [NON-ENGLISH].
    And I think he literally kicked me in the butt,
    and I flew out of the door.
    I still did not know what I did wrong.
    You mixed did.
    You mixed these things.
    That's what I got at home.
    So that was my religious experience,
    which probably contributed to my non-piety, let's put it.
    Tolerance but non-piety.
    Just like in Jerusalem, first time I was there--
    that was after liberation--
    there was that sign, if you go to the mosque,
    to the Holy Muslim temples, you will not
    go to heaven and so forth.
    I disregarded it.
    I went to the mosque, and I went to the dome, took off my shoes.
    And it was interesting, really, to see the rock where they claim
    that Muhammad went to heaven.
    My concern was if I find my shoes back, good shoes.
    And the same thing happen in some other well-known mosques.
    Not in [NON-ENGLISH].
    I haven't been there yet.
    I'm wondering, is there something
    I should have asked you that I have not asked you?
    I'm kind of at the end of the interview.
    But is there something else you'd
    like to share that we haven't talked about to this point?
    I cannot think.
    You asked me a questions that brings out things.
    Unfortunately, with age, some things there are gaps.
    Occasionally I remember things.
    I dropped it down now.
    Where I put it, the n I forget it.
    Not really.
    I guess with time, or if we had to talk,
    certain small things will pop up.
    Well, you see, I know that we can never capture everything
    in one interview.
    But what I care is that I capture the things that
    are important for you.
    The highlights you captured.
    The highlights, and what you think
    has the meaning that should be part of it.
    Yes.
    That's right.
    As long as my father, my mother, my brother and sister
    are remembered, that's what matters.
    Otherwise, small incidents could have happened, you know.
    Then let's say their names again.
    Your father's name was--
    Julius.
    [NON-ENGLISH], Julius.
    [NON-ENGLISH] Majerovic.
    Majerovic, yes.
    Majerovic.
    M-A-J-E-R-O-V-I-C, like I spell it.
    Or the Polish spelling was W-I-C-Z.
    And the German spelling was a W-I-T-Z, like in New York,
    optician Mejerovic, except he has M-E. We had M-A.
    And he had cousins here, and they changed their names
    to [NON-ENGLISH].
    Did your father teach his last name to Malvet as well?
    No.
    It was just you.
    And I changed it because friends, as I told you,
    couldn't pronounce it.
    When I was in UCLA, I graduated, and I
    applied for graduate school in UCLA
    because I was supposed to go to law school,
    but the army took precedence.
    So I applied for graduate school.
    My professor of Russian history comes in.
    And in his class, a few years before I was a citizen,
    was Majerovic.
    When I became a citizen, was Malvet.
    So then he sees an application from Malvet.
    He asks, who is this Malvet?
    He said, he's sitting there, Dr. Fisher.
    He's a bit confused.
    Then he's, are you [NON-ENGLISH]?
    I said, yes, Dr. Fisher.
    I started-- and he says, I understand.
    So you are the only one of the family who--
    OK, would have been your father.
    My father did not.
    He said, I didn't come--
    Why should I?
    If someone has problems with my name--
    and I had friends who told me, Herman you're crazy.
    Belatedly I thought I should have left my name,
    just put a Mac.
    If it were Mac Majerovic, that would have
    been a knockout, like McCohen.
    They asked me when they changed your name, I said why?
    Go through all that thing?
    And when I came to Chile--
    I have a cousin who survived in Uzbekistan.
    Oh, that's one.
    I informed him I stayed in the hotel.
    And that was a period when Allende was taking over.
    And I think the Communists, because he told me later on it
    was not only Allende.
    There was a hard core of well-trained
    come in town, individual.
    So I called him.
    I left a message.
    He comes to the hotel.
    And I must have forgotten I left the name Malvet.
    He looks and said, there's nobody.
    And then Majerovic.
    He looks for Majerovic.
    There is nobody.
    But he says, but there must be an American.
    Nobody there.
    Other Americans in the hotel.
    Finally he says someone who came here,
    and that somehow we connected.
    He said, I looked for Majoerovic.
    I said forgot to tell you.
    I forgot to leave the message.
    That happened in Vienna with the man who carried me on his back
    when I jumped off that train.
    I came, I found him.
    He lived still in Vienna.
    He was in Vienna in the '70s.
    I'm not sure he's around.
    And I come to the house, and I knock at the door.
    And I gave my war name, my name.
    She cannot remember.
    Then I started telling her the story,
    and then she opened her door and says he wasn't home.
    And then he comes later.
    She introduces me.
    Tells the name, doesn't ring a bell.
    Afterwards he just exploded.
    So how many years had passed by since you had last seen him?
    When I say in the '70s, it seems like that could be 40 years.
    We were going through the names.
    Your father, Julius, Juda Majerovic.
    Your mother.
    Berta Majerovic.
    Maiden name, Thier, T-H-I-E-R.
    Your sister.
    Helen, Hela.
    Hela.
    And your brother.
    Henek.
    Henek or Joachim.
    Joachim is Germ-- I don't know if it's a German name.
    All of us started with an H.
    That's right.
    Don't know why.
    Thank you.
    I thank you.
    Thank you, Mr. Malvet.
    I appreciate it.
    Thank you very much.
    That's an interview.
    And I want to thank the gentlemen double,
    or I start counting when I jumped from the train--
    when I was thrown out from the train.
    Then people, you were thrown out?
    I said yeah, I was thrown out from other places, too.
    Oh, come now.
    Say my final sentence, and that is, this
    concludes the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Mr. Herman Malvet on June 5, 2018
    in San Francisco, California.
    Thanks again.
    Thank you.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Herman Malvet (né Majerovic), born on January 1, 1935 in Bardejov, Slovakia, discusses growing up in both Bardejov and Katowice, Poland; his father who was an industrialist; the German attack of Poland on September 1, 1939, at which time he was in Katowice; his father packing up the family, including other relatives, in to two automobiles and fleeing eastwards; reaching the area under Soviet control, at which time their car was confiscated in Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine) by the Soviet intelligence agency (the GUGB); the arrest of his father and his release soon after; his family’s return to Katowice, where two German officers had already sequestered a front bedroom of their apartment; his family’s escape to Slovakia, where they were able to live, sometimes in hiding, until 1943; the deportation of his mother in 1942; fleeing to Hungary in 1943; living with false papers as Christian Poles; the arrival of the Germans in March 1944; fleeing to Slovakia; their arrest in early fall 1944 and deportation to Auschwitz; and escaping the transport by jumping from the moving train and his father’s successful jump as well.
    Interviewee
    Herman Malvet
    Interviewer
    Navazelskis, Ina
    Date
    interview:  2018 June 06
    Geography
    creation: San Francisco (Calif.)

    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
    Malvet, Herman.

    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 Herman Malvet on June 6, 2018 in San Francisco, CA.
    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 08:05:52
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn614771

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    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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