Oral history interview with Ruth Kohner

Oral History | Accession Number: 2016.198.75 | RG Number: RG-90.062.0006

Some video files begin with 10-60 seconds of color bars.

Interviewee: Ruth Kohner
Interviewer: Borbála Kriza
Peter Murphy
Date: interview: 2018 August 22
Geography: creation: Belfast (Northern Ireland)
Language: English
Credit Line: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection

Expand all

Special Collection: The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
Topical Term: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives.
Personal Name: Kohner, Ruth.
Legal Status: Permanent Collection
Provenance: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch produced this oral history interview as part of the European Holocaust Survivors project.
Funding Note: The production of this interview was made possible by Jeff and Toby Herr.
Copyright Holder: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Conditions on Access: No restrictions on access
Conditions on Use: No restrictions on use
: Record last modified: 2019-07-03 12:30:37
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn694077

Also in Oral history interviews of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's European Holocaust Survivors project

Oral history interviews with European Holocaust survivors

Oral history interview with Judit Steiner Szabó

Oral History

Oral history interview with Alexander Bachnár

Oral History

Alexander Bachnár (né Bachner), born on July 29, 1919 in Topoľčany, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), describes his father (Jakub Bachner), who was a painter and his mother (Františka Bachner), who was a homemaker; attending primary school in his hometown; studying at the Piarist Gymnasium in Nitra, Slovakia and transferring to high school in Prievidza, Slovakia; graduating in 1938 and attending the Pedagogical School in Bratislava, Slovakia on Lazaretská Street; being excluded from the school in March 1939 because of his Jewish heritage; being drafted into the Sixth Labor Battalion (VI Prapor) in February 1940; being assigned later to a labor camp for Jews in Nováky; doing manual work in the camp at first and later teaching children; the escape of a fellow prisoner (Weiser) from the camp, after which Bachnár served as director of the camp's primary school; the beginning of the Slovak National Uprising and the subsequent liquidation of the Nováky Labor Camp at the end of August 1944; joining the uprising; being a platoon commander of a Jewish partisan group and taking part in the fighting in central Slovakia; the end of WWII and working as the editor of the military newspaper Bojovník from 1945 until 1949; moving to the Pravda printing house in 1949 and working as an editor for two years; being released from Pravda in 1951 for political reasons; working for two years as a welder in the Juraj Dimitrov chemical plant in Bratislava; finding work in 1953 with the daily Práca as an editor and later working as a secretary and then as an editor of foreign affairs; being fired in 1969 from the editorial staff and subsequently being expelled from the Communist Party; being an editor at the Institute of Health Education between 1969 and 1976; retiring on June 30, 1976; and his marriage and three children.

Oral history interview with Ákos G. Bálint

Oral History

Oral history interview with Miksa Braun

Oral History

Oral history interview with Iván Répás

Oral History

Oral history interview with Vera Weil Hauser

Oral History

Oral history interview with Anna Müller Heller

Oral History

Oral history interview with György Sándor

Oral History

Oral history interview with Ágnes Lányi Orbán

Oral History

Oral history interview with Magda Braunstein Újvári

Oral History

Oral history interview with Vera Piroska Svéd

Oral History

Oral history interview with Illés Dési

Oral History

Oral history interview with Balint Fuzeki

Oral History

Oral history interview with Judit-Miriam Kertész Muresan

Oral History

Oral history interview with László Nuszbaum

Oral History

Oral history interview with Katalin Singer Sági

Oral History

Oral history interview with Gábor Vadász

Oral History

Oral history interview with Zoltán Blum

Oral History

Oral history interview with Mária Csukor Istvánfi

Oral History

Oral history interview with Golda Malek

Oral History

Oral history interview with Helena Klain

Oral History

Oral history interview with Olga Gavor

Oral History

Oral history interview with Katalin Mráz Sztranyiczki

Oral History

Oral history interview with Károly Löwy

Oral History

Oral history interview with Imre Kertész

Oral History

Oral history interview with Veronika Klein Forrás

Oral History

Oral history interview with Vioara Braun

Oral History

Oral history interview with Julianna Judit Szilagyi

Oral History

Oral history interview with Elisabeta Steier

Oral History

Oral history interview with Alexander Bachnár

Oral History

Oral history interview with Valeria Propstein-Slamova

Oral History

Oral history interview with Tibor Ehrenfeld

Oral History

Oral history interview with Pavol Polak

Oral History

Oral history interview with Margita Lustig Horakova

Oral History

Oral history interview with Jozef Pevny

Oral History

Oral history interview with Juraj Kohlmann

Oral History

Oral history interview with Marta Szilard

Oral History

Oral history interview with Elvira Weiszelova

Oral History

Oral history interview with Peter Kovács

Oral History

Oral history interview with Štefan Lesný

Oral History

Oral history interview with Dina Schächter Jelić

Oral History

Oral history interview with Vilma Szalay

Oral History

Oral history interview with Philippe Akar

Oral History

Oral history interview with Piroska Moskovics Lévy

Oral History

Oral history interview with Etelka Nagy

Oral History

Oral history interview with Eva Gregus

Oral History

Oral history interview with Adele Schreiber

Oral History

Adele Schreiber, born in 1922 in Satu Mare, Romania, discusses her mother’s suicide when Adele was eight months old; being raised as an only child by her father and step-mother; her father, who was Orthodox and cultured; attending a Rumanian school and speaking Rumanian; speaking Hungarian and German at home; her parents speaking Yiddish only when they did not want her to understand; living in a mixed neighborhood; the forced relocation of the Jews in Satu Mare in 1944 into a ghetto; the deportation of all the Jews to Auschwitz; being in Auschwitz a short time before being transferred to Weisswasser with her friend Kati; being sent to Bergen-Belsen and the terrible conditions there; the end of the war and going by boat to Sweden in July 1945; living in Lovön, Sweden; learning Swedish as she worked as a maid for a lawyer; her thoughts on the Jewish community in Sweden; and moving to Stockholm in 1948.

Oral history interview with Lili Jodelsohn

Oral History

Lili Jodelsohn, born in 1923 in Carei Mare, Romania, discusses her parents and 10 siblings (she had nine sisters and one brother); her father, who gave private lessons in mathematics; the Jewish community in the town; being raised religiously observant; the Hungarian annexation of the area; being deported with her family to Satu Mare and then Auschwitz; the murder of her parents and three youngest siblings; being sent to a camp in Frankfurt Am Main, Germany, where they built trenches and an airstrip; being forced to pick vegetables in the countryside; being sent to Ravensbrück; being severely beaten by the camp commandant; going to Copenhagen, Denmark and her realization that they had been liberated; going to Uppsala, Sweden; the Christian family in Landskrona that took care of her when she arrived; her marriage to a Swedish Jewish man whose family had roots in Lithuania; and having two daughters; getting divorced in 1953; getting married to her second husband, Arnold Jodelsohn, in 1968; and the Jewish community in Sweden.

Oral history interview with Mirjam Pollin

Oral History

Mirjam Pollin, born in 1926 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), discusses growing up in Hamburg, Germany; her father’s unsuccessful attempts to arrange his family’s immigration to the United States; her parents’ divorce when she was very young; her older sister and older brother; the Nazi’s rise to power; her father’s arrest in April 1933 after a boycott against Jewish shops; the relocation of her sister to the US and her brother to Palestine; her experiences on Kristallnacht; the immigration of her father and his new wife to England; her mother’s death in the Holocaust; being sent in January 1939 to Sweden, where she stayed for eight years; living with a secular Jewish couple in a suburb to Stockholm and attending a regular Swedish school; life as a refugee in Sweden; making friends with a group of teenagers who ran a kibbutz outside of the town of Falun in the county of Dalarna; getting married to a Jewish refugee from Germany named Oshi; going on a ship after the war to Palestine and being interned in Cyprus; escaping the camp; and the nightmares she still experiences.

Learn About The Holocaust

My Saved Research

Oral history interview with Ruth Kohner

Also in Oral history interviews of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's European Holocaust Survivors project

Availability

Learn About the Holocaust

Further Your Research

About the Museum's Collections

Plan a Research Visit

Ask a Research Question