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Oral history interview with Selma Tennenbaum Rossen

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2019.409.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.1052

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    Oral history interview with Selma Tennenbaum Rossen
    Transcript
    Yep.
    This is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    interview with Mrs. Selma Tennenbaum
    Rossen on September 20, 2019 in Springfield Township,
    New Jersey.
    Thank you very, very much for agreeing
    to speak with us today, for sharing some of your life story
    and your family's experiences and destiny during World War
    II.
    Well, thank you.
    Well, I'll start our interview with the most basic questions.
    OK.
    Can you tell me the date of your birth?
    March 6, 1936.
    March 6, 1936.
    Yes.
    And what was your name at birth?
    Selma Tennenbaum.
    OK.
    Where were you born?
    I was born in Zolochiv, Poland.
    OK.
    It was then Poland.
    And is it still or no?
    No, it is part of Ukraine now.
    So that means it was on that eastern part of Poland that
    has been so often contested territory.
    Absolutely.
    OK.
    When my parents were born, it was Austria, Hungary.
    And then it was Poland.
    Then it was Russia.
    Now it's Ukraine.
    Well, isn't it interesting?
    A person can be born and live in the same city, maybe even
    the same street, and have lived in four countries.
    That's correct.
    Yeah.
    And they have much different experiences than those of us
    who are never near such borders.
    Let me ask a little bit about your family.
    Can you tell me your mother's name and your father's name?
    My mother was Elizabeth Tennenbaum, Elizabeth Horowitz
    Tennenbaum.
    And Father was Samuel Lipa Tennenbaum.
    OK, so your mother's maiden name was Horowitz.
    Yes.
    Did both sides of your family come from--
    was it Zloczow that you said?
    Zolochiv.
    Zolochiv.
    Yeah, actually, Father was born in a very small hamlet called
    Gologory.
    Doldory?
    Gologory.
    Doldory.
    G-O-L-O-- Gologory, which is actually means "Bare Mountain."
    Ah.
    OK.
    But Mother was from Zolochiv.
    And was this small hamlet close to Zolochiv?
    Yes.
    OK.
    Very close.
    Did you have brothers and sisters?
    I have a sister.
    And what is her name?
    Her name is Edith Tennenbaum Shapiro.
    And was she older or younger than you?
    She was one year older.
    13 months to be exact.
    Really?
    13 months older?
    So you're very close in age.
    Very close.
    13 has always been my lucky number.
    [LAUGHS] That's very good to have.
    Yes.
    For so many of us, we keep looking at it like,
    oh, it's an unlucky number.
    But it's good when it's the opposite.
    So you have one sister.
    Mm-hmm.
    And she is still living?
    Yes.
    OK.
    Your mother's side of the family you say were all from Zolochiv.
    Did she have brothers and sisters?
    No.
    OK.
    And her parents, do you know their names?
    Well, I remember my grandmother's name.
    Her name was Basha, Barbara Horowitz.
    Barbara.
    Yes.
    I don't remember my grandfather's
    because he was killed very early, and we never knew him--
    in an accident.
    He was not killed in the war.
    OK.
    He died before the war.
    OK.
    Did he die when your mother was already an adult?
    No, she was a child.
    She was I think four or five years old.
    So does that mean your grandmother brought her up?
    Oh, yes.
    By herself.
    Yes, absolutely.
    OK.
    She had a little restaurant near the railroad station in town.
    And that's how she made out.
    Wow.
    It must have been a hard life for her.
    Yes.
    I know it was, right?
    But she's a very stalwart woman, very religious woman.
    And she always felt that God was on her side.
    And so you knew your grandmother.
    Oh, yes.
    Yes.
    She survived the war and came with us to America.
    Oh, my.
    Yes.
    Did she live on her own when you were born?
    Or did she live with you and your parents?
    She lived on her own.
    She lived on her own.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And there were no other children, just your mother?
    Correct.
    All right.
    On your father's side, did he have brothers and sisters?
    No, he didn't.
    Oh, so he was also an only child.
    He was an only child.
    All right.
    No aunts, no uncles, no first cousins.
    OK.
    And what about his parents?
    Were they alive when you were born?
    Oh, yes.
    We lived in the same house with them.
    Ah.
    OK.
    So there are three grandparents in your life.
    Yes.
    All right.
    What were your paternal grandparents' names?
    Leon and Lola Tennenbaum.
    OK.
    And Lola, do you remember what her maiden name might
    have been?
    I think it's Tapaun.
    Kapaun?
    Yes, T-A-P-A-U-N.
    OK.
    And did they survive the war?
    No.
    No.
    Grandmother died of typhus.
    We were actually living just outside the ghetto.
    And Grandfather committed suicide,
    took some cyanide when he was picked up by one
    of the roundups during the war.
    Oh.
    Do you have any memories of them?
    Oh, yes.
    Absolutely.
    Because it's funny.
    Very small memories because this was before the war.
    My grandfather owned a factory.
    He was traveling.
    And he was a cultural Jew, a very strong cultural Jew
    but not a religious Jew.
    My grandmother was really orthodox, very kosher kitchen.
    Can we hold on for a second?
    So your grandfather was a cultural Jew but not
    a very religious Jew.
    And your grandmother?
    Grandmother was orthodox, kosher kitchen.
    And grandfather when he went traveling sometimes
    brought ham back with him from his travels.
    And then he would take Edith and me
    to the back stairs of the house and give us ham sandwiches.
    Now, Edith is much more adventurous and brave
    than I am.
    So since then, she loves him.
    And I felt very guilty, and I don't eat ham to this day.
    Oh my goodness.
    I eat bacon.
    [LAUGHS] But not ham.
    No, the guilt still stays with me.
    Oy yay, oy yay.
    But so he was a bit naughty.
    He was a bit naughty, yes.
    Yes.
    But that's also very charming in a grandfather.
    Yes, he was a very good grandfather.
    Yeah.
    What was the factory that he owned?
    What was the factory--
    Factory that he owned.
    He owned a factory that made paper products, boxes,
    and all kinds of printing material
    for the pharmaceutical industry.
    Aha.
    So the box that you get your medicine in and many
    of the items, like a headache powder, which
    was called [? guduchi. ?] Came in little paper twists.
    So they did all the packaging for pharmaceutical industry.
    And they were probably the second larger manufacturer
    of pharmaceutical packaging in Poland.
    That's quite something.
    It's something.
    And that factory saved our lives.
    Well, we'll, come to that.
    We'll come to that.
    Was it a large factory then if it was
    the second largest in Poland?
    Or was it not so large?
    It was not that large.
    I mean, this is Poland.
    Yes.
    OK.
    Well, also because it sounds like a very specialized niche.
    Yes.
    It was a classic niche market.
    Yeah.
    About how many people worked in that factory?
    Well, it varied.
    But I think right before the war, it was close to a hundred.
    That's pretty big, yes.
    Yeah.
    And did your father work with your grandfather?
    Or did he have a separate business or pursuit?
    Well, Father has a law degree.
    He originally planned to be an engineer
    and so studying in Lemberg, in Lvov.
    But Grandpa needed some help in the factory.
    So Father came to help him.
    In Poland, you didn't have to attend classes to be a lawyer.
    You just had to show up for the final exams.
    So Father switched to law, and then
    he worked in Father's factory, essentially
    running it, the technical side of it, from a very early age.
    Oh, wow.
    Yes.
    Well, that speaks to somebody who had talent.
    Mechanical abilities and management abilities
    and language abilities, yes.
    Your father, when was he born?
    Do you know?
    Yes.
    He was born in--
    I'm blanking out for a minute.
    But it's April 9, 1909.
    OK.
    And your mother?
    My mother was born on September 12, 1909.
    Ah, so there's just half a year difference between them.
    Yes.
    So your father was a young boy.
    Actually, this parallels in the generations a little bit,
    that his child was during a war and yours
    was during a war, in that his was World War I.
    Oh, absolutely, yes.
    Did he have any memories of World War I?
    He did, but not that many.
    At that point, Poland was part of Austria, Hungary.
    So they were really in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
    All right.
    And there was really no prejudice
    against Jews at that time.
    There were some pogroms, but not close to where he was.
    OK.
    Did he ever talk about such things?
    Did he ever talk about his own childhood, his own growing up,
    or things like that?
    Not in the-- not that young.
    But certainly, once he was a teenager, absolutely.
    So he would tell you stories.
    Oh, sure.
    Yes.
    Are there any favorite stories of his that you remember?
    Well, not particularly.
    But he was a great athlete.
    And he was a member of a lot of clubs.
    He always encouraged us to be athletic
    and to swim and to read.
    Most of the stories really had to do with the books
    that he read.
    And we were brought up on a lot of Polish literature
    and American literature.
    And he liked western stories from the United States.
    Well, in some parts of Europe, and particularly Germany,
    people would always-- when they talk about westerns,
    their eyes would light up, and they'd say, Karl May, Karl May.
    You got that one right.
    Yes, absolutely.
    Yes.
    Was that one of them?
    Yes, it was.
    Yes.
    OK.
    And this name is not known in the United States.
    He was a very popular in Poland.
    Yeah.
    But we got things like Anne of Green Gables.
    And I'm trying to think of-- but a lot of western stories, yes.
    And were they translated into Polish?
    Oh, yes, sure.
    OK.
    What language did you speak at home?
    Polish.
    Polish.
    Did your parents speak Yiddish?
    Well, I'm sure they knew Yiddish.
    I mean, I know they knew Yiddish.
    But at home, we always spoke Polish.
    OK.
    And with their own parents also?
    Polish.
    OK, that's a distinction.
    Because in some families, it was not that case.
    I know.
    OK.
    So would that mean that you were--
    that that sort of--
    being a cultural Jew, that was one of the ways
    that that showed that one was more secular in that way
    or more assimilated?
    Also, our town Zolochiv was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
    And their attitude toward Jews was
    very different in that Jews were allowed to hold high offices.
    They could practice law in a way they could not
    in parts of Poland which were occupied by Russia.
    And there didn't seem to be-- lots of Father's friends
    were not Jewish.
    But he was very devoted to Judaism and to Palestine
    and was culturally assimilated.
    Well, if it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
    I would assume that he also spoke German.
    Of course.
    OK.
    And your mother, too?
    Oh, surely.
    OK.
    Did your mother have higher education?
    Yes, she went to law school.
    Also?
    Yes.
    That's unusual.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    They were both lawyers in prewar Poland, which is unusual.
    Very.
    And did she practice?
    For a little while, and then she had us.
    OK.
    How did your parents meet?
    Well, they were apparently introduced
    by their parents, actually Mother's mother and Father's
    mother.
    OK.
    Was it matchmaking?
    Or was it just--
    No, they were children.
    Ah.
    The picture you see standing other there of my parents,
    he was--
    I think they were 16-year-old.
    So they knew each other from high school.
    Tell me a little bit about their personalities,
    your mother's personality and then your father's personality.
    Well, Mother was a great reader also.
    But she was very social.
    She made friends very easily and had a lot of friends.
    She was also interested in things like clothing, jewelry.
    And she was a fabulous cook.
    I mean, our grandparents were fabulous cooks.
    So she was very social.
    But she did get a law degree because Father
    went to law school.
    And she did not get as involved in politics as Father did.
    Father were also a great reader.
    I think that both of them were great readers.
    But Father was also a great sportsman.
    And he was a manager, very good technical manager.
    Did your mother participate in the work of the factory at all?
    No.
    No.
    So her world was running the household?
    Yes.
    And a social life and a literary kind of interest.
    Aboslutely social life, yes.
    OK.
    which one-- is this a fair question?
    Which one were you closest to?
    That's an Interesting question.
    I don't think I can even answer that question because there
    were some things that Father, and there were some things
    that Mother did.
    And they both did their bit with us, right.
    OK.
    It sounds as if they were engaged with you.
    Very much so.
    OK.
    Having said that, we were brought up by nannies.
    Well, that was one of my next questions.
    Yes.
    Yeah.
    I wanted to ask, would you have said your family was well-to-do
    in--
    Yes.
    OK.
    Before the war.
    Before the war.
    Yes.
    Describe your home for me a little bit.
    Where did you live?
    What do you remember from your home?
    Well, we actually lived over the factory.
    Not exactly over at the factory.
    But there was a very big building.
    And on the second floor, there were apartments
    of my nuclear family, Mother, Father,
    Edith, and I. And Grandpa and Grandma Tannenbaum also
    lived there.
    In the same apartment or a different apartment?
    Well, different apartments, same floor.
    Got it.
    OK.
    The factory was on the bottom floor.
    And there was an adjoining building.
    Ah.
    And there was-- and we moved from there
    when the Russians invaded, which was in 1941.
    It was when I was five years old.
    So I don't have too many memories
    of that first apartment except Grandpa
    giving us ham on the back stairs.
    And I have this very strange memory, which
    I've talked to Edith about, is in the kitchen when
    the maid and the cook were there, there were geese.
    And they were stuffing the geese, the heads of the geese.
    They were stuffing the geese for foie gras, you know, it's--
    and just--
    And you remember that?
    I have that memory, right.
    How interesting.
    Yeah.
    And I also remember that in the winter,
    they put sacks with hay on the doors for it
    to provide protection from the cold air, yes.
    Well, tell me about the house itself.
    Did it have modern conveniences?
    Yes.
    We had one of the four toilets in the city of Zolochiv.
    And one of them was actually--
    Well, there's a distinction.
    [LAUGHTER]
    One of the ones was actually a flush toilet, right.
    Oh my goodnes.
    [LAUGHS] Well, I asked this a lot
    partly to know, what was the level of modernity?
    What were the level of conveniences at the time?
    We can make assumptions that aren't necessarily true--
    how a place was heated, how a place was lit,
    what kind of access their water--
    Well, we had those porcelain stoves in each room.
    You had a-- oh, you had those types of--
    Stoves, right.
    OK.
    And Father had one of the six cars in town and of town.
    But if we go somewhere, we would not--
    it would not be in a car.
    It would be a horse-drawn carriage, [POLISH]..
    So you had an automobile.
    Yes, we did.
    But you would not use that.
    Automobiles at that time were not that reliable.
    I mean, there's a picture of my father
    going to his wedding in the automobile.
    But that are only for very special occasions.
    OK.
    They had tires which didn't last.
    And it wasn't that easy.
    Ah.
    Interesting that if one had an automobile,
    one didn't necessarily use it.
    Not for every day, no.
    OK.
    Every day was still the--
    Horse-drawn.
    Yeah, [POLISH].
    Horse and buggy.
    Absolutely.
    Yeah.
    So were there farm animals even though you lived in the city?
    Like, there was a horse?
    There was a stable?
    No.
    No.
    No.
    OK.
    Not around us.
    But there may have been in the outskirts of the town
    or something like that.
    So when you'd use a horse and buggy, it wasn't your own.
    It would be hired like a taxi.
    It would be hired, sure.
    OK.
    Just like a taxi.
    OK.
    And did your family--
    I mean, some people did in the city keep chickens.
    You mentioned geese.
    I mentioned the geese.
    There may have been some chickens somewhere.
    But I did not come in close contact with any of them.
    OK.
    Did the building have a garden of a kind,
    a yard where you could play?
    Well, there was a wonderful park right
    across the street from us.
    And I do have memories of going for a walk
    with my father-- it was my mother and a friend of hers
    in the park.
    OK.
    What was the name of the park?
    Do you remember?
    Hmm.
    I'll have to look it up in the book, right.
    That's OK.
    And do you remember your address in Zolochiv?
    Sure.
    Well, it's 11 [POLISH],, which is--
    [POLISH] is eagle.
    So it's number 11 Eagle Street, [POLISH]..
    So eagle the bird?
    Yes.
    Aha.
    Well, that's quite regal.
    Yes.
    And wasn't it also the Polish symbol,
    the national symbol, the eagle?
    Oh, yes, absolutely.
    Right on.
    OK, OK.
    You mentioned earlier that your father also
    had some political interests.
    Yes.
    What were they?
    Well, he was very involved with the Jewish movements.
    And he had started a couple of clubs associated with them.
    The idea was to regain Palestine.
    So he was a Zionist.
    Oh, absolutely.
    OK, OK.
    And was he involved in Polish politics at all?
    No, not really.
    OK.
    So in Poland, his profile--
    well, let's say for Polish society--
    would be as a businessman.
    As a businessman, right.
    OK.
    And did you have a radio at home?
    Yes.
    A telephone?
    I think so, yes.
    OK.
    All right.
    Yes.
    And if you're born in March 1936--
    I was five when the Russians came in.
    But the war starts September 1, 1939 when you are 3 and 1/2.
    Right.
    Now, in that part of Poland, was it the Germans who occupied it?
    No, no, the Russians.
    So that would have been in 1939.
    Right.
    They started to come in 1939.
    I really mispoke when I said '41.
    '41 is when the Germans came.
    OK.
    The Russians came in '39.
    Do you remember, have any memory of this?
    You were 3 and 1/2.
    What I remember is leaving our apartment,
    which must have been in '39.
    And it was raining, and we were walking not with my mother
    but with a friend of my mother's.
    And we had to move to a different apartment
    because the Russians nationalized the factory.
    And they threw us out of there.
    And then we went to a different--
    a very small two-room apartment, which eventually wound up
    in the ghetto.
    Ah.
    OK.
    Do you have memories of what that apartment looked like?
    Oh, sure.
    Describe it for me.
    Because we lived in that for quite a while.
    It was an apartment house.
    And there was an interior courtyard.
    And there was balcony that run on the interior courtyard
    on the second floor.
    And that's where our apartment was in it.
    And we had like a two-room apartment.
    And you had a balcony on the inner courtyard.
    Right.
    The balcony that was not part of the apartment.
    There was just this balcony.
    You had to come out of the apartment
    and can run around the inner balcony, which as kids we'd
    like to do.
    And some friends of our parents and us
    also had an apartment on the other side of the courtyard.
    Oh, that's perfect.
    Right.
    Well, there's some memories from that courtyard.
    But more of that later, I think, yeah.
    OK.
    And could you go downstairs from that balcony?
    That is, was there a way of exiting the apartment
    and leaving the building by using this balcony?
    Yes.
    OK.
    Was that the only way to get out of the apartment?
    No, I don't remember that.
    It may have been straight from the apartment.
    But I don't think so.
    I think you stepped out of the apartment into the balcony,
    and then you had stairs downstairs.
    OK.
    Was it far from your original home?
    Not that far, no.
    Do you remember the street address there?
    I don't remember it yet.
    But I can give it to you.
    OK, OK.
    And you remember still at age--
    you would have been about 3 and 1/2 or 4,
    not much more than that because--
    so until that moment of moving from your own home
    into this place, you don't remember-- you
    don't have memories of the war.
    Well, there was no war in 1939.
    Then 1939, when the Russians came in, we don't have--
    there was no major bombing.
    There was nothing like that.
    They just came in quietly.
    So my first memories of a war is 1941 when the Germans came.
    Got it.
    You're right.
    You're absolutely right.
    It is a occupation.
    But it's not fighting.
    Right.
    And explain to us how it is that the Russians
    came into this part of Poland and not the Germans.
    Well, this was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
    And what was that?
    Or some people call it the Stalin-Hitler Pact.
    It happened in 1939.
    And Hitler and Stalin formed a non-aggression pact.
    And part of it was the division of Poland.
    Russia took part of it, and Germany
    took another part of it.
    OK.
    And your part being in the east--
    Was Russia.
    Was Russia.
    Yes.
    Yeah.
    And that pact many people say is what allowed
    Hitler to attack Poland.
    Yes.
    Because one week afterwards, after they signed it--
    Right.
    When he was-- he was essentially assured
    that Russia would not have a second front,
    would not attack him from the East.
    Yeah.
    And did your grandparents-- did your paternal grandparents move
    in with you when you moved from one place--
    No.
    No?
    What happened with them at that point?
    Well, this was-- since Father didn't own the factory.
    Grandfather did.
    So Grandfather and Grandmother were
    considered to be bourgeois and capitalists.
    So as such, they were in danger because the Russians
    would take over the intelligentsia
    and over the owners of the property
    and send them to Siberia.
    Very, very sadly, a lot of people who were sent to Siberia
    actually survived.
    But who knew that at that time?
    So people did not want to be sent to Siberia.
    Of course.
    So it was decided that Grandfather and Grandmother
    would go to Lvov, to Lemberg.
    Was it far from Zolochiv, Lemberg?
    I think it's about 50 kilometers, something
    like that.
    That's not much.
    No.
    M'kay.
    But Father had some--
    Grandfather had some connection there
    in a pharmaceutical trust.
    And they said that they felt they could protect them
    from the Russians.
    Now when the Russians came in, they looked at everybody,
    and their passports got stamped.
    OK.
    It said "jevrej," on it, which means Jew.
    And in some cases, it did not allow
    Jews to move outside of the area where they were living.
    By some absolute fluke of nature, Father's--
    Grandfather's and Grandmother's passports were not stamped.
    So they could move to Lemberg.
    Father's passport got stamped as an enemy of Russia.
    So they told us later that their suitcases were always
    packed under the bed.
    But they needed Father to run the factory.
    There was nobody-- because Father's factory--
    Grandfather's factory had printing presses.
    And they had Cyrillic alphabet, and Father spoke
    Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish.
    And every bureaucracy needs printed stuff.
    So they hired Father to run the factory.
    So in other words, it wasn't his factory anymore.
    No, of course not.
    It was nationalized.
    And then what they did is they appointed a Ukrainian woman
    to be the director.
    But she couldn't run it.
    So even though she was technically the director,
    he was whatever, and he ran the factory.
    And we were not deported to Siberia.
    But I'll tell you, what a bitter thing
    it must have been for your father.
    Yes.
    Did he ever talk about that later?
    Oh, we talked about it quite a bit.
    I mean, he hated the Russians.
    He really hated the Russians because they nationalized,
    of course, all the business.
    But also, they sent a lot of people to Siberia,
    and they also executed some people.
    Yeah.
    Do you remember-- do you remember--
    I mean, again, I realize I'm asking you
    questions of when you were of a four-year-old, five-year-old
    child now.
    But were there conversations at home?
    Did you feel fear of any kind?
    Or was life pretty normal for a kid?
    I was going to say I wouldn't say exactly normal.
    But during the Russian occupation,
    I don't remember feeling fear.
    OK.
    OK.
    The new two-room place where the four of you lived,
    did it have running water?
    No.
    I take it it didn't have one of the four or five toilets
    of Zolochiv.
    No.
    What did that have is what do you associate with an outhouse.
    But it was inside the house.
    So it was this wooden thing, and there was a hole in there.
    And that's where you went.
    And there's one thing I do remember is that my mother--
    I don't know if you want anecdotes like that.
    Absolutely.
    My mother once went to the bathroom,
    and she put her pocketbook behind her.
    And then when she got up, it fell into the toilet.
    Right.
    And then it was quite the occasion to get it out of it.
    So these are those little flashes of memories
    I have from things like that.
    But otherwise, we played with friends.
    There were little girls there.
    And there was--
    Sue Gold survived also and her brother.
    So a childhood friend?
    Yes.
    What was her name?
    Susan Gold.
    Oh, Susan Gold.
    Yes.
    I'm sure she does a lot of work with--
    right.
    And she's written books on this.
    And sadly, her brother didn't survive.
    But I just talk about it later.
    OK.
    And you were too young to start school, weren't you,
    at this age?
    That's correct.
    OK.
    Did your older sister start school?
    No, we didn't have school.
    But we did have tutors that would come to the house
    and teach us.
    We both learned to read and write very early.
    OK.
    I also remember being taught how to tell my right hand
    from my left hand by standing against a wall
    and toward the dining room table with your right hand
    and the other one was the left hand.
    Did you have any non-Jewish friends at that age?
    No.
    No.
    But we had a very devoted maid--
    her name was Hanka--
    who actually moved with us, too.
    She didn't live with us, but she was with us in that apartment.
    She had another apartment nearby.
    And I remember going to church with her.
    Do you?
    On Sundays, right.
    And, again, these are those little memories
    from very young.
    And in Poland, they had little niches
    in building were there was statues of the Virgin
    Mary or saint and all of that.
    So as we were walking from church,
    she would encourage us to select one of those as a patron.
    And I remember getting very mad at Edith
    because she selected this beautiful Virgin Mary, and--
    That meant you couldn't.
    I couldn't, no.
    [LAUGHS] Were your parents aware that she would take you--
    Oh, sure.
    And was it OK with them?
    Yes.
    OK.
    So they were very open and liberal minded.
    Right.
    But we were Jewish.
    There was no question about it.
    OK.
    OK.
    And they would not want us to--
    Convert.
    --convert, right.
    All right.
    But many families-- and I've interviewed people who were
    children at the time--
    when they found out that the nanny or the maid
    was taking the child to church, that maid
    didn't work there anymore.
    We didn't have anything like that.
    OK.
    You also said your father was a great patriot earlier.
    Was this for Palestine or was this--
    OK.
    Yes.
    Very much so.
    He was not a Polish patriot, no.
    OK.
    Or Austrio-Hungarian?
    No.
    Well, he had a great respect for the Austrio-Hungarian Empire.
    And he talked to us about it and that they
    had a lot of different countries and really
    let each country do their own thing.
    And there was very little, in our area,
    prejudice against Jews.
    Not sure about other areas.
    OK.
    So his view of what Austria-Hungary had been--
    Was much better than--
    right-- than of Russian.
    Right.
    All right.
    But what about when Poland got reconstituted?
    1914, right.
    That's right.
    1918.
    1918.
    1919, yes.
    And after having been dismembered 120 years earlier.
    Right.
    I can imagine that it can be confusing as to,
    where do you now live?
    Where should you integrate to?
    Should you integrate?
    You spoke Polish at home, which is already a sign of--
    Absolutely.
    --that this is a choice that the family makes
    when there are possibilities to make other choices.
    Right.
    Was his business integrated into Polish economy.
    Absolutely.
    We led a very good upper middle class life.
    Mm-hmm.
    OK.
    What else did I want to ask?
    So at this time when you're living
    in the two-room apartment, your paternal grandparents
    moved to Lvov where they hope to be able to avoid deportations.
    Right.
    Your mother and your father, your sister and yourself
    live in this two-room apartment.
    Right.
    What happens with your maternal grandmother?
    Where does she go?
    She had her own apartment.
    And she was not the bourgeoisie, and she was not a capitalist.
    She was a working woman.
    So she safe.
    OK.
    And did your-- were there people at that time--
    you say you don't remember feeling fear.
    But did your parents talk about people
    who might have disappeared at that time
    or might have been arrested?
    Or was that ever part of a conversation?
    It might have been.
    But I don't remember that very distinctly
    because I really don't remember much fear from that period.
    Oh, that's--
    Yeah, yeah.
    It's just-- well, of course this is the wrong--
    it would have been your parents who
    could have told me the answer to that question.
    Oh, yes.
    Yes.
    And Father does talk about in his book.
    But I'm going on my own memories.
    Of course, of course.
    Are there any other memories from that time for you?
    [PHONE RINGS]
    Not really.
    We can cut for a second.
    So I'm sorry.
    We cut--
    I think we went up to the--
    we are still in the Russian period.
    Yeah.
    And I was asking you whether there were any other memories
    that you had of that time.
    Not really, no.
    OK, OK.
    I mean, there were very incidental ones.
    For instance, I remember being in the kitchen,
    and there were barrels in there.
    And there were cabbages brought in by the ton
    because you didn't have any fresh vegetables
    during the winter.
    So the maids grating all the cabbages--
    To make sauerkraut?
    --to make sauerkraut for the winter.
    Things of that type I remember, but just fleeting memories.
    Mm-hmm.
    When do things change again?
    When the Germans came in.
    So tell me what happened.
    And that I do remember.
    Because when they came in, the bombing started.
    The bombing started.
    You're five years old.
    Yes.
    '41, yeah, over five years old.
    And I remember going outside.
    And there were these planes flying by.
    And I thought there were strings which were dropping from them.
    And Father said, no, no, these are bombs.
    And we had to go-- we went into the cellar.
    OK.
    And I think from what I remember,
    there was a period of these bombs.
    And then the Germans came in.
    And the shooting started immediately.
    Now--
    Do you remember that?
    Did you hear shots?
    Did you see soldiers?
    Absolutely.
    And we had to hide.
    And I can just--
    I'll just tell you what I remember.
    Yeah.
    Even though originally we hid in the cellar.
    And then Father decided obviously
    that that was not safe.
    And they took us to the factory where
    there was an attic built over the factory.
    And apparently, it was not clear if you
    saw the building from the front that there was an attic.
    So I remember going into the attic.
    And there were-- you could see between the boards
    on the street.
    And there were people-- and you heard the shots.
    And I remember being very scared there, but also
    being very worried where I was going to go to the bathroom.
    And I remember saying to Mother, what am I going to do?
    And she said, no, you just go in the corner of the attic.
    And I was saying, how can I do it?
    And that's what it was.
    So we stayed in that attic.
    So no pot, no anything?
    Just the corner of the attic?
    It was a corner of the attic that I remember.
    Now, later on, I think they brought some containers.
    Utensil, yes.
    Yes.
    And I do remember being scared at that point.
    And you're 5 and 1/2.
    And we're in that attic for quite a while.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    There were a lot of shots that time.
    And so you were able to see a little bit through the slot--
    through a slat of wood.
    Right.
    But then I walked away from it.
    I saw it.
    Then I went to the back part of the attic, yeah.
    Was the factory on a--
    was the street a major street or a side street?
    [POLISH] was-- well, it was a building
    that has a opening on a major street,
    but this was the back street.
    But there was a big open space there.
    On the back street.
    Yeah.
    And that's where the Jews were gathered.
    And the first day, there were several thousand Jews
    that were killed, the first days that the Germans came in.
    This you learnt later?
    All I heard was the shots.
    But then I learned--
    yeah, I learned later.
    Yeah.
    OK.
    Through the slats, what was it that you could see?
    Well, I just saw some people.
    And then as I said, then I just walked away from that.
    I just felt very scared.
    And I went to the back, yeah.
    And how did you eat?
    Well, there wasn't much to eat the first couple of days.
    But then people from the factory were
    very devoted to our family.
    And Hanka, who was the maid, she brought up some food for us
    and I assume water, right.
    OK.
    And this lasted like two or three days.
    And then we went back to that two-room apartment.
    I see.
    And did you ever encounter any of the German soldiers?
    I saw them.
    And I'm going back now to a later episode.
    But I was walking on the street, and there were a couple
    of Germans I guess in uniform.
    But there was also a woman, and there was a little girl.
    And the little girl pushed me.
    And I fell.
    And I really hurt my leg.
    And I was very surprised that my parents were so panicky,
    and they didn't say anything.
    Usually if somebody pushes a child, you would say something.
    And I had an open sore on my leg for quite a while.
    But they were, of course, terrified
    that they would take me or whatever.
    So that was the only episode I remember
    that I was really involved with the German soldiers.
    So this could have been his wife and child?
    We don't know.
    We don't know, no.
    We don't know.
    But someone who felt like she could
    do that and get away with it.
    The thing is, the little girl could do it, right.
    Yeah, the girl do it.
    Also, another thing, there was--
    on the first few days-- no, after the first few days
    of shooting, it all quieted down.
    And from what I know now, there were
    a lot of rules and regulations that had to be put into effect.
    And, again, the Germans needed somebody to print them.
    So they sent for Father.
    They were told that Father could run the factory.
    And then Father did that.
    And one of the things that happened
    is you had to wear an armband with a Jewish star
    if you were six years old or older.
    And the penalty if you didn't have one, it would be death.
    They would kill a six-year old child.
    And oh, I remember I was very jealous of Edith,
    because she was six years old, and she got an armband.
    And I was five, and I didn't get an armband.
    And of course, I didn't understand--
    Why don't I have one?
    --why don't I have that armband, too?
    Yeah.
    So these are memories, right.
    Yeah, well, children have a logic that
    makes perfect sense to them.
    Perfect sense.
    Soon enough, I got an armband of my own, right.
    Yeah, yeah.
    Right.
    [LAUGHS]
    And so was your father somewhat safe, do you think,
    because he was doing this work?
    No question about it.
    And again, the factory was nationalized,
    this time by the Germans.
    OK.
    Now, the Ukrainians loved the Germans.
    So they appointed a Ukrainian woman.
    The same one as before?
    Interesting question.
    No, it was a different one, Rose Dachko
    to be the manager of the factory.
    But Father was running it, and she kind of got jealous.
    And this is a story my father told us.
    And it's also in the book.
    And so next time the German commandant called, she
    didn't take Father with her.
    She went by herself.
    She didn't speak German.
    She didn't know what he wanted.
    And he yelled at her and said, don't ever come back
    without Herr Tennenbaum.
    So they valued Father.
    But Rose hated Father for that because--
    but she couldn't run around the factory without him.
    But again, the fact that they needed a lot of documentation
    and a lot of printers.
    So he got a permit sent that he was a valued worker,
    and he was--
    in the beginning.
    In the beginning when there were the roundups,
    they respected this.
    Later on, not so much.
    So what was happening with your paternal grandparents in Lvov
    at this time?
    Yeah, we were in touch with them all the time.
    And they were protected by this woman
    who was in charge of the pharmaceutical trust.
    A pharmaceutical trust?
    Right.
    In--
    In Lvov.
    OK.
    What is that?
    Well, I gather it was like a union that
    was responsible for all the pharmacies
    and things of that type.
    So they got him a job.
    So he was also a protected worker at that point.
    As I said, these things didn't last forever.
    OK.
    So he seems to be doing OK in Lvov.
    And they did have phone conversations, Father
    and Grandfather.
    Through what-- there was no phone where you lived.
    Pardon me?
    Well, there was no--
    No, but you could get a phone.
    In the factory, there was a phone.
    And in the other factory, there was a phone.
    OK, so they communicated that way.
    They communicate.
    Also, there were people who traveled back and forth
    between Lvov and Zolochiv.
    And they brought new of--
    and Father did mention that he would send people
    to Lvov to find out what was going on with his parents.
    But he himself could not go.
    No.
    OK.
    And that was because--
    you see, the Soviets were the ones
    who stamped in that he's Jewish in his passport.
    Yeah, that was during the Soviets.
    But in the German, you still have that permission
    to travel more than a few miles from the house.
    OK.
    Now, his protection, was that extended to you
    and your sister and your mother?
    Well, they got a worker's permit for my mother.
    And her job was to--
    the Germans had a quota that Jews
    had to collect furs and glass and metal.
    So she had to collect a certain amount of glass and metal
    and furs every month to deliver to the Germans.
    And so that was her work.
    That's not fun.
    No.
    But she was protected.
    With us, the problem didn't come into effect
    until the ghetto was formed, which was at the end of 1943.
    So this is-- you're able to live 2 and 1/2 years
    in this kind of a situation.
    Right.
    Right.
    OK.
    So that's quite a long time actually.
    Yes.
    But what the Germans did-- and I'm sure you've heard about
    it--
    the actions, Aktions, right.
    And--
    In those 2 and 1/2 years.
    Oh, yeah.
    And then Father usually was able to get advance notice
    when the action came about.
    Tell the camera.
    I'm sorry that I put it that way.
    What is an action?
    What an action is, it's a hunt, which
    means any Jew found on the streets
    or found in a hiding place, they would go on the streets,
    and they'd go into the buildings.
    And they sometimes had dogs.
    And if they found any Jews, they would round them up,
    and they'd take them to a big market place,
    load them into railroad cars, and take them
    to concentration camps.
    Sometimes not concentration camps.
    Sometimes, as we found out later, it was a forest.
    And they were just get shot and buried in the forest.
    But we usually had advance notice.
    And you usually saw the railroad cross coming in
    and the sightings.
    And you knew that something was going to happen.
    So when you have advanced notice, what would you do?
    Well, what our parents did, they-- and Edith
    probably told you about it.
    They were just very concerned about us, about Edith and me.
    So they had the hiding place in the factory.
    So they tried to find a Christian people who
    would take us.
    And there was a couple that seemed very kind.
    They always called Father Mr. Tennenbaum and all that.
    And sometime Father had a feeling
    that he might be receptive.
    They had no children.
    So he asked if they would take Edith and me,
    and they said yes.
    And I remember that because they took us to the apartment.
    And I'm much more Judaic-looking than Edith is.
    So I remember they're putting me to bed
    and pulling the cover over on my face
    so my nose would be covered.
    And they didn't have to do that with Edith,
    but they just did it up to here.
    And I said, why are you doing it?
    And she said, it's better that way.
    It's better that way.
    So they had us during this action.
    And father was hid in the-- and Mother--
    in the factory.
    When the next action came, they said
    they would take Edith but not to me because I too Semitic
    looking.
    And they were very afraid that if somebody
    would walk into the apartment, they would see me.
    So Edith went.
    And I'm sure she told with that story.
    Tell us.
    And that she was left in this apartment.
    And the people left.
    So she was all alone in the apartment.
    And she didn't know what was going on.
    So she jumped out of the window and went back--
    she knew where our parents were hiding,
    which was extremely dangerous for her to be out on the street
    by herself.
    And also, she could have led the Germans to where
    Mother and Father were hiding.
    And you.
    And me.
    But she survived the trip, and everything worked out.
    So when the third action came, we were going to be--
    they didn't know what to do.
    So our old nanny said that she would take us.
    Hanka.
    Both of us, and hide us.
    And her name was--
    Hanja.
    Hanja.
    Yes.
    And I didn't want to go.
    I was crying.
    I do remember that.
    And what they did is they promised
    that we would have noodles with poppy seed and honey.
    So I then said, OK.
    [LAUGHS]
    So we went to Hanja.
    And there was a dish of noodles and poppy seed and honey.
    But there were these two little noodles,
    and I thought that the poppy seed and honey would be inside
    the tubes, but they weren't.
    It was all mixed up.
    So apparently, I started crying, and I wouldn't stop crying.
    And I think that set Edith off also.
    And she cried.
    Yes, so that both of us were just crying.
    And a neighbor of the nanny said, we'll just take them back
    to their parents.
    And Mother said that this was fate.
    We would either survive together or not survive together.
    So they didn't try to give us--
    Up again.
    It didn't work.
    It didn't work with us.
    But in many cases, it did work, and the children
    were given away into convents and Christian families, right.
    Yeah.
    And they were able to hide because their hiding
    place was not discovered.
    There's one memory I have from that-- a couple of memories
    from that period is that we came out of the action.
    And I had mentioned there was this courtyard in our building.
    And there was a dead man lying in the courtyard.
    In the courtyard itself.
    In the courtyard, on the ground floor, though.
    Not on the balcony.
    And I remember Mother saying to cover your face when
    you walk by it, which we did.
    And after a couple of days, some Jewish men
    came and took him away.
    And I remember that distinctly.
    So there was--
    Was this the first time you saw a body like that?
    Yeah, yes.
    First time I saw a dead body.
    Do you know who it was?
    No.
    Never found out.
    No.
    OK, OK.
    But it was--
    I think the Germans at that point decided to have a ghetto.
    But the apartment that we were living in,
    that two-room apartment, was actually in the ghetto area.
    So they moved a lot of the Jews from other areas.
    And there were eventually 30 people
    living in two-room apartment.
    30 people?
    Yes.
    And I told you about Sue Gold, who was
    living in the other apartment.
    They also had a lot of other people with them.
    And there was another family on the ground floor.
    There was a little girl younger than I was.
    And I have a very bad memory from that
    because I don't know how that happened.
    But they were cooking supper or something.
    And there was some boiling water that spilled from the stove
    on her face.
    So I remember being very scared by that.
    Tell me, do you know why--
    you had to move to this two-room apartment
    when the Soviets were there.
    Yes.
    Why is it that when the Germans came in,
    you didn't move back to where the factory was?
    Oh, there was no question about that.
    I mean, this was a beautiful house,
    and the Germans were quartered there.
    OK.
    No way.
    OK.
    Got it.
    All right.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    If it was one of the six places in Zolochiv
    that had a toilet then.
    Yeah.
    Not for Jews.
    Not for Jews.
    No.
    OK.
    And I think-- oh, no.
    Well, I know that, again, I have memories from that period
    and of the ghetto.
    And there was one memory that I had nightmares for years
    afterwards.
    And what was that?
    Because we had this woman Hanja, the maid
    that would be with us until the ghetto was formed.
    And she would bring fruits and vegetables and things
    of that type.
    And she would even sneak into the ghetto.
    So we probably had more than the average family there.
    And my mother was looking at some vegetables,
    and she and a couple of other women
    were running a soup kitchen.
    And there was a potato which was spoiled and had worms in it.
    And she gave that Edith and me.
    So we knew that the women had soup kitchens.
    So Edith and I said, well, let's--
    and I think there was another girl involved--
    let's do a soup kitchen.
    So we went down to the ground floor.
    And we had-- I just cooked that potato in the pot,
    and we had it.
    And an adult man came, and he was obviously starving.
    And he asked if he could have that potato.
    And I think there was another person that came up.
    So they ate that.
    And for us, it really hit us that these
    were hungry grown-ups. And this is the thing
    I had nightmares about.
    The hungry grown-ups?
    The hungry grown-ups, that they actually came to--
    what did they think about those six, seven-year-olds?
    They had a potato.
    But your mother, did she give you that potato to eat?
    No, no, no.
    Just to play with.
    Just to play with.
    But for these starving people, it would not be to play with.
    Of course.
    It would be-- it would be--
    there was great hunger in the ghetto, and then typhus.
    You know typhus, right?
    Tell me, what are symptoms of typhus?
    Typhus is horrible disease.
    It's carried by lice.
    By the way, we had lice, and we had fleas.
    And one of our favorite sports was hunting fleas and killing
    them on your fingernails.
    And it's essentially GI with intravenous bleeding
    and vomiting and fever.
    And nearly everybody died who had it in the ghetto.
    Now, the Germans got very worried
    that Father would bring typhus to them because he
    was going to the factory.
    And they needed him.
    So there were a number of Jews, including the Judenrat people,
    that had permission to live outside the ghetto.
    So they gave-- they called Father in.
    And they said they would give Father and Mother permits
    to live outside the ghetto.
    And Father said, what about the children?
    And he said, no.
    And then he walked back to his office.
    And Father was standing, and the secretary was there.
    She had the permit that had his name and Mother's name.
    And he looked at the woman.
    He said, I cannot do it.
    So she put the permit back into the typewriter
    and she put in "und zwei Kinder."
    So she wrote it in.
    A middle-aged German woman.
    And "und zwei Kinder" means?
    And two children.
    And we still have that.
    Well, I think Father gave that document to Yad Vashem.
    But you could see there was a different typewriter
    for the original from it.
    So we were able to move outside the ghetto.
    That is amazing, actually--
    Yes.
    --that a secretary would contradict the commandant.
    Yes.
    A middle-aged German woman.
    Right.
    Of course, he didn't know what she did.
    He was already back in his office.
    And at that time, we got a message from Father--
    from Grandfather that the work permits for his wife was
    no longer effective.
    He was very worried about Grandma.
    So he was going to send her back to us.
    And she arrived.
    This is Father's mother, whom I also remember.
    And she came just as we were moving outside the ghetto.
    And my other grandmother also came with us.
    So two grandmothers are with you.
    Right.
    And one of the grandmothers, which is Mother's mother,
    caught typhus.
    And Father's mother nursed her.
    So Mother's mother recovered.
    And Father's mother did not.
    And I also remember that because they
    sent Edith did out of the apartment
    because they were concerned that she would--
    she was older.
    She would remember too much, which is true.
    She was much older than I was.
    But I was stayed in the house when Grandmother died.
    And I still remember her dying in that bed and Father's
    despair when she died.
    So she died.
    And no, she died of typhus.
    Right.
    And was he able to bury her?
    They got some friends, and they were able at night
    to take her to the cemetery.
    And they were even able to get a little stone.
    But when we came back after the war, there was no sign.
    They took all the stones from the Jewish cemeteries.
    Who would have done that?
    The Germans did.
    OK.
    Who knows?
    Ukrainians, Germans.
    Yes.
    One of those, yes.
    One of the things that I'm struck by,
    though, is that it sounds like when
    you were hiding in the attic for those few days, how many people
    knew about this if you had food and water being brought to you?
    There were at least three people knew about that because there
    were two Ukrainians that actually worked
    with Father to the factory.
    And of course, I know that from the book, not from my memory.
    And they really protected him because they were Ukrainians.
    And when the Germans came out, they said, no, no, no.
    They're not Jews.
    So they knew that.
    And then Hanja the maid knew that.
    And afterwards, Rose Dachko, who was
    the nominal head of the factory, found out about it.
    And she was very angry.
    This was not only our family.
    There were a couple of other people in there.
    And she forbade Father do that again.
    But he didn't listen to her, and she didn't betray him.
    OK.
    OK.
    So it sounds like--
    I mean, you see human behavior in such extremes
    that there were these tensions.
    And there was this pulling and this disagreement.
    And it could have gone--
    Oh, yes.
    --very badly.
    It could've gone very badly.
    I think there were so many people whose luck run out.
    We were just very lucky and that there
    were people who protected us, including
    some of the Ukrainian, which is strange.
    Did you ever have any encounter with any of them,
    these people who could have betrayed but did not?
    I knew where those people were at,
    but I didn't have that level of--
    we had, really, encounters with people who helped us.
    And I remember those, yes.
    OK.
    And the reason why you say you think it's strange
    is because the Ukrainians were much more allied
    with the Germans?
    Or was it--
    Oh, sure.
    They hated the Russians.
    When the Germans came in, they were greeted with flowers and--
    not champagne, but with flowers and flags.
    But the Ukrainians thought that the Germans would give them
    their own country.
    And they were very quickly disillusioned.
    The Germans said no.
    But they still preferred the Germans to the Russians.
    Now, Ukrainians were killers of the Jews.
    The Poles didn't like the Jews.
    And they would occasionally point out the Jews
    to the Germans.
    But they were not as virulent as the Ukrainians.
    Is this something that you came to understand later?
    Or is this something you felt at the time?
    Well, I knew about the Ukrainians.
    I think that was kind of the way people thought, even to us.
    No, we were small children.
    But you said, Ukrainians, be very careful, right?
    OK.
    So let's go back now to the point where
    both grandmothers are with you outside the ghetto.
    And your paternal grandmother dies and is buried.
    And there's, at least in the beginning,
    a stone to mark it, her grave site.
    What happens after that?
    Do you continue living outside the ghetto?
    Well, what happened after that is that, again, from what
    I gather is the feeling is that Father
    hears that ghettos are being eliminated in many other cities
    around Poland.
    And he's becoming convinced that what Hitler wants
    is to get rid of all the Jews.
    And on the last Aktion apparently,
    even people who had the permits like Father
    did, that they were needed workers, they were disregarded.
    People were picked up anyway.
    So he knew it was close to the end.
    So the feeling was that maybe we should
    try to survive on false papers.
    And Grandfather, who was still in Lvov, said he had a contact.
    He had some jewelry and money left.
    And he would get us false papers that we can leave the ghetto
    and pretend to be Poles.
    Mother was not in favor of that.
    She was like I was, very Jewish looking.
    And the name that was picked as a false name was called Bulski.
    Bulski?
    Bulski, B-U-L-S-K-I. I was Christina Bulska.
    Mother was Elizaveta Bulksa.
    Mother said, this is a fake name.
    They will discover us right away.
    They can tell by the way we look that it's not going to work.
    But I mean, what are the choices in a situation like that?
    So there was going to be a man who
    said he could smuggle us out of the place
    beyond the ghetto on a train that would go to Warsaw maybe,
    a larger town where we could hide.
    And this, again, I learned, of course, later.
    Now when we were living outside the ghetto,
    a number of Mother's Polish friends
    would come and see us and bring, again, some food.
    So we weren't starving like so many other people.
    And one of these women was called Helena Szczulczewska.
    And her name is on the wall of the righteous in the Holocaust
    Museum.
    And she was a member of the partisans, maybe yes, maybe no.
    She was a Polish patriot.
    She also engaged in all sorts of buy and sell,
    which is how you trade.
    This is how you survived in Poland at this time.
    Like black market.
    Yes.
    Exactly that.
    And she came to Mother one day, and she
    said she had this absolute deal, that there was some furs,
    that she has a seller, and she has a buyer.
    But she doesn't have money to pay for them right away.
    So if Mother has any money to give to her, and the next day,
    the money will come back.
    So Mother took the money that was supposed
    to pay for the runner to take us away from Zolochiv
    and gave it to Hela.
    A couple of days later, Hela comes back,
    and she says money's gone.
    And Father's very upset.
    Mother says she didn't think the false papers would
    have worked anyway.
    The runner comes in to take us through the German section.
    But we have no money to pay him.
    Father has no way to pay him.
    The runner says, well, that's OK because it's too dangerous now
    anyway, and he leaves.
    And this was probably the luckiest thing
    that ever happened to us.
    Why?
    Well, because very short period after, we get the news
    that the ghetto is surrounded.
    Everybody is being taken to the concentration camps.
    Now, the Gestapo had a list of people
    who lived outside the ghetto.
    And apparently, they came before they surrounded the ghetto
    and asked a woman on our street, do you have any Jews here?
    She said, no, no, no Jews in the street.
    She protected us.
    She sent them away.
    And there was-- in the building next to the one
    we were living outside the ghetto,
    there was a hiding place.
    So we hid there for a couple, three days.
    And Father had cyanide.
    He was planning that the whole time we would take cyanide.
    And about a couple of days where this last Aktion was
    being taken place, there's a knock
    on the cellar, the overhead door.
    And Hela comes.
    And she says great success in Africa in the war.
    We are going to win the war.
    It's a question of weeks, a question of months.
    Come with me to my place, which is a town called Yelykhovychi.
    It's about four miles from Zolochiv.
    And we also stayed with her over the summers.
    She said, I'll hide you.
    This is the woman that Mother gave the money to.
    So she says it's payback time.
    Ah.
    So she took all of us.
    She said, what we're going to do is there's
    going to be a mass, major mass.
    It's a major holiday.
    There'll be groups of people coming out of church.
    You're going to come with me.
    And the two Polish ladies in the next building
    said that they'll come escort us and some other young people.
    And you realize all of these people
    would have been killed if the Germans thought
    that they were protecting Jews.
    And I do remember that walk.
    So we're all walking after mass.
    So you come out from the cellar that you're hiding in.
    And do you go to the church and then come out?
    How is it?
    We go on the street and blend with the people who
    are coming out of the church.
    And we start walking.
    And we walked to Hela's place where
    we were hidden for 18 months.
    Wow.
    I have a technical question.
    Excuse me, I'm going to cough.
    It's OK.
    [COUGHS]
    Do you want to take a drink?
    I have--
    Yeah?
    My logistical question is, I want
    to go back to where the Germans surround the ghetto,
    and it's going to be kind of like the final action,
    even for people who have those permissions as special workers.
    For everybody, yes.
    OK.
    So if they have a list of people that they
    know live outside the ghetto who have these permits
    and they go to the street where they're supposedly living
    and a Gentile woman tells them, oh, there are no Jews here,
    they've got their list.
    So how come they believe her?
    Exactly.
    There were two lists.
    One was a Gestapo list, and one was
    a list of the stormtroopers organization, SS.
    We were not on the Gestapo list.
    Ah.
    OK.
    But you were on the stormtroopers' list.
    There may have been another list.
    But what happened is when the Judenrat, all of that,
    where outside the ghetto, this was all
    done very highly officially.
    Now, when Father-- when the people in charge of the factory
    panicked and they said they needed
    Father outside the ghetto so that they wouldn't get sick,
    then he got the permit from the guy
    who was in charge of whatever.
    Of the factory.
    Right.
    And apparently, we were not on the list
    that they used to round them up.
    And again, that's also in Father's book, right.
    OK, OK.
    But--
    It's those little things that make all the difference.
    Yeah.
    Yeah.
    And by such a thin--
    such a thin possibility is life and death in that situation.
    Absolutely.
    OK.
    So that helps explain why it is that even
    if you're outside the ghetto, you're not taken.
    You're not caught.
    You can hide.
    Were you the only ones in that space that was hiding?
    Or were there more people?
    I think we were the only ones at the end.
    They were coming and going, all of that.
    But the last one, Hela came.
    It was only us.
    OK.
    OK.
    All right.
    So you blend in.
    And you walk with the procession or the people leaving church.
    And do you walk to where she lives outside of town?
    Which is where-- this is in the village called Yelykhovychi,
    which is where we used to vacation during the summers.
    So we knew the place.
    OK.
    And it was about four kilometers or four miles?
    Four miles.
    All right.
    Well, it's a little bit of a walk, but not--
    yeah.
    Was this springtime, summertime?
    This was springtime.
    Was it Easter?
    Was it--
    April.
    It was in April.
    It could have been Easter.
    It could've been, yes.
    It could have been.
    And you say you spend the next 18 months there.
    Right.
    This was in April of '43 to August of '44.
    OK.
    And in that time, describe for me
    the house, the location, the surroundings.
    What did it all look like?
    And you at this time are six years old?
    Yes.
    OK.
    Six or seven.
    '43, seven.
    Yes.
    I was seven years old.
    I would say it's really mind boggling
    when you think about it.
    This was a house--
    would it help if I showed you the picture of it?
    The drawing of it?
    Later.
    Yeah, but now do it in words, and later, we may film it.
    Absolutely.
    This was a farmhouse that had a kitchen, very large--
    two very large rooms, another small room, and an outhouse,
    I guess.
    That's it.
    So when we got there, there were actually other Jews
    that were being hidden there.
    And we later found out that these people--
    that's Nusha Sternschuss, and her son Fred,
    who was like seven years older than I was--
    were actually the ones that suggested to Hela
    that she come and get us.
    Ah.
    But we did not know that at that time.
    And in that house besides Nusha and Fred, [? Rytele, ?]
    whose husband was a member of the Polish police.
    And he was the head of the police in Zolochiv.
    But there was also some suspicion
    that he cooperated with the Ukrainians.
    Anyway, he had to flee for his life from somebody.
    So it was Hela, and there were two more people.
    There was a stableman called [? Jashch. ?]
    And there was a friend of Hela's called Misha.
    [? Jashch ?] was Ukrainian.
    Misha was school teacher.
    She was Polish.
    Very complicated.
    Misha and [? Jashch ?] were lovers at some point.
    But also apparently, [? Jashch ?] and Hela
    were lovers at some point.
    [LAUGHS]
    But I did not know that at that time.
    This was just-- we found out later on.
    So in the beginning, they were very hospitable.
    But the way it ended up is that we
    were in the smaller of the three rooms.
    Grandma was with us, by the way.
    So there were the five of us plus Nusha and Fred.
    So there were seven of us.
    And Grandpa at this time, was he still in Lvov?
    He's still in Lvov.
    Yes.
    He's still in Lvov.
    He never comes to us, unfortunately.
    He was still in Lvov.
    So the issue was how to protect us.
    Nobody was supposed to know we were there.
    So Fred and [? Jashch ?] and Father
    dug out a dugout underneath the house.
    And I'm claustrophobic to this day,
    and I think that's probably from that time.
    So this was a space about 3 feet by 3 feet.
    And they put branches on the inside of it.
    And all of us would go in there one at a time
    and stay there if any strangers came into the house.
    And since I was the smallest, I was always
    at the far end, which could be my claustrophobia.
    And we would have to stay there sometimes for hours, sometimes
    for days if there were any strangers around the house.
    And if there were strangers come to the house,
    the signal was this woman Misha would start
    singing a song called [POLISH].
    I still know the melody of that.
    If you heard that song, that's when you had
    to crawl into the hiding place.
    And what is it--
    what's the translation of the name of the song?
    "Holiday Songs."
    "Holiday Songs."
    Right.
    No, I'm sorry.
    "Holiday Bells."
    "Holiday Bells."
    Yes.
    OK.
    But when there was nobody around,
    we were able to be in that room.
    And there was a stove in that room.
    Outside of that, there was this porch.
    And there was a large wardrobe on the porch.
    You know The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?
    It was a wardrobe like that.
    The bottom of it came out.
    And through that, you got into this underground tunnel--
    Oh my goodness.
    --where we were hiding in.
    Right.
    Oh my goodness.
    I mean, it's beyond unreal.
    When you look at that and when you think that my parents were
    in their 30s when they planned all of that,
    it's beyond belief.
    And when there was nobody around the house,
    we were able to be in that room.
    And what I remember is actually Fred.
    He probably say our parents' sanity.
    But they played a lot of games with us.
    There was a lot of lessons.
    We played-- when you have one long word
    and you can do many words with it.
    And they made a deck of cards.
    So they played cards.
    And as the children were being home schooled,
    I guess you call it these days--
    because we did reading.
    We did writing.
    We did arithmetic.
    We did all of that.
    The adults were very, very involved with us.
    So were you able to go--
    that is, feel safe to go to other rooms in the house
    even when there's nobody around?
    Into the kitchen, definitely.
    We would tend-- maybe go to the middle room.
    We never went outside.
    Never went outside the house.
    OK.
    And we had to stay inside so nobody would see us, right.
    Now that wardrobe, you say it was on the porch?
    Yes, but it was like a sheltered porch.
    It was a wooden porch.
    It wasn't outside.
    It wasn't outside, no.
    It was an inside porch.
    So if the song starts to be-- if you start hearing the song,
    someone outside the house would not
    see you opening the wardrobe.
    No, no, no, no, no.
    This was-- yes.
    OK.
    No one would know.
    Right.
    And--
    It is "Vechirni Dzvony."
    I think "Evening Bells" was the name of the song.
    OK.
    And the house itself, was it isolated from other dwellings?
    It was on a farm, yes.
    And were there other buildings on the farm, like a barn?
    Yes.
    And we spent some time in the barn also.
    Because at some point, the people who were hiding us
    got very nervous about us being in the house.
    SO there was a cellar under the barn.
    And we went in there for about three months.
    Oh my goodness.
    And that was very dangerous.
    Because once you were in there, you could not
    open it from the inside.
    So the only way you could open it from the outside,
    if somebody came and opened it.
    And we were there for three months during the summer.
    And then Father and Mother negotiated that it
    was getting cold in the barn.
    We cannot really stay there.
    So they let us back into the main house.
    And that is Hela and the other two people, the--
    [? Jashch ?] and Misha, right.
    OK.
    OK.
    But this is-- I mean, it gets more--
    you wouldn't believe what really went on.
    Later, we picked up two more people.
    Just you had asked about the farm.
    I think one of the reasons we were able to survive
    was there was a farm, and you could grow vegetables on it.
    So you could get food.
    But even though there were large quantities of food,
    we're pretty sure that some neighbors knew about us
    because they could see--
    they could have a feeling about it.
    There was actually one woman who really knew about us,
    that we were hiding there.
    And then there was another Jewish woman who
    knew Mother and who knew Nusha.
    And she had a little girl a older
    than we were who had been hidden by a Christian woman.
    And she converted, the little girl.
    And she kept not wanting to be Jewish.
    She was very troublesome.
    And I remember that Edith and Nusha and I had these talks
    that women, girls could pass, but boys can't.
    And of course, we didn't know what
    circumcision was, what it was.
    So we tried to figure out what it was--
    Why girls could pass but boys couldn't.
    But boys couldn't, right.
    And we couldn't really figure it out
    till we were much older, right.
    Yeah.
    So it sounds like there was a bit of comings and goings
    on this place.
    Yes, there were these two extra women.
    And later, there was another woman.
    There was another woman.
    There was another group in the barn.
    So Hela saved 15 people altogether.
    That's pretty amazing.
    It's absolutely beyond amazing.
    It gets really more amazing as you continue the story.
    And I remember some incidents.
    When Sandjesh, who's a Ukrainian man, just said,
    I have enough of this.
    I don't want to hide the Jews anymore.
    We have to-- and I remember that scene.
    He ran out of the house, and Father ran after him.
    And we were all kind of terrified about it.
    So there were these flashes of things happening.
    Well, I can imagine that the pressure and the nerves--
    Oh, yes.
    --the nerves being frayed.
    Yes.
    And people in close quarters under fear.
    It doesn't bring out the best in folks.
    Of course, we were younger, and we were sheltered from it.
    But if you read Fred's book, who was 15 at this point,
    and his father was killed, he saw his father
    die before he went into hiding.
    You could see that he was--
    it was very difficult for him.
    But our parents sheltered us from a lot.
    And he became a very well known writer and television producer
    in Israel.
    But he could see the end of his life.
    Did this leave a mark on you?
    Well, probably less-- there were six of us
    children who survived the war.
    You know the statistics, right?
    15,000 Jews started in Zolochiv.
    70 survived.
    And they were among us--
    the six children among them.
    So the odds were quite something.
    Edith probably also told you that one of the six
    won the Nobel Prize.
    No, she didn't.
    Yes, Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1981.
    What was that person's name?
    Roald Hoffmann.
    Roald?
    Roald Hoffmann.
    Roald Hoffmann.
    H-O-F-F-M-A-N-N.
    OK.
    So when you think of what was lost in the Holocaust.
    But we were-- we were not the only ones who
    survived with two parents.
    But I think our parents were unusually solid and protective.
    So I think both Edith and I came out much better
    than some of the other children.
    Like Sue Gold when we were hiding
    and we were talking about splitting families up.
    She had a little brother who was a year younger than I was.
    And he cried a lot.
    So when time came to hide in the actions,
    his grandmother took the little boy into one hiding spot.
    And Sue and her parents went into another hiding spot.
    And they discovered the little boy and the grandmother,
    who didn't survive.
    So Sue, of course, was very much affected by that.
    Edith and I both made it.
    And I give her a lot of credit because she
    wouldn't stay given away.
    She came back no matter what.
    Yeah.
    She came back when the time was right.
    Now it's just to tell you how incredible this story
    is, when we were in hiding, one day,
    a whole group of SS troopers came in front of the house.
    And they essentially commandeered the house
    for themselves.
    Of course, we all went into the hiding nook.
    But Hela gave them this main room.
    At that time, it was the end of '43, beginning of '44.
    So it's winter.
    But they were very paranoid, the SS,
    because there was a lot of partisan activities hunting
    them for a change.
    So they were outside a lot.
    And they had the kitchen.
    And they gave a lot of their food
    to Hela, who give the food to us.
    And the fact that there were SS around the house
    protected the house from Ukrainian and Polish roaming
    bands.
    So we actually had protection with the SS people right there.
    And this happened like a couple of different times.
    Was the house ever--
    I mean, did such bands ever really attack the house
    or come to the house?
    No.
    No.
    But our keepers sometimes did not feel comfortable
    staying in the house at night.
    So they would leave and just leave us there.
    And there was one occasion when a group, a German group--
    whether it was SS or Wehrmacht, I don't remember--
    came into the-- came in the front.
    They started knocking on the door.
    What us hidden Jews--
    this is again from what I hear from my parents--
    were afraid of if the house was empty, they would come inside,
    and they would search, and they'll find us.
    So Mother and Nusha--
    everybody else went into the hiding place.
    And Mother and Nusha went out and greeted the Germans
    at the door.
    Nusha spoke excellent German, even though she
    was warned not to talk Polish.
    But she kind of panicked, and she forgot.
    So they pretended that they were Polish ladies of the house.
    So the SS guy said, how come you speak excellent German?
    And she said, well, I was really working in Germany
    during the war, but I came back to marry a Polish guy.
    And the Germans couldn't have been more of gentlemen.
    They came back with a box of candy and whatever
    for Mother and Nusha.
    And then they went out to do something.
    And then Nusha panicked because she
    realized she spoke this excellent German,
    and she shouldn't have.
    So she went back into the hiding place, just left Mother--
    Alone.
    --alone.
    And Mother did a very good job.
    She was social, as I mentioned before.
    She had good cold blood, and carried it off.
    And then the Germans left.
    So when our keepers--
    but they said they'll be back the next day.
    So when our keepers came home, they asked what happened,
    and they were told.
    When the Germans came back, they said
    who are those two lovely ladies that come out last time?
    And Hela said, oh, they're our relatives from another city.
    They went back home.
    So these were the things that tested people's nerves.
    And I'm just mentioning one or two occasions.
    But there was a lot of very bloody--
    and it was all blind / I mean, how did--
    Did people argue with each other?
    Oh, yes.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    As I said, a lot of people in a small area.
    And this lady, Eva and [? Wusha. ?]
    there was not good chemistry there.
    So there were arguments.
    You mean Eva and [? Wusha ?] were the mother
    with the child who converted?
    Right, was older then-- no, no.
    Eva and [? Wusha ?] was the woman with the little girl
    who converted to Christianity.
    Right.
    By the way, I'm just backtracking for a minute.
    If you think how all these people slept in one room,
    there was one bed there.
    And Grandmother and I had the bed.
    Everybody else had pallets on the floor.
    Oh my goodness.
    And they cleaned up afterwards.
    And it was a four poster bed.
    Memories are coming up as I'm talking to you.
    Yeah, yeah.
    Mm-hmm.
    And I had nightmares that there were devils dancing on the four
    poster areas of the bed, right.
    Well, no matter how much there is an attempt to protect you,
    something comes through.
    Yeah, there were periods we were scared.
    No question, especially when we were in the tunnel.
    Yeah.
    And, yeah.
    But again, Edith was a year older.
    She had some good memories from before the war.
    I didn't.
    I didn't know any different, being scared and having
    to hide.
    And--
    That was normal for you.
    That was normal, yeah.
    Anyway, how we try and figure this out, it was normal.
    And that's why I was very--
    Edith wanted to go back after the war, which we did.
    I was very apprehensive because I had no good memories.
    But she did.
    Edith wanted to do what?
    Go back to Poland afterwards.
    I didn't.
    But I went, and I'm glad.
    Yeah?
    Yeah.
    When did you go?
    We went back in 1990.
    So decades later.
    Oh, yeah.
    Well, the area we were in become part of Russia.
    And they did not allow foreigners in that area
    until Gorbachev and Glasnost Then we could come.
    Yeah, and then you could visit.
    Well, I'm jumping ahead.
    But tell me, why are you glad that you went back
    when you did?
    This involves a little bit of thought to answer that one.
    I guess I saw the house where I was born.
    I saw the attic.
    I saw where we were hiding.
    And I remembered that there were good people that saved us,
    I think.
    But the city was Russian.
    All the signs were Russian.
    The street names were Russian.
    It was not home anymore.
    There was no feeling of going back to any roots.
    We asked about Jews in town, and they
    said there was one Jewish man left, an old man.
    But he left a little while before we left.
    And there was like nothing to go back to.
    But we did run into a woman that remembered Father.
    That's something.
    Yes.
    And I was wondering how she would--
    she said a couple of interesting things.
    One of them, she went through the Russian occupation,
    the German occupation.
    And she really remembered him as a wonderful man
    and a grand old time.
    And then she whispered to me, they're
    going to kill all of us.
    And I said, who's going to kill whom?
    And she said, the Ukrainians are going to kill all the Poles,
    because that part of Poland was given to Ukraine.
    And a part of Germany was given back to the Poles.
    And a lot of Poles left at that time.
    So we're talking of post-war borders.
    So the fate of this part of the world didn't change.
    It still was transferred to somebody else.
    And Poland then had her borders go further west.
    Correct.
    She lost in the east.
    She goes further in the west
    Right.
    OK.
    Right.
    And when we went also to the western part,
    and there were lots of Poles there also.
    But they said it's not going to last long because the Germans
    are going to come back.
    And they're not going to conquer us.
    They're going to buy us.
    And there were a lot of German factories and things
    like that over there, yes.
    Well, it's also said between East and West Germany
    that it's not so much that East and West Germany united as West
    Germany bought East Germany.
    People talk about that.
    They wanted it together, right.
    Yeah.
    But we started with the question of,
    you were glad that you went back.
    It gave you something.
    It gave me something, yes.
    And I'm wondering how to put into words
    what that something was.
    Again, great disappointment in Zolochiv
    that it became a Russian city.
    But the feeling of seeing the house where you were born
    and the park where you used to play with, and there
    was some reality to that.
    That's what I really wanted to see,
    to walk the streets where we used to walk.
    And yes, everybody spoke Polish.
    And I never felt that I was Polish.
    I felt I was Jewish.
    To this day when somebody asks me,
    oh, you were born in Poland.
    Are you Polish?
    I always say, well, I was born in Poland,
    but I'm a Polish Jew.
    You do not feel--
    like, you can be an American.
    You don't say I'm American Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim.
    But in Poland, you're a Catholic or you're the other.
    You're strange.
    And that was reinforced when we went back.
    There was nothing in the Jewish cemetery.
    There was nothing.
    But we went to Kraków in the very early days before
    Schindler's List.
    And it was very sad.
    And then when we came back after Schindler's List,
    there was a museum, and there was so much rebuilding.
    We were back actually three times.
    To Poland.
    To Poland.
    And each time, we had an anti-Semitic incident
    that happened
    Oh, that's so sad.
    Yes.
    You see, the thing is we speak Polish.
    So it's easier for us to tell what people are saying.
    And I've had Americans come back saying, oh, this is wonderful.
    And I'm not sure that I see what's going on.
    Having said that, in each case, we
    had a Pole that interceded for us, saying we're
    not all like that.
    Don't--
    Don't carry this as the only image.
    Yes.
    OK.
    Do you want to relay what some of those incidents were or not?
    Sure.
    Would you like to hear that?
    Yeah, yeah.
    Well, this was our first visit to Poland.
    And--
    That would have been 1990.
    1990, right.
    And we were coming back on a train from--
    it's really pretty complicated.
    But anyway, at some point, we were on a train from Przemysl.
    I think we were going to Krakow at that point.
    And Polish trains are like European trains.
    So you have the compartments, and there
    are three people sitting in each side of a compartment.
    So I was sitting by the door.
    The next seat was empty.
    And my friend, the one who lost her brother,
    was in the end seat.
    So that's Susan Gold.
    Susan Gold, right.
    And then Edith was across for me,
    and then Jack was on the other side.
    And so there were four of us in the compartment.
    There were two empty seats.
    And the door opens, and a very, very drunken Pole
    says, plenty of room, plenty of room, plenty of room.
    And I said, no, there isn't plenty of room in here.
    And they start inveighing against not only Jews,
    Americans, dirty Jews.
    And we were kind of shocked kind of sitting there.
    So another Pole comes down the corridor
    and grabs him by the scruff of his neck and says,
    we're not all like this, and--
    Pushes him.
    --pushes him away, right.
    And then he was very helpful getting our luggage out
    of the car and all of that.
    OK.
    And then we were at a Warsaw train station again.
    And we were with a group before Poles and things like that.
    And they said there's a lot of beggars around and all of that,
    but don't give them money, which is problematical.
    But usually, I tend to give people money.
    So we go up to waiting for the train.
    We were going to go into Breslau, which is Wroclaw.
    And we're standing there, and the middle-aged woman,
    Polish woman, approaches us and asks for money.
    And I didn't even say no.
    I kind of hesitated.
    And she started inveighing against all the Jews,
    back again and taking our money again and stuff of that type.
    That's two.
    The third one was just big swastikas
    on Holocaust monuments.
    So I'm afraid that's still there in Poland.
    And yet I had my sister-in-law go
    and had a wonderful time with a Jewish revival scene in Krakow.
    I know of that.
    Let's go back to Hela's farmhouse.
    Yes.
    Was there a woods nearby--
    Yes.
    --near the farm?
    OK.
    Were there other farm houses that could see her house?
    Oh, no, no.
    But the woods are the killing woods.
    That's where they took all the Jews from the ghetto.
    Oh.
    And we knew that.
    And we heard the shots for quite a few nights.
    Oh my goodness.
    Yeah.
    And I think there are people that came recently from Israel
    and put up some monuments there.
    OK.
    Now you say you stayed there until August '44.
    Right.
    What happened in August '44?
    In August '44, the Russians came.
    And they came in from the east.
    And again, lots of bombing, and the Russians
    were very well organized.
    They wouldn't move until they bombed the cities flat.
    And then they would come in.
    And so they did.
    And--
    And you're seven or eight years old at this time.
    This is 1940--
    4.
    4.
    So I'm eight.
    Right.
    So they came.
    And Father went to meet them, and he
    speaks Russian and all of that.
    A lot of the officers in the Russian army were Jewish.
    But they would not--
    they would not confess to that.
    They would tell Father, I'm Jewish.
    But there was enough anti-Semitism
    in the Russian army that they were
    afraid to speak out loud that they're Jews,
    although some did.
    But as soon as they-- they would ask us 'jevrej,"
    and we said, "Jewish."
    So then there was a couple of days everybody was saying,
    oh my god, they brought us food, and they were really very good.
    And then the Germans counterattacked.
    So Hela said now everybody knows you're here.
    You have to get out of here.
    So after not being outside, we started
    walking to get away from the front lines.
    And I remember that very well also,
    because the Russians had a gun they called the Katyusha.
    Katyusha.
    You've heard of the Katyusha?
    It sounds like very loud, very rapid machine gun fire.
    So I remember walking along the pathway.
    There was the tanks coming this way and the Katyushas overhead.
    And I think I was beyond being scared.
    It's just pretty overwhelming.
    You just fall to the ground whenever you hear the Katyusha.
    But there's a limit to how far we
    would walk because we have not had any exercise
    or anything like that.
    So I do remember that walk.
    I don't know how far we walked.
    But at some point, we stopped, and some Russian soldiers
    gave us food.
    And we waited in the fields.
    Oh, so you were in the fields rather than in the woods.
    Well, woods, there was a road.
    And there was a woods right next to it.
    But there was some grass in between,
    because we didn't walk among the trees.
    We walked on the grass.
    And I think we stayed like a night at most,
    maybe two nights there.
    And then the Russians counterattacked.
    And we were able to get back.
    OK.
    And then once we got back, then Father said--
    they waited until Zolochiv was liberated, which took a while.
    And after that, he went--
    it was only like four miles.
    He went to town.
    And in between, there were people coming out
    of hiding and talking.
    And they said that Zolochiv was demolished completely.
    What about my factory?
    Completely demolished, completely demolished.
    But when Father went back, he found that was not true.
    There were a couple of bombs fell nearby.
    But it was not completely demolished.
    And a few of the workers were still there.
    And they said to Father, come back.
    And Father said, how can I be the one?
    Everybody's gone.
    There's nobody there.
    If you come back, then maybe you can come back
    to your apartment, the apartment you were talking about.
    And Father was helped by a few of the workers.
    They got the workers together and were
    able to-- some of the machines were gone.
    But a lot of them were left.
    And the old story--
    a bureaucratic army needs printers.
    And Father had to Cyrillic font, which nobody else had.
    So the Russians came in.
    And again, can you do any printing?
    But there was no paper.
    The Russians said, we'll get your paper.
    And Father was able to get the factory working.
    Of course, it was nationalized again
    about four different times.
    But again, he had different boss and everything.
    But he was running the place.
    Were you living in your old apartment again?
    Yes, yes.
    But it was a very uncertain.
    There still were a lot of people being sent to Siberia.
    I wanted to ask, do you know what happened to Hela?
    If her husband had been a police chief,
    that would not make her very safe at that point.
    Well, I think the way they had it figured out--
    and this is, again, overhearing what grown-ups were talking,
    not my turn, that if the Russians and Americans won,
    she and he would be protected because they hid Jews.
    If the Germans won, he would probably betray his wife,
    and he would be protected because he
    was with the Ukrainians and the Germans.
    I see.
    Yes.
    So they both survived.
    He actually came back after a while, but then he left again.
    I don't think they ever lived together
    for any period of time.
    [? Jashch ?] and Misha got married.
    Yes.
    For a while, it sounds like hippie land
    out there on the farm.
    And Hela slept with a lot of the Germans.
    And that probably helped us all to survive.
    Again, this is overhearing grown-ups.
    This is not something that children figure out
    on their own.
    Yeah.
    But Hela unfortunately died of cancer.
    [PHONE RINGS]
    Rolling.
    So you were telling me about Hela and what happened to her.
    Yes.
    She unfortunately died of cancer in about 1956.
    [? Jashch ?] and Misha got married.
    And he was alive until I think mid-'70s maybe, '80.
    Now, after everything ends, and as I had asked during this time
    is that the stress was there, the nerves were frayed,
    there were arguments and things, did people make up?
    Oh, yes.
    So these were not the kind of arguments that cause
    rifts that can't be repaired.
    No.
    Well, I think as far as our family was concerned,
    that was true.
    But Fred and Nusha I don't think ever
    recovered from their arguments with Eva and [? Wusha ?]
    because the four of them went to Israel.
    And when we went to Israel to visit them,
    Fred discouraged us very strongly
    from visiting [? Wusha ?] and Eva.
    And they were difficult, I must admit.
    They were difficult. And they tried
    to convert me to Catholicism and our parents
    were worried, because they thought Edith had more brains
    and that I was more susceptible, perhaps.
    But I think in the end, everybody
    realized we are in this together.
    But still, human beings are human beings.
    So that was--
    For those of us who have not been through something
    like that, it is, for me, always a mystery
    and a bit of a wonder of when sometimes people
    cross the line that can never be repaired,
    and sometimes when it can be stretched.
    But they realize that it's the circumstances that
    made these things happen rather than the differences that
    are inherent between people.
    I don't think there were any lines that
    couldn't be repaired.
    But when you think about the pressure
    that everybody was under, it's amazing.
    I mean, I was thinking of our parents.
    And they were playing games with us
    and teaching us and doing so many things with us.
    And I know that is not true because I
    know some other children who are in similar circumstances,
    and their parents did not hold up the way our parents did.
    It's incredible.
    Because at the same time as they're playing games,
    they have to be aware of all these other things
    and keep that in mind.
    And we were very well schooled.
    And Fred deserves a lot of credit.
    I still remember him trying to--
    I'm a monotone.
    I can't sing.
    I still remember him trying to sing me--
    there's a song, very patriotic Polish song
    that the young boy is dying from a bullet wound in his chest,
    and he's bleeding.
    And he's just singing to his mother,
    "The only thing I'm sorry about is
    I'm leaving you behind and Poland behind."
    And he tried to get me to sing that on key.
    Never made it.
    [LAUGHS]
    You could never get that one.
    No.
    I think Edith got it finally.
    OK.
    Did your parents' personalities change, do you think?
    Well, I know that my mother was pretty anxious after the war.
    Now, whether that was because of the war,
    because I didn't know her that much before the war.
    But there was anxiety there, yes.
    And your father?
    My father probably less so.
    Probably less so.
    Because I think he was very, here's the problem.
    Let's find the solution, rather than overthinking it, yes.
    What happened with Grandfather, and when did it happen?
    And when did you find out?
    Well, Father called right after we were liberated.
    And he was told by some people they were in a concentration
    camp in Lvov.
    But that was in Lvov.
    When they had an action to take them to one of the mains
    places like Auschwitz or Dachau, that Grandfather took poison.
    But Father-- there were several people who told him that.
    But Father never believed that.
    And for years and years afterwards, he
    would scour every source, check every source
    of possible knowledge, and was never
    able to find anything, any sign that he survived.
    So it's most probably that people who said
    that he took poison were true.
    Mm.
    And they were in their early '50s.
    But people say we were so lucky, which we were so lucky.
    So when we came to America, there
    were headlines in the newspapers that a intact family
    has arrived.
    But Father lost both his parents.
    So we didn't quit make it.
    Yeah, it wasn't completely unscathed.
    Wasn't completely unscathed, no.
    And I suspect that in that situation,
    it is very bittersweet because, yes, you know you're lucky.
    But that doesn't mean that there wasn't suffering
    and that there wasn't fear and that there wasn't great danger,
    as you have described for us.
    Yes.
    And I know there were periods--
    again, listening when our hosts would go away for several days,
    we had no food.
    And we know we would go hungry for a while.
    I think the kids, they were always short,
    but said there were periods of hunger
    and certainly limited food in the ghetto
    and before all of that.
    But we were so much luckier than people who wound up
    at a concentration camp.
    And we knew that.
    We knew that, yes.
    So for a while then, you come back to Zolochiv.
    Yes.
    Your father goes back to the factory.
    It gets nationalized and the same sort of-- it
    sounds like deja vu all over again.
    Deportations start again and some shootings
    of people who were enemies of the state
    and things of that type.
    And Father decides that he needs to leave.
    And because this part of Poland was given to Russia,
    people who were Polish were given permission
    to move to the western part.
    And you were citizens of Poland.
    We were citizens of Poland.
    So we would theoretically be free to leave,
    except they wouldn't let Father go
    because he was indispensable to the operating of the factory.
    But Mother and us were able to go.
    And did you?
    And we did.
    And Father was able to sneak away
    when his boss was on vacation.
    But believe it or not, it was not
    safe to travel as Jews in Poland at that time.
    So we actually used those Polish Christian papers we had.
    Really?
    Yes.
    When you were-- what was it?
    Your name was Bulka?
    Bulski.
    Bulski.
    By the way, I still have the cross that I wore.
    Again, since I was Jewish looking,
    they gave me a big cross.
    And Edith was not so Jewish looking,
    just had a little medallion.
    And I still have the cross.
    I have it here because I have given it to someone.
    They gave it back to me.
    Well, we didn't realize that that was a mourning cross
    because it's inlaid with ebony, and there's
    a little statue of Jesus on it.
    Oh, my.
    So we changed our names to travel through Poland.
    What year was this?
    This was in the beginning of 1945.
    Ah, so the war is still going on.
    Yes.
    Yes.
    OK, the war is not over.
    All right.
    But in our part, it is over.
    Yeah, of course.
    But it's not over--
    In Germany.
    --in Germany, right.
    So we're again traveling, and there's a number
    of towns we go through.
    And finally, Father-- by the way, Father
    has bleeding ulcers.
    So in all of this, he had several major attacks
    that were life-threatening.
    But he recovers.
    And then he runs, in a town called Katowice,
    into a man that had the biggest pharmaceutical printing
    factory in Poland.
    So his competitor.
    His competitor.
    Except he was the salesman.
    And his technical guy, who was Ukrainian, had to leave.
    So he asked Father would he join with him
    to run the factory, still under an assumed name
    because that guy was Polish Christian.
    So we are living there.
    But does he know the real name?
    Does he know it's really--
    He does.
    He does.
    He knows who your father really is.
    But the decision was it's safer.
    Because when the Jews came out of hiding, a lot of Poles said,
    well, the Germans didn't do a good enough job
    and things of that type.
    So the decision was made that he would live under assumed names.
    It was a town called Cieszyn.
    It was right next to Czechoslovakia.
    And so we get enrolled in school with good Catholic children.
    I am in a panic because I'm getting
    ready for first communion.
    And if God finds out that I'm Jewish
    and I get first communion--
    You poor thing.
    --first communion under--
    Under false pretenses.
    --under false pretenses, I'm going to burn in hell forever.
    So this is not a happy period for me, right.
    And Father is beginning to get very concerned
    that people will recognize him.
    Because the pharmaceuticals, he already
    runs into people who remember him from old times.
    He says, we have to get out of here.
    So we cross the border from Poland to Czechoslovakia.
    You can have a day pass illegally.
    And I'm the chief smuggler because I'm
    very small and thin.
    So they gave me just about, which is filled maybe
    with some money.
    I don't know.
    Maybe jewels.
    And I put it there on my waist.
    And then the family just goes for a day trip over the border
    and get rid of the stuff.
    You don't come back.
    You come back.
    We did this two or three or four times.
    Oh, really?
    Yes.
    So you went over, and you come back.
    And you come back.
    And then finally, when we get the stuff
    we need to Czechoslovakia, we go to Czechoslovakia.
    Again, traveled for a number of towns.
    Father wants to make contact with the United States forces
    in Germany.
    So all kinds of adventures.
    And finally, the only way you can
    get across the German border is what's
    happening today between the United States and Mexico.
    You hire guards, and they smuggle you.
    And you go in the middle of the night through the forest.
    And was the war over?
    Pardon me?
    At this point, the war is over, yes.
    Because the United States troops are in--
    Bavaria.
    --Bavaria.
    So this is essentially the end of 1945.
    And so essentially, Father hires a guide.
    And I, again, remember this, the immigrant children
    going through the woods.
    And we get essentially caught by the Polish guards.
    I'm sorry, Czech guards because we're in Czechoslovakia.
    And they take away the luggage.
    And the guide say, forget your luggage.
    Go through.
    Father says, no.
    Because in that suitcase, you'll see a lot of pictures
    here, like my mother, my grandmother, and all of that.
    And I have to backtrack a little bit.
    When we came back to Zolochiv after we were liberated,
    we found somebody was in our apartment.
    And we had all these albums, these pictures.
    And they tore all the pictures out,
    and they were all over the floor.
    And Father gathered them all.
    This were pre-war pictures.
    So he hid them in that suitcase that the Czech guards
    took away.
    So Father says he was not leaving without it.
    People said it was crazy.
    So he goes to the station, to the Czech station.
    And he tells the officer in charge
    that these are pictures of my parents and my grandparents.
    I can't leave them behind.
    So the officer opens the suitcase.
    And there was my grandfather's picture, which
    we have there right on top.
    And he closes the suitcase, and he
    says, go with God or something like that.
    And he lets Father go with all of his luggage.
    So we cross over Germany.
    And then again, lots of adventures.
    We can't go through them in a short period of time.
    But eventually, Father makes contact with the American army
    and he's hired by HIAS.
    Ah.
    Because Father speaks a lot of languages.
    So he was helping with displaced people from a lot of countries.
    And we were quartered, I remember that,
    in Munich in a house of a German woman within like--
    her husband was a prisoner of war.
    She wasn't too happy about it.
    But we make contact with some wonderful Americans.
    It was somebody called Dr. Elias and some others.
    And then after a while, Father was given--
    we had an uncle in Brooklyn, who sponsored us.
    So we were actually on the second ship
    of displaced persons, came over in 1946.
    That's early.
    It was great here.
    And do remember the name of the ship?
    Marine Flasher.
    I've heard Marine Flasher before.
    You've heard that name before.
    Yeah, yeah.
    And I think it sailed from Bremen.
    It usually did, from--
    or was yours from--
    Bremerhaven.
    It was from Bremerhaven.
    There was a very--
    accident on that-- when we were on it, we heard somebody
    jumped overboard.
    And we later heard that there was
    an SS officer who was pretending to be Jewish,
    and somebody recognized him.
    Oh my goodness.
    Oh my goodness.
    Your father had a great deal of foresight.
    I mean, if you just--
    I mean-- I mean, this was five years.
    And when you think of everything that he did.
    But he always said, there were other people
    who are just as foresighted as I was, but their luck ran out.
    And that was true.
    That was true.
    We were just incredibly lucky.
    OK.
    Because if you think that 70 people remain out of 15,000.
    And I must say that Father--
    and he was very proud of it.
    There were Jews, believe it or not, collaborated.
    There were people that joined the Judenrat.
    And he was asked many times to join the Judenrat,
    and we'd get extra rations and everything.
    He would never do that.
    We came here, we didn't have a penny.
    Well, not quite true.
    Father-- when we went into hiding, there
    was a Ukrainian woman that was engaged to a Jewish man who
    didn't survive.
    But Mother gave her some of our jewelry.
    [PHONE RINGS]
    Mother gave us some of her jewelry.
    And she gave back every bit of it.
    Oh, my.
    A lot of people whom Father and Mother gave things, they
    just said it either was stolen, or they
    had to live on it, which was probably true.
    But we had these few pieces of jewelry,
    which enabled us to have something
    when we came to United States.
    But still, we had enough to give a couple of things to the kids.
    And Father-- I mean, both my parents were lawyers.
    Father worked as a night-time cashier at a place
    like [INAUDIBLE],, one of those 24 hours, went to school,
    got an MBA, and became vice president for Remco toy
    company.
    And Mother started a new luncheon in Greenwich Village.
    And so we always had food.
    And they just kept going.
    And your grandmother came with you.
    Your maternal grandmother came with you.
    Yes, and that was quite a story.
    As we disembarked from Ellis Island,
    her sweetheart from 45 years ago was there to meet us.
    His wife had just died a year ago.
    And they met, and they got married again.
    They got married.
    Unfortunately, he didn't live long after that.
    But that was a real--
    What a lovely ending for her.
    That was a wonderful ending.
    And by the way, she never let go of kashrut.
    And she would not touch any meat or anything.
    And you know something?
    Every person who hid us or who came to us respected her.
    And they went out of the way to get some food
    that she could eat.
    And she really feels that that's what's saved us, that she never
    let go of God, right.
    Yeah.
    Well, it sounds like we've come close to--
    An end.
    Yes, yes.
    I'm sure there are many things that we could add to it.
    In one interview, you can never capture it all.
    I mean, it's five years, right.
    Yeah.
    I'd like to give you the final word in the sense
    of, what would you like people to take away
    when they hear your story, when they listen to it?
    What would you like them to understand from it?
    Well, it's still appalls me the evil that exists.
    But then in spite of all of that,
    when you think of the people who saved us and helped us
    all along, who would've been killed
    and their families would've been killed, it's amazing.
    I sometimes think what I would have done if I
    was in a situation like that.
    And I'm very glad that's Helena Szczulczewska
    is recognized on the Wall of the Righteous
    in the Holocaust Museum.
    And I just found out that [? Gresh ?] [? Tiss, ?] who is
    the Ukrainian man, is on the Wall of the Righteous
    in Israel.
    OK.
    Yes.
    Because there would have been no miracle
    without these incredibly brave people.
    And Father talked to us about that,
    that the reason they did it was because they
    were people of faith.
    I couldn't think of a better note to end on.
    Thank you very, very much.
    Well, thank you for coming and for listening.
    Wow.
    It's an honor.
    It's an honor.
    Well, I tend to--
    it's odd, but for a long, long time, I wouldn't talk about it.
    My children say that I never talk to them about it.
    But I'm 83.
    So it feels at some point, you feel
    you're like the last generation.
    And you really need to make people realize.
    And I just hope that something like that never happens.
    But if you look around the war now--
    Yeah, evil is still there.
    Hate is still there.
    And innocent people still are suffering.
    No question about it.
    No question about it, yeah.
    And I know that the museum, that only looks--
    people are saying, yes, there are different holocausts,
    which is true.
    But when you think of what we went through,
    which is five-year-old children being herded into gas chambers,
    our problem was that we thought that west was civilized,
    I think.
    Yeah.
    You never know what beast is in there.
    How could people do things like that?
    I mean, that's an unanswered question.
    As much as one can do historical research
    and look at ideology and beliefs and all of that,
    it still remains a great unanswered question.
    Yes.
    Yeah.
    Thank you.
    Thank you.
    OK.
    And thank you, Gus.
    OK.
    He was standing all along.
    And I will say that this concludes the United States
    Holocaust Memorial Museum interview with Mrs. Selma
    Tennenbaum Rossen on September 20, 2019.
    Thanks again.
    And thank you.
    So tell me, who is in this photograph right here?
    These are my maternal grandparents, Basha
    and Solomon Horowitz.
    Solomon unfortunately died just after the First World War
    in a railroad accident.
    An agrarian accident.
    Yes.
    And Basha survived the war, came with us to New York.
    And when we disembarked at Ellis Island,
    her sweetheart of 45 years ago was waiting for her.
    And they got married after she came here.
    She was 65 years old.
    What a lovely story.
    It is a wonderful story, yes.
    OK.
    Thank you for sharing that photo.
    OK, now you want--
    OK.
    Tell me, what is this photograph of?
    These are our parents.
    These are my parents, who met when they were very young.
    I think they were both 16 or 17 at this point.
    And they were both in gymnasium, which is a high school.
    And you can see how they feel about each other.
    [LAUGHS]
    And they went through high school together,
    and they went to college together,
    and they went to a life together.
    Oh, my.
    And so on the left is Elizabeth Horowitz.
    Elizabeth Horowitz.
    And on the right--
    Was Lipa Shmul Tennenbaum.
    Now he was a little upset--
    or, no, he wasn't upset.
    His mother was upset when he was named
    by a very Orthodox grandfather, who was Lipa Shmul.
    And Mother was named by a much more secular.
    So she was Elizabeth.
    I see.
    OK.
    And this photo you think is taken when they're teenagers?
    16 or 17, yes.
    OK.
    All right, so this would have been the mid-'20s, sometime
    around then.
    Yes.
    All right, thank you very much.
    Absolutely.

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Selma Tennenbaum Rossen, born in 1936 in Zloczow, Poland (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), discusses her experiences during WWII; the Soviet occupation beginning in 1939; the German occupation beginning in 1941; being interned in a ghetto; being allowed to leave with her parents who were laborers for the Germans; and moving in 1943 to a hiding place on a farm, where Polish friends hid them for 18 months.
    Interviewee
    Selma Tennenbaum Rossen
    Interviewer
    Navazelskis, Ina
    Date
    interview:  2019 September 20
    Geography
    creation: Morris County (N.J.)

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    1 digital file : MP4.

    Rights & Restrictions

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

    Copyright Holder
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

    Keywords & Subjects

    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 Selma Tennenbaum Rossen on September 20, 2019 in Springfield, NJ.
    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 08:06:19
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn709456

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    Oral history interview with Miriam Storch Lewent

    Oral history interview with Miriam Storch Lewent

    Oral History

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    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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