Oral history interview with Bronia Tagner

Oral history interview with Helen Borenstein

Oral History

Helen Borenstein (née Hela Kronenberg), born on December 10, 1923 in Łódź, Poland, discusses growing up in a well-to-do family and having a wonderful childhood; her father’s work in the iron business; attending a Jewish private school along with her three sisters; their family vacations in the mountains; rumors of war in 1939; the German invasion on September 1, 1939 and the occupation of Łódź; being deported with her family in a cattle car to a little town in the south of Poland, where they lived in a house with another family; their move to live with her aunt; the spread of typhoid fever; falling ill and going to the hospital; her family’s recovery from the disease and moving into a house her father purchased; the arrival of the Germans and being forced into a ghetto; her making uniforms for the German officers; the liquidation of the ghetto; being saved from deportation to Treblinka by her sister’s boyfriend who was a Jewish policeman; getting a job at a factory; going to an outside labor camp in the early spring of 1942; the fear in the camp; sneaking out of the barracks with a friend and being beaten when they returned; being sent to Bergen-Belsen; escaping from Bergen-Belsen and blending in with a group of Polish people in the ghetto; living in the ghetto undetected; getting a job in a peat factory with her sisters; meeting her future husband at the factory; the liquidation of the ghetto and the transportation of her family to Natzweiler concentration camp; being transported to Majdanek; the crematory in Majdanek; being moved to Brünnlitz concentration camp; working in a quarry; being sent to Auschwitz; being tattooed with a prisoner number and being forced to have her head shaved; volunteering for a transport that was predominantly full of Hungarians and ended in Mühlhausen, Germany; working in the Black Forest; tap dancing for the German soldiers; being liberated by English soldiers; going to Stuttgart displaced persons camp; getting married; immigrating to the United States in 1948; life in the US; and her message to younger generations to respect their parents and teachers.

Oral history interview with Henry Eisenberg and Ruth Eisenberg

Oral History

Oral history interview with Louis Montanti and Margot Montanti

Oral History

Oral history interview with Adrienne Fein

Oral History

Oral history interview with Pauline Soden

Oral History

Oral history interview with Marcello Chinski

Oral History