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Oral history interview with Noemi Stern

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 2020.219.1 | RG Number: RG-50.030.1073

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    Oral history interview with Noemi Stern
    Transcript

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    Good afternoon, Noemi.
    Good afternoon.
    Today is June 10, 2020.
    This is a interview with Noemi Stern.
    My name is Yael Siman.
    Noemi, do you agree to be recorded today?
    Yes, I do.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    So we'll start, Noemi.
    So what is your full name.
    My name is Noemi Stern, Salamonovitz
    on my mother's side.
    But by birth, my name was Noemi Agnes Silberberg.
    Can you tell me, where were you born and when were you born?
    I was born in Budapest, Hungary on December 30 of 1943.
    What were the names of your biological parents, Noemi?
    My mother's name was Edit, in Hebrew Rivka, Salamonovitz
    Horowitz, and my father's name was Abraham Bumi Silberberg
    Bernstein.
    Did you have any siblings?
    No.
    And what were the names of your adoptive parents?
    My mother was Ilonka Salamonovitz,
    but I married when she--
    Stern when she got married, and her husband
    was Moore Moshe Stern Boxhorn.
    Do you have any siblings?
    Yes, I have three siblings.
    My oldest sister is Judith, in Hebrew Sarah.
    She is-- by marriage she is Nurko.
    She lives in Israel.
    And then comes my brother, Arthur Abraham Shmuel Benjamin
    Stern, who lives in Teaneck, New Jersey.
    And then comes my sister, Yergi Rahel,
    who lives in Mexico City.
    And those are the three of them.
    Thank you.
    What memories do you have of your childhood?
    Well, not too many because I was too young.
    I was 2 and 1/2 months old when the Germans came into Budapest,
    which was on March 19 of 1943.
    I know that we had to be hiding and we went from place
    to place, to several safe houses,
    and we ended up in the one that was set up
    by Raul Wallenberg, who was a Swedish diplomat in Budapest.
    For some time we had to hide in the Jewish ghetto that
    was set up just then, and I was with my mother
    at my grandmother's, my paternal grandmother's
    home that was in that area.
    But I don't remember any of this.
    All of this was told to me.
    And I know that my father was taken, even before the Germans
    came in, to labor camp, which is the way most of the Jewish men
    were taken for work.
    And since my father was a textile engineer,
    his skills could be used for sewing uniforms
    for the German army.
    Unfortunately, I don't remember neither my father or my mother
    or anybody else at that time.
    The only memories I have is of a man after the war
    ended, and now I understand that that man was my stepfather.
    But nothing is very clear.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    And what do you know about your family before the Holocaust,
    even if you don't remember it but maybe it
    because someone told you?
    How was your family?
    Oh, well, beginning with my grandparents,
    my maternal grandparents were in a small town called Edeleny,
    which was not far from Miskolc, which was a city about 15
    or 20 miles away from Edeleny.
    And my grandfather and grandmother lived in Edeleny,
    and they had 12 children.
    And both my birth mother and my adoptive mother
    were siblings from that family, from the 12 children.
    There were 11 years difference between them.
    And my grandfather, when he came back from the yeshiva,
    he started the business in that town, and he bought a forest.
    It was a place where a lot of people
    were in the lumber business.
    So he had some forests, and then he processed the lumber.
    And he had his store, and then he
    had the general store for the town,
    where they sold everything.
    Later on, he bought mine with some partners.
    And to be able to work the mine, he
    got a generator that produced electricity for the whole town.
    Also, the house that he bought, he had a tavern, a pub in it.
    It came with a house.
    But my grandfather never worked there.
    It was my grandmother and the aunts, when they grew up,
    that worked that place.
    And it was a small town.
    They had geese and they had, I guess, other animals there.
    And he was in a very good standing with a city council
    member the town council.
    Actually, who was a council man there,
    and he used to go to the meetings in his horse
    and buggy.
    And he even wore a top hat for that.
    And so he was very well respected and admired there.
    And then the children, well, they all started--
    they went into business with their grandfather.
    Now, by the time my mother got married,
    they were already in Budapest because grandfather
    had two or three strokes, of which he mostly recovered.
    But he was in a wheelchair most of the time,
    and that's where he was--
    how he was when he was taken to Auschwitz.
    I don't know if you want to know anything else
    about my grandfather's family.
    On my father's side, I don't know a lot
    because I didn't know about them until I was about 24 years old.
    I know that my father was one of six siblings,
    and he was the oldest.
    And he and a sister were murdered during the Holocaust,
    and the other four ended up in Palestine,
    one of them before the war and three of them after the war,
    and so was my grandmother, Yola, my father's mother.
    And my grandfather on my father's side
    had passed away already when I was born, from what I hear.
    And I don't know what was the business he was in,
    but besides that, he was a cantor.
    He went to different towns and cities
    when they needed him to lead the prayers.
    I understand he had a beautiful voice,
    and I know so had my father.
    My mother also liked to sing, and so do I. I used to at one
    time.
    And I don't know if you know anything
    else about the families, or you want--
    Maybe you can maybe you can tell a lot
    about their Jewish identities?
    Were they religious or not?
    Yes, both families where orthodox, and all the boys
    went to yeshiva and the girls just
    went to a Jewish day school.
    And so they were really--
    they were very religious, but they were not like the Haredi
    nowadays.
    They were modern orthodox .
    That means that they didn't dressed in black.
    They had modern clothing.
    And they all wore a hat, but it was
    a hat that was in style at that moment,
    with a color gray or whichever thing that
    went with the rest or their clothing.
    And the only one that had a beard
    was my grandfather, my paternal grandfather.
    I don't know about my maternal grandfather.
    I think he also had a beard.
    But there were no payos, and there were no--
    I think both families were like that.
    My survivor family, on my father's side,
    they all lived later in Iraq, so they were pretty orthodox,
    especially after because they were
    in that environment in Israel.
    My mother's family, on the other side, few stayed orthodox,
    but most of the survivors were not so observant.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    So both families lived in Hungary before the war.
    Yes.
    But they were--
    I know that my father was born in Transylvania,
    which at that time I think it was part of Hungary
    because borders used to change every Tuesday and Thursday,
    and governments.
    But later, they move to Budapest,
    and that's where he was when he met
    my uncle, my adoptive father, who
    was Moore Stern, even though she was not
    my father while he was alive.
    He was also murdered by the Nazis.
    And the Nazis in Hungary, the job
    was done mainly by the Hungarian Nazis, who were the Iron Cross.
    They were worse than the Germans to the Jews, to the Jews.
    And when the Germans came in to Hungary,
    it was already the last place and it
    was almost the end of the war.
    But as usual, the Germans did a very perfect job,
    and of the 800 and so many thousand Jews
    in Hungary, which were mainly in Budapest,
    they exterminated more than 600--
    no, I'm sorry 500,000.
    So they did a very good job.
    But the heads of the Nazis were they Germans that came in,
    like--
    oh, what was his name that was caught in Argentina?
    Eichmann.
    But the people who carried out the dirty job
    were the Hungarians.
    So both your families had been living
    in Hungary for a long time?
    Yes.
    Yes, I think probably about 200 years.
    On my mother's side, my grandmother
    was a Horowitz, as I think I've mentioned before.
    And they originated-- they came from a small town, Horovice,
    which is in what used to be Czechoslovakia.
    They changed it.
    Now it's the Czech Republic.
    And then they moved to Prague, and eventually, from there,
    they spread to other places, having started, actually,
    in Spain.
    Well we have family genealogy books that
    go back to the 15th century.
    But we know from the Israeli encyclopedia
    that they have found us all the way back in the 13th century
    in Spain.
    I don't know what you would like to know.
    Thank you.
    Thank you very much.
    So how and when did life change for your family?
    Well, my grandparents and the two single daughters
    came to Budapest when things started
    being bad with the Germans all over Europe, all the Nazis,
    and after my grandfather had the strokes.
    And I think my aunt, my second mother,
    wanted them to be there.
    I guess they were better doctors or something.
    They had their own building with three apartments.
    I think it was one for them and one for the future families
    of the two single daughters.
    But then the war became worse and people started
    being taken away from Hungary.
    They didn't send away the Jews at the beginning
    because the ruler of Hungary, Horthy
    had a treaty with Hitler, and so the only ones that
    were deported were those Jews that
    were not Hungarian citizens.
    But the men were all taken to the working,
    to the labor camps.
    Now, later on, after the treaty was broken because Hothy's son
    was kidnapped by the Germans and he
    was forced to implement they the Jewish final plan,
    and that's when Eichmann came.
    And so that then started sending away the Jews,
    but from the provinces from the countryside, not the people
    from Budapest.
    We were the last, actually.
    We were-- those of us that survived
    were never sent to the concentration or the death
    camps.
    We were just in the shelters, in their hiding places
    in the ghetto.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    So can you tell me more about the ghetto?
    What do know?
    Who was sent to the ghetto and how long were you there?
    Well, I know that my mother and I went to the ghetto.
    And as I mentioned before, we stayed at my grandmother's
    house, my Silberberg family because my grandmother,
    her apartment was there in what became the ghetto.
    My second mother, Ilonka, and the three siblings
    were also in a ghetto, but they stayed with some family members
    of their father.
    My family-- I'm sorry, my grandfather and the sister
    that was still single, Lili, went back to Edeleny.
    And from there, after the Germans
    came in the Jews of the countryside started
    being there to send to Auschwitz,
    they were taken there, too.
    Some of them survived, but most of them were killed.
    And so do you know, how long were you in the ghetto?
    Did your-- Ilonka tell you?
    Not very long.
    Not very long because they kept moving us from place to place.
    From the ghetto, I understand that before the ghetto
    we had been already in one of the shelter houses.
    And when we were at the ghetto, we
    were ordered to go to the train station,
    and we didn't know why or what for we were going there.
    So I understand that we were in line,
    both my mothers and my siblings, myself, waiting
    to see what were the next orders when a soldier approached
    us and asked I don't know which one of my mothers,
    what are you doing here?
    And it was probably Ilonka because she was older,
    and she said, well, we were ordered to come here and wait
    for the train.
    And so this soldier, who was a human being, fortunately,
    he told to my mothers, as soon as I tell you, just grab
    the children and run away from here.
    This is not the place for you.
    So that's what we did.
    And when we escaped, we didn't want to go back to the ghetto
    because we were afraid that they would go back to get us there.
    So that's when we went to Raul Wallenberg's safe house.
    And it was probably a matter of weeks or a month,
    not more than that.
    Thank you.
    And you've mentioned before, Noemi, we were sent
    or we were moved several times.
    Do you know who walked you around?
    Well, the Nazis, the government, the Hungarians, that's
    who gave-- those are the ones who gave the orders.
    Supposedly, it us from the Hungarian government,
    but they were puppets of the Germans.
    And do you know how did you get to the shelter houses?
    I think it's--
    I don't know exactly, but it was known that it was there,
    or they were there.
    There was one from Sweden, there was
    one from Switzerland, which I think it was together
    with the Vatican.
    Then there was one from the Red Cross.
    There were different shelters, and people know about them.
    And I guess he went from mouth to mouth, the information.
    I'm not sure.
    Do you know if one of your moms had to make certain choices
    to be able to go to these places and protect you?
    Or did Ilonka ever tell you of any choice she made or--
    No.
    No.
    Well, I know she told me several times,
    when she used to talk about it, that some places where we went,
    they wouldn't let us in because both my sister, Yergi,
    and myself, we were babies.
    So in many places, they didn't let children in, especially
    very young children.
    And until my mother, Ilonka, my anyu, she put her foot down
    and she said, I'm not moving from here.
    You don't want me here, but I am staying here.
    I don't have any place elsewhere to go.
    And then we stay there.
    And I know that when they had them both mothers
    to wash diapers, they would wait until it was nighttime
    and everybody else finished already,
    and they would go out and wash the diapers.
    And then since there was no way to iron them or dry them,
    they would bring them into the place and fold them,
    and then they would sit on them.
    That's crazy.
    So with the heat of their bodies,
    they kind of made it more bearable for our bodies,
    for our lower bodies to take them.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    Do you know if you stayed together all the time?
    I understand that, besides the time that we were at the ghetto
    where we were in different houses but not far from each
    other, obviously-- it was just a few blocks, the ghetto--
    that besides that, we were together most of the time,
    as far as I know.
    And do you know anything else about your life
    in these shelter houses, anything else
    that Ilonka told you?
    Well, there is a memory, which I don't
    know if it's a real memory or later spoke it with anyu,
    it's that I saw these--
    that the beds where like those in the camps,
    like boards, you know, and two or three people,
    one on top of the other.
    And that's in my mind, but I don't
    know if it's because I saw it someplace or because
    or that's the way it was because I can't imagine
    that I have a memory from that time when I wasn't even a year
    old.
    And then on the other side, I know
    that my father used to come and visit us,
    because at those times, at the beginning,
    they still allowed the men to come from the work camps.
    But later, they couldn't do that anymore.
    And when my father came the last time,
    that's when he was taken out with about 10 other people
    and was taken to where they were killed.
    That's what they used to do.
    They used to bundle up a few of the Jews
    and kill a couple of them and throw them into the Danube.
    And they would tie them together so
    that the weight of a couple of them, they all drowned.
    I recently found out that my father--
    before that, when they came and took out about 10 people,
    the excuse was that there was a radio,
    that they were broadcasting our where we were to the Russians.
    And so they took out 10 people, and my father
    was not among those chosen at the beginning.
    But then a lady bribed one of the guards,
    telling him not to take her son, and after that guy was left,
    they took my father.
    They were not taken straight to the Danube.
    They were taken to a high school that was
    not far from the safe house.
    And there was a big gym there, and that's where they were.
    I understand that there were other Jews already
    there that they gathered from other places.
    And then they interviewed-- they told them to get undressed.
    Everybody was naked.
    It was freezing cold because it was December 30
    of 1944, my first birthday.
    And so when the people, why did they do that?
    I would say just to punish them, to make them suffer.
    And then they brought in each one of them into a room,
    and they tortured them and they were interrogating them
    about that radio.
    And they all said they don't know anything about it.
    There was only one of them that--
    they both went off, and he said, I know where it is.
    I will take you there.
    So he saved his life at that moment
    because all the rest were taken out.
    There was a short wall, not very high,
    and they were all put by that wall, kneeling,
    and they were all shot in the nape.
    Then some of those that were still alive
    were ordered to put them into carts and taken to the river
    and dump them and get rid of them.
    And others were ordered to clean up
    where they were killed so the blood would
    not to be seen by others.
    So they were ordered to shovel all that dirt,
    put them into some other wheelbarrow carts,
    and take them to other places and spread that soil so nobody
    would know what they did, that they murdered all these people.
    Fortunately, one of them, I don't know--
    the two that took all the dirt and the people down,
    somehow they escaped.
    And also the guy that said that he know where the radio was,
    he ran into the woods and hid, and they didn't find him.
    So one of those people, I don't know which one,
    went to the safe house and told them
    what had happened because that way in Judaism,
    and you need witnesses for somebody's death
    in order to declare him dead and in the future
    for the former wife or husband to be able to remarry,
    otherwise they are not allowed to.
    So this man came back, and I understand
    that he told my mother, Ilonka.
    But Ilonka never told my birth mother, Edit,
    until after the war was over.
    There was nothing to be done and it wouldn't help,
    so I guess she wanted to save her the pain.
    Thank you.
    So your father was never sent to the ghetto.
    No.
    He was in several work camps, labor camps,
    but not in the ghetto.
    And you never met him because you were a baby, so you
    don't have memories of him.
    I don't have any memories of him.
    Absolutely.
    What did it mean to you not to have these memories of him?
    I grew up thinking that my uncle Moore had been my father.
    In that sense, it didn't make a difference
    because I didn't remember neither one of them.
    And they had been good friends, and actually, that's
    why my mother, Edit, married Bumi
    because he was in the group of friends of Moore.
    There was a youth organ-- of young men,
    an organization of orthodox young men
    that was called Tiferet Bahurim.
    And they both belonged to that group.
    So I don't remember them.
    When I grew up, for me it was terrible.
    I did not have a father and I did not have any grandparents,
    and I felt very, very deprived from everything.
    There was a certain feeling inside me where I did not
    belong anyplace or to anybody.
    I had this Cinderella complex, let's put it that way.
    Even though I considered my mother and my siblings
    my real mother and siblings, there
    was a certain something I felt always
    that something was not right.
    And when we were at school, we were poor,
    but we always had enough to eat.
    And we had clothes to wear, which, for me,
    they were all inherited, be it from my sisters
    or be it from some other people that had daughters
    and that had outgrew their clothes.
    And so we got those.
    So we never had--
    as a child, I never had anything new.
    So I always considered if I had a father,
    he would provide for us and we would have more of the things
    that we need.
    It's not because I needed more clothes,
    but because people would not have
    to pity us or something like that maybe,
    or wouldn't laugh at us because of what--
    they were laughing already at school,
    I remember, from their lunch we had
    because it was different from what other children ate,
    to begin with because we were kosher,
    because, believe it or not, even though we
    were at an orthodox Jewish school, but most of the kids
    were not orthodox and most of them were not even kosher.
    So they made fun of us, and so I always
    felt that we the father I would have been more protected.
    Then as pampering goes, of course, kids came to the class,
    to school, and they said, oh, my grandparents were here
    and here, and they brought me back this and this,
    or my parents were on a trip.
    And we never had that.
    And I always was thinking, my grandparents
    could not give me anything.
    I knew they were murdered, even from when
    I was a very little child and we arrived in Mexico,
    from their first holiday that we had
    and there was a yizkor said.
    I remember me standing next to Jutka, Yuri,
    because she know how to read already,
    and she would say the prayers and the yizkor,
    and I would say it after her.
    Now, I would say it after my father, Moore, Moshe,
    but I didn't say anything for the mothers
    until I found out later.
    And now, unfortunately, I have to say it
    for both mothers and their fathers.
    So that's about it.
    Yes, it was--
    I always felt that life would have been completely different
    if we had a father.
    Grandparents also, but mainly a father.
    And I thought even my mother would
    have been a happier person because my mother was always
    angry at us, at the children.
    And I felt she was angry at me.
    And I used to think, well, and being the situation as it is--
    and the war had been raging in Europe already for years--
    why would they have a fourth child?
    And I didn't know I wasn't really the fourth child.
    But why did they have me?
    My mother would have been much more happier only with three
    children, and it would have been easier for her
    to remarry with three children.
    But who will want a woman with four children?
    And all those things went on in my mind.
    So I always felt I was--
    I don't know.
    The word wouldn't be "unwanted," but it
    would be not needed, not actually a bother,
    that the world would have been better
    there for everybody without me.
    So it was very difficult for me.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    That's why I was so--
    I was an introvert.
    I didn't speak to anybody, and I was afraid
    of all the adults, all the adults,
    especially if somebody had a uniform.
    I was afraid of my uncles, of everybody, every adult.
    That's why I never had--
    I never dared approach any of them
    when I had a need because, first of all,
    my mother always told us to be quiet.
    We children were not allowed--
    we allowed to be seen but not heard.
    And when we first arrived in Mexico
    and we had a sofa bed in the living room,
    well, every once in a while one of the uncles would come.
    We were not allowed to sit on that sofa bed.
    It was just for the uncle to lay down.
    So it was very, very--
    it was a difficult childhood, definitely.
    It was sad.
    I was always a sad child, which developed later
    into depression, which is what I have up to until today.
    I'm chronically depressed.
    But we survived.
    We are survivors.
    Thank you so much, Noemi, for sharing your feelings.
    Thank you.
    So I'll go back to Moore because I
    think we still need his story.
    So what happened to Moore?
    Moore-- oh, Moshe, he was from a very aristocratic--
    not meaning get like in the not Jewish world,
    but for Jews his great grandfather
    had been the Chatam Sofer, who was
    a very, very important rabbi.
    And so he was very orthodox, he was very intelligent,
    and he was the president of that group
    I told you, the Tiferet Bahurim.
    And he was a furrier, so he was also
    making uniforms for the Nazis.
    And he was taken to several camps also.
    And at the last place where he was,
    I think when they closed it down,
    they took them all to Bergen-Belsen.
    And from Bergen-Belsen, they took them on a forced march
    to--
    I think they were going to Berlin.
    And well, he was not a strong man.
    He was always very, very thin.
    And when he was on the march, it came a point
    when he decided he couldn't or wouldn't go any farther.
    And he had a vest, and of course, it was winter,
    and he gave it to another younger man.
    And also he took off his boots and gave them
    to another younger man and told them,
    you will give them a better use than me.
    And eventually, he couldn't walk anymore,
    and he was shot by the Nazis.
    And that was, if I understand well,
    the day before the war ended.
    A real tragedy, a real tragedy.
    And everybody who knew him, be it
    from his family or my other family
    or my cousins, whoever knew him, they all praised him.
    He was such-- he was a very, very special man.
    Now, my father was not so known because he was more recent,
    and it was just practically the year before the war ended,
    because they married I think it was February of '43, 1943,
    and I was born in December the same year.
    So I understand that he was his friend.
    He was quite younger than him.
    But I don't know much about him either.
    They were all well learned in Jewish Studies,
    and they all always learned every day.
    But they still worked in the secular world
    and they had careers.
    So they both, unfortunately, were killed almost at the--
    my father almost at the end of the war because you know this
    was December 30, '44.
    And in '45, I think in March or something like that,
    the Russians were in already.
    That's why they were looking for that radio, that transmitter.
    And my father to be Moore just a day before the day the war
    ended.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    Do you know what you were doing this entire time that you were
    in these houses, protected houses,
    if you experienced hunger or if anyone got sick in the family?
    Yes.
    I don't know if we were hungry or not because I, even today,
    have no idea what we were eating.
    I suppose I was still sucking my mother's milk,
    but I can't imagine how long she could have--
    she was hungry because they were all hungry, the adults.
    And neither Yergi, I have no idea what we ate, we as babies.
    And the adults, I know that my mother, Ilonka, since they
    had the fur business, she still had some furs hidden.
    And also Moore's family was in the diamond business,
    so they had some diamonds.
    And I know that once she exchanged a mink
    fur for a sack of potatoes or something
    like that, or a kilogram of sugar for a diamond,
    things like that to keep us alive
    because we needed the sugar.
    Otherwise, people would take saccharin,
    but babies cannot have saccharin or something like that.
    So I don't know.
    Maybe they gave us order with sugar.
    I have no idea what was our food.
    I know we were very, very weak when we were liberated.
    Yergi and I could not stand on our legs for a couple of months
    because we didn't have the strength to stoop or stand.
    And now everybody was very, very thin,
    of course, the adults also because nobody had food.
    Later, the winter in Hungary was terrible.
    So I heard that the horses, when they died or were
    killed in flight or something, their bodies, the corpses
    where just left there.
    They didn't decompose because of the cold.
    So some people went out in and cut up a horse
    and brought in some meat.
    My anyu used to say that she wouldn't eat it,
    but she would feed it to everybody else.
    And so I don't know what else we ate.
    But the potatoes, I know that was one of the main things.
    And sometimes, if you have the means,
    you would ask a peasant or somebody who went by.
    I think she always had a good relationship with the person
    in charge, the manager of the building where she lived,
    the porter, and she asked her to buy her things.
    I know that most people who were sick,
    and both Jutka and Arthur, Erchi, my brother,
    were in the hospital because there was a scarlet fever
    epidemic.
    And actually, we didn't know if Jutka survived
    until the end of the war.
    And Erchi was also sick, and that
    was the reason they didn't leave when they had their--
    they had passports and visas to leave before,
    but he was in the hospital and the transport left.
    And I don't know if they were going to Palestine
    or to the United States.
    I have no idea.
    And so they couldn't go because his father said he's not
    leaving without his son.
    And so they saw--
    but he was also in the hospital.
    So I don't even know if they ever were
    in the safe houses with us.
    I think it was mainly Yergi and myself.
    Now, Yergi he also became very ill.
    She had-- I think he was encephalitis.
    But fortunately, she survived.
    But my mother, my anyu, always kind of
    was very careful with her because from then on she
    treated her like a sick child.
    And I know they were quarrels inside the safe houses
    because there were quarrels for the places
    and for the blankets, not that I remember,
    but that's what I heard.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    And do you know why you had to move from one house
    to another house, multiple times?
    Well, because the way I told you, in the one house,
    they wouldn't take us because we were children.
    In other houses, they were to full.
    I understand there were hundreds of thousands of people
    in between those houses and other houses, and other places
    that we were hiding.
    I mean, there were 300,000 Jews that survived,
    mainly from Budapest, so there were a lot of people.
    And they fought for room and for food
    and for everything possible.
    I mean, we're human beings, not angels.
    They were needs, and everybody tried to survive.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    And do if your moms had a network of support,
    given that they were leaving in Budapest before the war,
    in other words, neighbors or people who
    they knew who helped them throughout this difficult time?
    I don't know about anything about friends in Budapest.
    I mean, I know about the man I told you about,
    that organization.
    So there were a lot--
    I have a picture of all of them.
    But those were the men.
    And I don't know anything about the women, just the family
    because, well, I guess, when you have a large family,
    it's your family who are the support.
    Thank you.
    And what do you love about liberation?
    And how did that impact your family?
    My-- about what, I'm sorry?
    The liberation of--
    About liberation?
    Yes.
    Well, when the Russians arrived, and so we went out,
    from what I know.
    I don't know where my mother and myself went at the beginning,
    because my grandmother on my father's side was not--
    no, she was still there.
    So we might have gone back to the ghetto to where she lived.
    I don't know where we went.
    But my mother Ilonka and the children
    went back to her apartment, and with a surprise
    that there were some Russian people that
    had taken it over already.
    So she went to the police to tell them
    that she wanted her place back, and the police said, well,
    there is enough room for you and for them there.
    Just take a place where you're not too close to them,
    and stay there.
    And so that's what they did.
    I think they stayed in the kitchen
    because it was warmer and more convenient,
    and they could cook.
    But then these neighbors started--
    I mean, they were not neighbors.
    They were in the same apartment.
    And they were partying every night
    and bringing women and drinking a lot.
    The Russians were always drinking.
    And so their neighbors started to complain.
    So when everybody was complaining about them,
    my mother Ilonka went again to the police.
    And then this time, they came and they threw them out.
    So my mother stayed there.
    And she was afraid that these thugs would
    come back or something, so she invited another widow or some--
    I think she-- another woman, the younger one that
    was also alone in the building in another apartment,
    and told her to come and live with them
    because that way at least they were two of them,
    and they could better defend themselves.
    So that's what I know after.
    Now, later on, when the family came back,
    those that survived the camps, and they went to-- first,
    they went through Budapest, and from there they
    went to Miskolc.
    And the uncle Hermosz, Herman, he had to survive,
    and he had he rented a house in Miskolc.
    And all those of us that survived
    went over there because there was more food
    and it was easier to survive there.
    And my aunt Malvina, who had a restaurant before the war,
    she was taken to Auschwitz, her husband murdered, her youngest
    son murdered.
    But she still had two children, adults.
    And she had a kosher restaurant before the war,
    and she reopened it for a couple of months
    when they came back from the camps.
    So we were all there.
    And I think I have a picture that I sent you,
    Yael, about myself as a baby.
    And that's when that picture was taken, in Miskolc,
    because we had a cousin that was a photographer.
    And my cousin Erika, who survived the camps,
    she took me in Miskolc to have their picture taken,
    and she had one taken off herself.
    And we were already in contact with the three uncles
    that we had living in Mexico, who were preparing papers
    and visas for us to emigrate from Hungary because we
    didn't want to stay in Hungary.
    First of all, we had not good means to survive,
    but besides that, we didn't want to be
    under the communist government.
    And the family in Mexico were already
    preparing all those documents for us
    when we were supposed to emigrate in '47, which we did.
    But we didn't know that by then my mother would be dead.
    My biological mother Edit died in September of 1947.
    She had remarried a man called Miklos Nicholas Weiss, who
    had lost his wife and two children during the Holocaust.
    And she was going to have a child by him.
    And they both died, my mother and the baby.
    So they never got to leave Hungary.
    And my mother was buried still in Budapest,
    but later her body was moved to Israel
    by my Uncle Herman, who by then, when her remains were moved,
    he was already living in Israel.
    And so the rest of us, 10 people that survived,
    we left for Mexico because we didn't have visas
    to stay in the United States.
    The United States was not giving out visas at that time.
    And my uncle Itzu, the oldest one,
    brought us in with false papers for myself
    because I was supposedly a daughter of Ilonka
    with the other three children.
    And my uncle Itzu adopted us as his children
    in Mexico when we went there.
    And my mother Ilonka came in as a caregiver.
    That's the way we could immigrate into Mexico.
    The other two aunts, an uncle and an aunt,
    went to Cuba with the two cousins.
    And the uncle had married in Budapest before leaving,
    and she, this lady, Margaret Hollander,
    she had a brother who was who had money some way
    and they did get visas for the United States.
    And so they went to New York and later arranged
    for my Uncle Herman and Aunt Mani to immigrate into New York
    also, and they went into the nursing home business.
    They never had children, none of the two couples.
    But my Aunt Lili, who survived Auschwitz and the camps
    with my Aunt Malvina and my cousin Erika,
    she married also before going to Mexico Uncle Bela,
    and they spent some time in Paris on their way to Mexico.
    But they were the first ones to leave
    Hungary and the first ones from those that
    survived to get into Mexico.
    His brothers were also in Brooklyn, New York,
    but they didn't go right away there.
    They went to Mexico first.
    So we grew up with them as family.
    My Aunt Lili was very, very dear to us.
    She gave us the emotional nurturing
    and love that my mother was incapable of because she was so
    embittered herself that--
    to the world outside, she was wonderful.
    She was smiling and she was sweet.
    But to the children she was not.
    She, I think, in her subconscious or "inconscious,"
    she blamed the children for her sufferings.
    And so that's what we had.
    We all loved her dearly.
    I still miss her.
    But she was not a happy person, especially to us.
    I think she really resented us, the children.
    But she protected us, overprotected us
    because she had promised my biological mother that she
    would protect me.
    I didn't know all of this, of course, until later,
    but that was the story.
    So that's it.
    I don't know what else you would like to know.
    Thank you, Noemi, for again sharing your feelings.
    I want to go back just briefly to the post-war period.
    So you mentioned in the beginning of the interview
    that one of the first memories that you
    have that is your memory is about your stepfather.
    So can you tell us more about what memories you have?
    Well, the memories I have about him is of playing with him
    and of him buying me toys, especially
    a small baby carriage made of wood, blue, for the doll.
    And then I remember there was also a little crib
    that he bought for me.
    And the crib was metal bars, and it
    had a mesh hanging on the metal bar
    to lower it on the sides, both sides of the crib,
    so like a really crib, to put the baby in, in my case,
    the doll.
    And that was color pink.
    And I remembered that my toys were behind a door.
    There were some--
    I think they're called French doors that
    are divided in three pieces.
    So when they are folded, it's like a triangle behind,
    and that's where I used to keep my toys.
    And those doors were glass.
    That's what I remember, and playing with him on a sofa.
    I know that he didn't like me when
    my mother leaved because I reminded him
    of the children he had lost.
    And why did I survive and his children didn't survive?
    But after my mother passed away, he suddenly had nobody but me.
    So he became closer to me, and he started--
    he wanted to be with me all the time.
    In fact, he wanted me to stay with him when we all
    left for Mexico, but my mother's family
    would not allow that because my mother had
    told my second mother that she wanted me to be with her.
    But I know that he came with us on the train, at least
    until Vienna, and that over there he gave us
    the girl's presents of a small ring that
    was like a small rectangle on top of gold, with a-- well,
    of course, mine said Noemi in that little rectangle,
    and Yergi had hers.
    I'm not sure--
    I don't remember if Jutka got one or not.
    And later on, I kept asking, who was that man?
    And I never got an answer.
    And I think that man was my stepfather.
    And when we got to Mexico and we went to school,
    and I remember that the school principal looked
    very familiar to me.
    So I am not sure.
    I don't know if he resembled my stepfather,
    but I know that he resembled somebody that I knew.
    Could have been my stepfather or could
    have been my uncle Hermosz who came with us to New York,
    up to New York.
    We took the trains and we got to--
    I don't remember which port in France,
    where we crossed the channel in a small ship to Southampton.
    And then from there, we took the first Queen Mary to New York.
    And the 10 of us were on that ship.
    I know we were in Paris because I remember going up
    to the Eiffel Tower, and in New York
    I remember going up to today to the Empire State Building
    and many other buildings, but not many not many memories.
    I know that on the ships, especially Erika and Yergi,
    were always sick, seasick and vomiting.
    A lot of people were sick, especially the short trip
    from France to London.
    I know that I don't remember it, but we
    had family both in Paris and in London
    from Moore's family, which were at the Boxhorns in Paris
    and the Sterns in London.
    He was one of Moore's brothers, I think the oldest.
    His name was Shlomo, and he had two sons.
    One was Bubi and Brudi.
    I don't know what were their real names,
    but those are the names that we I always heard growing up.
    I don't think I ever met them.
    Anything else you need to know?
    Yes.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    So how did you get from the United States to Mexico?
    OK.
    When we arrived in New York, people from the family,
    from the Horowitz Margareten family, were waiting for us.
    And it's a very large family, and there
    were doctors and attorneys.
    And one of our cousins, cousin Florence,
    who lives now also in Washington, but she was there,
    and they came to pick us up when the ship got to New York.
    And I remember going to different buildings
    to see an attorney or things like that because of papers.
    We had a visa just to go through the United States.
    And from New York, we took a train to Laredo.
    And in Laredo, my uncle Ali, was one of the three uncles
    in Mexico City, was waiting for us,
    and so it was a very pleasant surprise.
    And of course, he didn't come with empty hands.
    He came with toys for us.
    And that day was my fourth birthday.
    And from there, I think we changed trains
    to the Mexican train, and we continued with the train
    from Laredo to Mexico City.
    In Mexico City, the uncles had prepared
    for us already an apartment at the Acros
    building at the Insurgentes Circle in Mexico City.
    And so we went there.
    My other Uncle Dave [INAUDIBLE] was
    living in an apartment in that same building.
    It was a very nice building.
    It had a roof garden, of which I have pictures.
    But I was afraid of the elevator in it
    because it was one of those metal see-through,
    you know, that you opened the doors and closed them.
    And I was always afraid I would get trapped in the doors
    because I had a bad experience in New York with the elevator,
    because I was so small.
    I was four years old, but my size
    was that of a year and a half.
    So when all the people, the 10 people that we were,
    nine of them went into the elevator
    in one of the high buildings and I stayed behind.
    Nobody noticed that the doors closed and I wasn't inside.
    So I started yelling like crazy.
    And my cousin Zoltan--
    Zolly, Itzhak we called him then--
    he came up running on the stairs and grabbed me and saved me.
    So I had a bad history with the elevators.
    Anything--
    Yeah, I was going to ask you, what was the date that you
    arrived in Mexico?
    I am not sure.
    We arrived in Mexico around my birthday.
    I don't I'm not sure if we arrived in Laredo
    on my birthday or in Mexico City on my birthday.
    I think it was Laredo.
    So I don't know how long could it have taken, a week maybe,
    to get to Mexico City on the train,
    so the first week of January sometime, January of 1947.
    No, sorry, January of 1948.
    And two months after that, around February 15, we started
    school because at those times, the school year
    went from about February 15 to November 15,
    and the long vacation was in the winter.
    Later it was changed.
    Now it's the same as in the United States.
    And can you please list who came to Mexico with you?
    Yeah.
    To Mexico, just the five Sterns, my mother Ilonka, my anyu,
    and Jutka, Erchi, Yergi, and me, but for all purposes,
    my nickname was Amy.
    So the four of us and Aunt Ilonka.
    And my Uncle Hermosz and Mani and my Aunt Malvin,
    and Zoli and Erika went to Cuba.
    With the time, when papers were ready for my aunt
    Malvin and Zoli, they joined us in Mexico City.
    Erika never came to Mexico at that those times.
    Later, she came to visit.
    But in those times, she was smuggled into the United
    States, back to Florida from Cuba,
    because she got engaged before leaving Budapest
    to Uzi, Dr. Emil Jacoby.
    By then, he was a doctor already.
    He got his doctorate in Budapest before leaving.
    That was Erika's boyfriend.
    And in Hungary they met because Uzi was the director of the--
    it skipped my mind now.
    I'm forgetting things-- of the youth organization that they
    went, the Zionistic Bnei Akiva.
    I don't know how I can forget that.
    Anyway, so Erika went there, and they met there.
    And they got engaged before leaving Hungary.
    He went to Paris for two years, as he
    was working for the Sochnut.
    And she came with us to New York, and from there to Cuba.
    But then later, when Uzi came to New York, of course,
    they wanted to be together.
    There was no way of getting a visa for the time being,
    so she was smuggled in and after a long pursuit by the FBI,
    she had to give up, give herself up
    because since we came from Hungary,
    they were afraid of communist spies.
    So finally, one of the attorneys in the family
    arranged for her to stay for the time being,
    but she had to go to leave the country in order
    to get her visa to come back in.
    So she went to Canada and came back the last minute
    that she could, a minute before the time ran out.
    And well, the rest is history.
    She stayed here and with the time, and they got married,
    and then she got her papers.
    So as I told you before, Uncle Hermosz and his wife
    went to New York, so nobody stayed in Cuba.
    Everybody left.
    My aunt Lili and Uncle Bela were already
    in Mexico and five of us, and then came our Aunt Malvina
    and Zoltan, Zoli.
    Thank you.
    And sorry, what were the names of your uncles
    who brought you to Mexico?
    And what was the relation?
    Where they brothers of Ilonka and--
    They were all part of the Salamonovitz family.
    The one that brought us out, the first one that went to Mexico,
    was Uncle Itzu, Ignacio, Ignaz.
    He was very, very smart.
    But he was also a rebel.
    When he was sent to a yeshiva when he was 16, and grandfather
    or whoever went with him put him on a train,
    on one side of the train, and he stepped down
    on the other side of the train, and he left
    and he went to Vienna.
    And he stayed there for a couple of years,
    working at some family member's business.
    And when he was about 18, he wrote to my grandfather
    that he wanted to go to Mexico, to please send him money.
    My grandfather would not send him
    the money because he ran away, but he told the oldest daughter
    Malvina to send him the money like he was from her, not
    from grandfather.
    So she sent him the money, and he then went to Mexico.
    Why to Mexico?
    First of all, it was a very exotic place to go,
    from the movies and everything.
    And besides, there was no way of getting visas
    to go into the United States.
    So he went to Mexico and established himself.
    He traveled through the whole country.
    He was a peddler, as most of the Jews
    were everywhere where they immigrated,
    and selling neckties and whatever he could.
    He got very sick.
    He got-- I don't know if it was the yellow fever or--
    what's the other name.
    Anyway, he suffered from it his whole life-- malaria.
    But finally, he established himself.
    He went into business with somebody
    that had a tailor business.
    And from there, later, he started to--
    he went into the shoe business and all kinds
    of other businesses.
    And then he made enough money that by 1936--
    when he went was in the '20s, I don't know.
    But a by '36 he had enough money to go back to Hungary
    to my mother Ilonka's wedding.
    And he already went back with his wife, my Aunt Margaret,
    and his oldest daughter, my cousin Clarita, and even
    my Aunt Margaret's Julia.
    So the four of them went for a visit.
    So that must have cost a lot of money.
    And so later, after he went to visit,
    my Uncle Ali, the youngest, told him
    he wanted to join him in Mexico because he
    wasn't happy in Hungary.
    He wasn't happy living in grandfather's house
    because there were two older brothers that
    were always abusing him.
    They were very strong and they were hitting him,
    and so he was the baby.
    And so later, when my Uncle Itzu went back to Mexico,
    he sent him money and tickets to go to Mexico.
    And the third one was Uncle Dave.
    In Hungarian, he was Dezso, Desiderio in Spanish.
    His Hebrew name, of course, was David.
    And he left practically in the last--
    in '39, in the last possible ship before the war.
    And they were all established when we got to Mexico already,
    and they were all married.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    I want to see about you.
    So how was life in Mexico for you?
    Well, it was exciting, I think.
    It was very difficult because I couldn't speak the language.
    We spoke Hungarian, mainly.
    And even when I started going to school two months
    after we arrived, in school they spoke Spanish and Yiddish.
    And we didn't speak Yiddish at home.
    But because of that, and also probably because I was so shy,
    I practically didn't speak the whole first year.
    I was, like, mute, and I was afraid of everybody.
    Now, we always had a maid, and so we
    started earning probably to speak a few words
    with the maid at home.
    And my mother used to take us on Sundays to the movies, where
    we would watch one or two Mexican movies with all
    the churros and all the a Mexican music and everything,
    and I think that's how we started learning the language.
    It was exciting in the sense that there were
    so many new sounds, new smells.
    I remember, first, we had them [SPANISH],,
    which are yams or sweet potatoes,
    and they were sold on the street in a cart where they were
    cooked, boiled with very hot water
    so that the cart had a steam sound.
    So they were blowing, toot, a loud noise
    and that the guy was yelling, [SPANISH]..
    That was one of them.
    And the other guy was yelling, elotes, which
    are corn on the cob cob, also.
    And then another guy was selling little birds in little cages.
    I also remember not exactly then,
    but eventually seeing they were they
    had all the turkeys walking on the street
    with a guy that was yelling, [SPANISH],,
    which is I think a native word for turkey.
    And all the noises, the turkeys say, [TURKEY GOBBLE],, all that.
    So they were very colorful, interesting.
    Everything was new for us.
    We had an ice box, and there was also
    a guy that came in and sold ice, yellow.
    He would also announce himself.
    And I don't know how we communicated
    with all these people, but I think he was through the maid.
    And so slowly, slowly, we learned the language.
    But I was always quiet, always quiet.
    I remember one thing that happened when we had recently
    arrived, and my mother wanted to fix one of my brother's pants
    because my brother was a devil.
    He was always up to some mischief.
    And anyway, the knees of his pants were always torn.
    So my mother wanted to patch his pants
    and she thought, OK, I'll take this old skirt
    from Emi, who is so little, and the skirt
    was very little and old, so I'll use this to patch it.
    And I made a whole scene about it.
    I don't want you to use my skirt.
    That's my skirt.
    I'm not going to let you do it.
    Don't do it.
    Please don't do it, and yelling, it's
    my skirt and my skirt and my skirt.
    I don't know if it's because I had lost so much, that anything
    that I had was so precious to me that I couldn't part with it.
    Finally, my mother gave up and she took something else.
    I think it was something of Jutka's, and she
    used that to patch my brother's pants.
    And of course, then came the guilt.
    Then I felt so guilty that she had
    to use a better cloth on skirt or whatever
    she used than my old skirt.
    How could I be so bad?
    How could I be so selfish?
    And I think it lasted my--
    up to today, I feel bad about it.
    It was so terrible.
    But I was so attached to my things.
    I felt like I had lost my father,
    then I had lost my mother, and my supposedly other father
    and my stepfather and my toys that I had to leave there,
    and I was crying when I left, and everything, everything I
    had.
    And then, of course, which I didn't know,
    but it's true, my identity.
    I even lost my identity.
    So I couldn't separate from anything else.
    And what do you mean when you say
    that you lost your identity?
    Well, because some way, I forgot everything.
    I was now Emi Stern, now Emi Stern Salamonovitz.
    But before we left for Mexico, I was Noemi Agnes Silberberg
    Salamonovitz.
    So it was a different person, and my whole history
    after we left, because I forgot everything.
    And I can probably say that I blocked everything out
    of my mind because I don't remember remembering my mother.
    I don't remember remembering my father.
    The only one I remembered was this man that I suppose
    was my stepfather.
    And that also is very blurry, not a clear face
    or what happened.
    So one person, one state in Budapest,
    and a different person went to Mexico.
    Thank you.
    And how would you say did you cope with all these losses?
    By closing up into myself.
    As I told you, I didn't speak the whole first year.
    They didn't know what was exactly wrong with me.
    I was anorexic.
    I didn't eat, couldn't eat, couldn't swallow anything.
    I think in a way I was, as much as a four-year-old knows,
    but not knowing, I was killing myself.
    When I was six or seven years old,
    I was sent to Rochester, to the Mayo Clinic,
    to see what was the problem because I wasn't eating.
    So I was very small anyway, and then I wasn't eating.
    When we were in Mexico City, everything I eat,
    I couldn't pass it.
    I always felt like something in my throat
    that wouldn't let there be food to go down, or I was nauseous.
    And so when I finally was able to swallow something,
    I would vomit it up.
    And the doctors said--
    I went with my aunt, my Uncle Ali's late wife, Graciela,
    because she spoke English, and my cousin Clarita,
    who was a teenager and she also spoke English
    because they both went to American schools.
    And we went with a train, and I have a paper, a piece of paper,
    that when I went back to Mexico, just by myself on an airplane.
    And they sent me back, and they stayed there to visit,
    to travel.
    My aunt did not fly at that time.
    Later she did, but at that time, she was afraid of flying.
    And they put me on an airplane, which was not
    the same plane I arrived in because they had
    to jump from plane to plane in those times,
    and so I don't know how, but I was sitting in the kitchen
    all the time with the stewardesses at those times.
    So there was a piece in the newspaper
    about a child of six or seven if lying by herself
    in Mexico City.
    And then I have that piece of paper someplace.
    And my aunt said that what the doctor said
    was that I needed a different mother, more nurturing.
    But the doctor sent a letter to my mother, what it just said,
    just treat her like any child in and force her and have her eat.
    So my mother used to love my first teacher in kindergarten
    because she was [SPANISH] who was always scolding everybody.
    And she wasn't very young, she wasn't very nurturing,
    but my mother loved her because she
    forced me to eat at school, to eat my lunch.
    But that's how I--
    I guess I didn't speak to anybody.
    I didn't have any friends.
    When I was already speaking, I made some friends.
    I was kept back a year in kindergarten
    because I wasn't speaking.
    They didn't have psychologists or such a thing in those times,
    so to be able to know that the only thing with me
    was that I didn't know the language,
    but I was not retarded.
    Actually, this teacher, Tamarita, many, many,
    many years later, she told me that she can never forget
    the beautiful [SPANISH],, the figurines I made with the--
    how do you call?
    The thing that children play with,
    it will come back in a second.
    Anyway, that with my hands, I have very good hands--
    I always had good hands--
    and I could form all these figurines and families together
    and all kinds of things.
    I mean, a child whose brain is not working well
    will not be able to do that.
    But I was kept back.
    And then later, they never want to put me
    ahead again because they always convinced me by, listen,
    you are the best in the class.
    Why would you like to risk not being the best in the class?
    If I put you one year ahead of you,
    it would be more difficult, and blah, blah, blah,
    and the children.
    Anyway, the only good thing about it
    is that, yes, I was a very good student,
    and my only friends were those that
    wanted to either learn something or wanted
    to be near me while we had a test or something.
    And then I had two good friends that we have been friends with,
    one of them specially up until today.
    And since I arrived when I was 4, and I'm 76,
    I would say for 72 years, and that would be your mother.
    And that she was the only really friend I had.
    The others were acquaintances, and there were several reasons
    not to have friends.
    Besides my shyness and I was a nerd, so it's like today.
    Children don't want to play, and I wasn't playing.
    And I wasn't skipping classes or taking off
    a day when there was school.
    So I wasn't like everybody else.
    I always was different.
    I guess from the day I was born, I was different
    because I was from Hungary.
    I was different because I was orthodox.
    I was different because I studied.
    I was different because of many, many, many things, everything.
    And I was different because we were poor.
    And when a birthday came of a classmate,
    I couldn't go to the birthday because we
    didn't have enough money to buy a present,
    and I didn't want to go with empty hands.
    Or I couldn't eat at the party because it was not kosher.
    So I didn't go to most parties.
    I went to very few parties.
    And the only friend I went to the house
    was at your grandmother's Aida house,
    and she was always, always so sweet and so nurturing and so
    nice to me, just like the mother I didn't have.
    And so that's the way--
    I was terrible in sports, terrible.
    I couldn't catch a ball.
    And the only sports we did, really, was to play volleyball.
    First of all, I was so small.
    When they chose people for the teams,
    I was always the last one they chose because nobody wanted me,
    and I don't blame them.
    I was terrible.
    And the only thing I could do, even with my short legs,
    was run.
    And I was running pretty well, but then I was also falling.
    I guess I didn't have a good method or something.
    There were no teachers teaching you or something, I don't know.
    So I fell several times.
    And my mother said, no more, no more running because she always
    felt responsible.
    She promised my birth mother that she would take care of me,
    and she didn't want me injured because of running, doing
    a sports class.
    So again, another reason not to be popular,
    not to have friends, nothing.
    There was an episode when a friend of mine--
    well, one of the girls sat in the class
    was inviting all the others to share in her potato chips
    that she had bought, and she told me plainly, not for you
    because you never buy anything.
    Well, I never buy anything because I didn't have any money
    to buy anything.
    And if I had to buy, I would have bought something
    that I had to because I need it.
    Anyway, so of course, I was insulted and was crying.
    I cried in those times for all the years I wouldn't cry later
    because today, even if you ask me to cry, I cannot cry.
    I don't know if it's because of the medication I take
    or something, but I cannot cry.
    So when my sister, Yergi, saw me crying,
    she came running because she was also my protector there.
    And what's wrong?
    Why are you crying?
    Well, because she didn't want to share her potato chips with me,
    and she said that I never give her anything, so I'm insulted.
    So Yergi started yelling at her, and anyway,
    but that's the way it was.
    That's the way it was.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    And do you think you developed a special bond with George given
    that you survived the war together and then
    came to Mexico together?
    Definitely.
    Definitely.
    We are very, very close.
    I'm close to Jutka and Erchi also.
    But with Jutka, there was always a certain--
    we were robbing each other because it was kind of--
    I don't know if, well, inside her she felt jealous
    that I came into their life because I took away
    part of my mother's attention or something like that,
    and she was the oldest.
    Also, she was a wonderful student,
    very, very bright until today, even more, better than me.
    But I was competition in a way.
    I don't know.
    So that was one thing why many times, and sometimes
    I felt Cinderella with her because she
    tried to manipulate me.
    And it wasn't as close as with Yergi because Yergi
    and I were so close in age, just one year difference,
    and everything we passed, we passed together.
    And we more or less felt the same way.
    And with my brother, we had a wonderful relationship,
    at the beginning especially, even
    though he was such a little devil,
    but he was the only one who could sit down with me when
    I wouldn't eat and feed me like a little bird, a little bit
    of--
    in a spoon that we would put from the bolillos,
    the hard bread rolls from Mexico, little pieces
    in to my coffee and then feed me one by one, little by little.
    And he could sit with me for hours, trying for me to eat.
    It came a time when the only thing I would eat
    was the dry bread because that didn't make me vomit,
    the crust, just the crust.
    I remember going to the Mexican--
    the [SPANISH],, the lottery, when they did the choosing.
    It was a big show for the radio, and there where many singers.
    And you could go to the show.
    So I don't remember who bought tickets for us to go,
    but we went to the show of the National Lottery.
    And I remember taking two or three bolillos
    to eat the crust, just a crust, not the inside,
    because the inside would make me vomit.
    And that was a nice experience, I remember.
    We had the regular Mexican singers
    that we all loved until today.
    Thank you.
    I have another question, Noemi.
    So you mentioned before that you didn't know about your story
    until much later.
    So can you tell me when and how did you find out,
    and how did that impact you?
    Yes.
    I got married when I was 19, and I didn't really
    want to get married then.
    I had known Robbie--
    Robbie Stern, Robert Stern--
    since I was a little girl because they were also
    Hungarian, but they were there from before the war.
    And anyway, Robbie was my brother-in-law's best friend,
    Yergi's husband, and they kept inviting me
    when he came to visit them.
    And we all lived in the same building.
    Until I grew to love him, and my mother wanted me to marry him.
    The whole family wanted me to marry him,
    and there was a very important reason.
    I had planned on going to Israel to the Michlalah
    for a year of schooling after I finished the seminary.
    I was going to go with Lili, with your mom,
    but my family didn't want me to go.
    Now I know it.
    I didn't know then why they were doing everything possible
    for me to get married, and the reason
    was that I had all that family in Israel
    that they didn't want me to meet or didn't
    want me to know about.
    Anyway, I got married when I was 19, and for some reason
    we couldn't get pregnant.
    And when I was married about four years,
    we decided to adopt a baby.
    So we adopted my son, a beautiful, gorgeous, smart,
    all the good things you can imagine,
    but a terrible mischievous guy.
    He was walking when he was seven months old by the hand,
    and at nine months he was walking by himself,
    jumping out of every carriage, every stroller, everything.
    The bed, of course, when he was six months old,
    he would jump out of the bed, of the crib.
    But anyway, we thought with time,
    or everybody thought we would calm down
    and it would be easier to get pregnant, whatever.
    Meanwhile, of course, I was going to see doctors,
    and they couldn't find anything wrong.
    Then my family in Israel kept sending me
    messages with anybody they could find
    that was visiting Israel from Mexico
    and asking them to look me up.
    My grandmother was probably in her 80s,
    and she wanted to see her grandchild,
    her only grandchild from her oldest son.
    And she was promised, actually, by my mother's family that they
    would take me to Israel later, because she
    wanted me to be with them, and it never happened.
    And my family just never told me anything.
    So they kept sending the messages.
    And eventually, Robbie's parents started
    going to Israel every year.
    They had a condo there.
    And they got to meet them, and they gave them the letters,
    and they gave the letters to Robbie.
    Now, at their instigation, or I don't know how,
    they convinced Robbie to tell me.
    So Robbie told me, my story because they thought
    that because my mother had died in childbirth,
    that was what was keeping me from getting pregnant.
    Anyway, Robbie told me.
    First, I kind of knew it, I kind of didn't believe it.
    Fortunately, my mother was not in town
    when he told me, so I didn't have to talk to her.
    And I called up my Uncle Ignacio, Itzu,
    the patriarch of the family, and told him
    I needed to speak with him, to please come to my house.
    So my uncle came, and I asked him.
    And so he said, he told me--
    he still kind of lied to me because he
    said, yes, you are adopted.
    Your mother died, but he said that she
    had died during the war, not--
    omitting all the second part.
    I guess their thinking was that if they tell me
    that my mother died in childbirth,
    that would not allow me to get pregnant.
    Anyway, when I was told, I was devastated ,
    even though I knew it but I didn't know it,
    I felt it but I didn't know it.
    I had had several encounters with people.
    When Robbie and I were going to get married, we went to visit--
    I mean, the custom was in Mexico,
    I don't know if it's still now, that if you get married,
    you bring the invitation personally to the people
    that you are inviting because nobody trusted the mail.
    So here in the States, we send everything by mail,
    but over there we used to take it personally.
    And people were used to that.
    If you didn't take it personally, they got insulted.
    So I went to a couple of people that way from my mother's town,
    and by their questions, I knew something was wrong.
    One of them kept asking me when I said--
    I came with the invitation with Robbie and said,
    we are here to invite you to my daughter's wedding.
    I am Ilonka's youngest daughter.
    And this was a man, and he kept asking me,
    which one of her daughters?
    Hers or her sister's?
    And I said, Ilonka's youngest daughter.
    But which one of her youngest daughters?
    So anyway, this went on for a little while.
    And when I came home, I told my mother.
    I said, listen, I think this--
    I don't remember if it--
    I think it was one of the Weinsteins.
    There are two families from my mother's town, the Weinsteins
    and the [PERSONAL NAME] that also
    went to Mexico with the help of my Uncle Itzu, from Italy.
    And I told my mother, I don't know if this guy is senile
    or what's wrong with him.
    Why does he keep asking which of her daughters, when
    I'm telling him, your youngest daughter OK, now I know.
    And then I kind of knew it.
    I felt it, but I didn't know it.
    And there was another one who also
    asked me something similar.
    So something was going on.
    So when Robbie told me and my uncle came, and I just
    asked my uncle, please don't tell my mother
    because this was a feeling like I've lost everything.
    Now, I had already lost everything.
    Now I'm losing again my family, and I
    didn't want to lose my family.
    And I didn't want my uncle to tell my mother that I knew
    because I didn't want her to know that I knew because if she
    knew that I knew, she didn't have to be my mother anymore.
    That's what was going on in me, terrible, terrible thing.
    And of course, my uncle said, no, I won't tell her.
    But of course, I knew he would tell her.
    And with the time, slowly, slowly, the thing came out.
    I never really had a talk with my mother about it.
    I know that she knew, and she knew that I know,
    or with my siblings.
    Only later it came out, little by little,
    from them, different occasions, but nothing aggressive
    or nothing bad.
    And with Yergi, we were always so close.
    We were like Siamese sisters.
    So then when I read all the letters from my family,
    I wrote to them.
    It happens that I used to write to my grandmother,
    not knowing it was my grandmother,
    because she used to send us things or in writing and she
    would sign [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] which means "from grandmother."
    What my mother used to say that in Hungary because of respect
    we used to call Grandma all the old ladies.
    And my mother said that, so we accepted that.
    So I used to write to Grandma a few words every year for Rosh
    Hashanah, but I didn't know that Grandma was really Grandma.
    And so when I went, I arranged with them to--
    I said, we will go visit, and we finally
    went in '69, in September.
    We went to Israel for five months,
    but I couldn't feel anything for them.
    They were my family, but I couldn't feel them
    as my family.
    Even today, it feels strange.
    They are closer because I had met with them
    many, many, many times.
    Unfortunately, the uncles and aunts are all dead besides one.
    One uncle's wife was still alive, but very, very old.
    And my grandmother also, I saw her a few times.
    That time we stayed in Israel for five weeks,
    so we had a chance to visit with everybody
    a few times, even with Moore's family,
    who were in Mea Shearim and also Bnei Brak.
    So even today, I have gotten farther away
    from religion for many things, for my life.
    And I still am observant up to a certain point.
    I eat kosher, I keep Shabbat.
    But I'm not like they are, and they are Haredim.
    And they are very nice, but we treat each other
    with the kid gloves.
    We love each other.
    We know we have to love each other.
    We are family, but it's not the same thing.
    It's not the same thing.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    I to ask you a question about Mexico, and then
    some reflections, current reflections.
    So would you say that you eventually developed
    a sense of belonging to Mexico?
    I'm sorry.
    Yes, with reservations.
    I did not belong to Hungary.
    I was and am grateful to Mexico for having taking us in,
    when where nobody else would take us in.
    And I loved Mexican history and Mexican culture
    and the Mexican people, who are so warm.
    But even though I had a Mexican passport,
    I wasn't Mexican either.
    I only got my passport when I got married because Mexico--
    well, because when I got married,
    I obtained the citizenship because of Robbie,
    who was born in Mexico.
    It was very difficult to get the citizenship in Mexico
    in those times.
    I don't know how it is today, probably even worse.
    I don't know.
    With a lot of money, you could do it,
    but we didn't have a lot of money.
    And we had all the rights being just permanent residents
    of Mexico.
    The only thing we didn't do is.
    Vote
    When I got married, I right away went
    to vote at the first occasion I had.
    And in that sense, I felt very, very Mexican, and I was--
    on the other hand, there were certain things of Mexico
    that I couldn't get used to.
    Something that nowadays we have everywhere,
    unfortunately, I have to say in the States also,
    but in those times at least we thought
    it was cleaner in Europe or the United States,
    the question of politics and corruption.
    We knew in Mexico we couldn't trust a policeman.
    And I was afraid.
    I was afraid still, as I told you,
    of every adult, especially somebody with a uniform,
    from the time of the war.
    And here, for some reason, actually,
    because I have worked with law enforcement
    for many, many years, I'm not so scared of them.
    I know there are good ones and bad ones.
    But over there, I was scared of all of the police
    or anybody in the government.
    Whenever we went to the government
    to renew any document, we knew we were not allowed to talk,
    had to keep our mouth shut, and just
    let the attorney do whatever he had to do, give a present.
    Even when I got divorced, the attorney
    told us, bring something nice for the judge, something
    that you would never think of here.
    Over there, it was something understood.
    You had to give a present, give something.
    If not money, something.
    And then when I got divorced after some time and my children
    left--
    they went to Israel--
    I thought it was time for me to start my third life.
    And then I moved to Los Angeles because of my cousin
    Erica who was living here already
    and we were always very close because of the Holocaust.
    And I first thought of going to New York,
    but then I changed my mind.
    I came here and started a new life.
    I went to UCLA, got my search certification
    as a court interpreter and started all over again.
    And I was 45 years old.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    I'll ask you some reflections.
    So why do you think you survived the Holocaust?
    I think there is something in us survivors.
    There is a certain strength, a certain will.
    I don't know how to explain it.
    Now, a baby months old, I survived
    because I had my mom and my other mom,
    and in a way because there was a certain amount of money,
    not in money, but as I said, you know
    you could buy a kilogram of sugar
    with a fur or a diamond, or potatoes, so that helped.
    And I had God on my side.
    I've always, always felt that I have a special relationship
    with God, not with the religion, which I was religious anyway,
    but a personal bond, something that God
    wanted me to live because I know my birth was very difficult.
    I almost died myself and my mother,
    both of us, when I was born.
    But we survived.
    I survived, when I should have probably died.
    So I always felt that there was something special.
    God wanted me to live for some reason.
    Then when I was growing up, the first years,
    I had all these fantasies.
    I was going to be like Superman.
    I was going to be Superwoman.
    I was going to save the Jewish people.
    Something like this was never going
    to happen because I was always going
    to be looking out for my people, and because God was with me.
    And I had special powers.
    I even used-- I was sure I could fly.
    Maybe you think maybe I'm crazy.
    Maybe I was crazy, I don't know, from so much suffering.
    But I was sure, until almost I became a teenager,
    that I could fly.
    I wouldn't tell it to people because I
    knew they would say I am crazy.
    In my daydreams or dreams, I would levitate.
    It wasn't really a flying flying.
    I would levitate, elevate myself.
    And then eventually, I thought, of course, I turned around
    and I was flying, and I am Superman.
    I guess I was not the only Jew, that there
    was somebody who created Superman who felt the same way.
    But I had the same feeling myself.
    So that kept me going and surviving everything.
    And God has been with me because I've
    had lots of things in my life, lots of things and moments
    when I said, that's it.
    I don't want this.
    But I keep going.
    I have tried to find in myself what was the reason that God
    kept me alive.
    The only thing I could think of many, many years ago
    was that it was to adopt and take
    care of my dear, wonderful, beautiful children.
    And I don't know, but that's what I think kept me alive.
    And of course, the love of my family, and now these last 17
    years at least, being with Barry,
    having made bad moments and good moments, but we are here.
    And Robbie was a wonderful man.
    He was very, very good.
    We had problems.
    We weren't the right people together,
    but he was a very good person.
    And so I think that's what's kept me going all my life.
    And I'm here.
    And since I was able to survive the worst part,
    so now it's just keep going.
    My family, especially the women, had
    lived a long life, those that we know of,
    and so I'm still pedaling.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    One more question.
    Why did you choose to share your story?
    Well, because I'm so saddened by everything that's
    going on in the world nowadays, by all the anti-Semitism,
    by the fact that "never again" has become "better again,"
    by the fact that, like Elie Wiesel said,
    what did we learn from the Holocaust?
    That they can get away with it.
    And it's important to tell our story
    because more and more people will come up,
    and they already do it now, say that this never happened,
    this never affected us.
    It affected us, not only those that
    were in the war, not only those in the camps, those
    that we're living at that time, that era, and the survivors
    and the children because, like my uncle and my cousin used
    to say, we are all damaged merchandise.
    And we could never live normal lives
    because we were not normal.
    They destroyed a lot of things, not only 6 million people--
    almost-- but they destroyed many, many more millions,
    a third of the Jews of the world--
    but they destroyed faith in mankind.
    And I felt I had to do it, at least if nobody else will
    listen, for my children, my grandchildren.
    And I have a great grandchild and I'm
    very much afraid for them, for their future,
    for their lives as Jews.
    They're all very assimilated, but that doesn't mean anything.
    And it's not that I want--
    I want them very much to be Jews,
    and so I want them to know my story.
    And I want them to be strong and to learn
    from what we went through, and to protect themselves
    and to defend themselves and not to let anybody take them
    to the gas chambers.
    And of course, Israel is very important to me.
    And I want Israel to be safe because the world has never
    been the same since Israel became our country,
    even though we don't live there.
    We got a little more respect from the rest of the world
    because they can't tell you--
    cannot tell you-- go away, or I'll kill you,
    because if they tell me, go away,
    I have a place where to go.
    And here in the United States, we are very fortunate
    and we believe very well.
    But as I say, I will put my hands
    into the fire for anybody.
    And I know there are anti-Semites everywhere,
    even here.
    I have more protections here, thank God.
    But you have to know-- you have to be prepared for life,
    and that's why I tell my story.
    Thank you so much, Noemi.
    One almost last question, what does it
    mean to be resilient today?
    Well, it's very personal because Jews
    have to be resilient in a certain way,
    other people have to be resilient in other ways.
    Minorities have to be resilient in their own way,
    but they have to learn to come out
    of where they are and fight, fight for whatever
    they feel they need.
    And always think that there is a better day tomorrow.
    Israelis have a very good saying, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]..
    This will also pass.
    And you have to go on, just go on.
    Continue walking.
    It's put one foot in front of the other and continue walking.
    You just have to go on.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    Before we conclude, would you like
    to share any information, any other information, about
    your family, your children, your grandchildren?
    Well, yes.
    I have, as I have mentioned, my son is 52 years old.
    He lived for 21 years in Israel.
    He had a very important job defending Israel.
    He was a paratrooper and a sniper,
    and he worked for different intelligence agencies.
    And he worked also for the American State Department,
    at the American embassy in Tel Aviv.
    And he also worked with technical things,
    with the internet and computers.
    He's the one that programmed the Museum of the Palmach
    in Tel Aviv, which is across the street from the University
    of Tel Aviv, and you will see his name up
    on the wall with the creators of the museum.
    His name is Gary, Gary Stern.
    He grew up as Gerardo in Mexico City, but he likes Gary better.
    And we adopted him in Anaheim, California.
    He has a son, my only grandson, Yonatan, who lives in Israel
    and has finished his army already.
    He's in Tzeva.
    And now he's working and studying college, doing it now
    online.
    And his work is similar a little bit to the father,
    but not exactly.
    I don't even know what it is.
    And then my daughter, who is 48 years old, and we
    adopted her from the city of Bath in England.
    At that time, the United States had the abortion law already,
    and it was not easy to get a child for adoption.
    And this came up just by chance with a doctor in Mexico,
    who asked a friend of ours if--
    that they know about somebody in England
    who had a month-old baby, wanted to give her up for adoption.
    We were interested, and we said, yes, of course,
    we are interested.
    So we got beautiful Galia to come to us.
    And both of them were the vet were very difficult to rear.
    They were both hyperactive children,
    which was a challenge.
    But they are two wonderful people,
    and I think that's the main thing.
    Galia has four daughters, my four granddaughters.
    She married an Israeli person when she was 21, here
    in Los Angeles.
    and it was a very bad marriage, and it was on and off
    for many years.
    And that same year, she had our first grandchild,
    granddaughter, Ilana.
    And a year after, she had twins.
    So we had in one year, three babies,
    and I was pushing a three-baby stroller.
    And they're all beautiful, wonderful.
    Ilana is 26 now, the twins are 25.
    And then Galia remarried 13 years ago,
    and they have a 12-year-old girl.
    Her husband is Eris, a wonderful person.
    I love them all.
    And Gary was first married in Israel.
    He's divorced, and he is married now to Cathy here.
    But they had no more children because Cathy
    had children of her own from previous marriages.
    And Eris had never been married before,
    so they had this girl who is 12 now
    and she's taller her mother already
    because the father is very tall.
    And that's my Gaby, Gabriella.
    One of the twins--
    the twins' names are Ariela, beautiful Ariela, who we call--
    she is our hippy.
    She likes to work the land, and that's what she does.
    She lives in northern California and she works on the land.
    I don't know exactly what, where,
    but she's happy that way, so that's good with me.
    And her twin is Esther, who lives now in Las Vegas,
    and Esther has now a baby who is a year and three months old.
    She is not married, but she lives
    with the father of the baby.
    The baby is a quarter Black, but she looks white, only with
    black, curly hair.
    And the father is half Black because he has a white mother
    and a Black father.
    And we went to visit them almost a year ago.
    And I never met him, but the baby
    has been an incredible experience.
    I don't see the baby, but I get almost everyday pictures
    of her.
    Now, the rest of the family with my siblings,
    we still love each other very much.
    We don't see each other as much as we would like,
    but I'm close to all of them.
    I saw Jutka last year.
    I hadn't seen her for three years.
    I last saw her before that on her twin grandson's bar mitzvah
    in Israel.
    But this time, we met all in Prague,
    not only just Jutka and her husband Pepe, who
    is my brother the same way that Haim and Yergi's husband
    was my brother, because I was 14 when they started dating them.
    And so they have been in my life forever.
    And it was incredible to meet with Jutka.
    It was a long trip.
    We were away for four or five days on a cruise
    and then in Hungary, my first visit to Hungary
    after 42 years.
    And we went to Prague and all the Jewish places.
    In every place we went, we tried to find a Jewish connection
    in the temples and the Jewish history.
    And just by chance, I met with Jutka in Prague,
    and it was just fantastic to be with her.
    It made my trip, really.
    It was a very fantastic trip in every way, but meeting with her
    it was very good.
    And Yergi, she came to visit a couple of years
    ago to see Erika and me, and then I
    went to Mexico for a week just to visit the family.
    Usually, when I had gone before, it
    was for the weddings or bar mitzvahs or things like that.
    But this time, I just went to have a girls' meeting,
    and that was nice.
    But I haven't seen them since then.
    Neither have I seen my brother since when we all met together
    in Israel for that bar mitzvah, the twins' bar mitzvah.
    But I know they're there, and they're always in my life.
    I speak with them.
    I see them now with WhatsApp or Skype
    or whatever other, fortunately, these electronic devices
    we have.
    And the rest of the family, unfortunately, I
    think, in Mexico, we have only one cousin's wife,
    and everybody else is either moved to another place or died.
    Fortunately, Yergi's family has been growing,
    and they're all in Mexico.
    But besides them, we are all over the world.
    Thank you, Noemi.
    So we're almost finishing.
    Is there anything else you would like to share?
    I think it's very important, the work you are doing.
    And I am very thankful for you and James for doing this.
    I think I'm the first person, probably,
    that you do it this way, through Zoom or whatever media thing.
    But I think it's very good to have this, to be able to do it.
    And I just will say, like we say in shul, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]..
    All the best to you and thank you.
    And I will end thanking God for everything,
    and that in my last years, in my old years, found my hubby.
    What?
    I'm thanking God for having found you.
    [INAUDIBLE]
    And just go on, one foot in front of the other.
    Thank you so much, Noemi, for sharing your story.
    We have completed the interview with Noemi Stern.
    Thank you.
    Thank you.

    Overview

    Interviewee
    Noemi Stern
    Interviewer
    Dr. Yael Siman
    Date
    interview:  2020 May 21
    interview:  2020 May 26
    interview:  2020 June 10

    Physical Details

    Language
    Spanish English
    Extent
    4 digital files : MPEG-4.

    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

    Personal Name
    Stern, Noemi, 1943-

    Administrative Notes

    Legal Status
    Permanent Collection
    Provenance
    Dr. Yael Siman, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Universidad Iberoamericana México, conducted the interview with Noemi Stern on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Branch. The interview was conducted remotely, in both Spanish and English, during the COVID-19 pandemic on May 21, 2020, May 26, 2020, and June 10, 2020.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:06:26
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn720254

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    Also in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum oral history collection

    Contains interviews with Holocaust survivors, concentration camp liberators, rescuers, relief workers, former POWs, and people of different social and ethnic backgrounds who were targeted by the Nazis and their collaborators or witnessed the events of the Holocaust

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    Oral history interview with Irene Weber

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    Oral history interview with Stanislaw Soszynski

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    Oral history interview with Abraham Lewent

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    Oral history interview with Miriam Storch Lewent

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    Miriam Storch Lewent, born on June 26, 1926 in Zamość, Poland, describes her family and childhood; fleeing her home when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939; her family’s internment by Soviet forces and being deported to Siberia; cutting down trees to earn food rations near Tomsk, Russia; the Soviets releasing her and her family when the Soviet Union went to war with Germany in June 1941; her two brothers registering with the Russian Army and the rest of her family settling in Kazakhstan, where they lived for the rest of the war; her father teaching Hebrew to Jewish children in their new home; attempting to return to Poland after the war but encountering too much antisemitism; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

    Oral history interview with Liane Reif-Lehrer

    Oral History

    Liane Reif-Lehrer, born in Vienna, Austria in November 1934, describes growing up in a middle-class family; obtaining a passport in 1938 to immigrate to the United States but not being able to go when her father, a dentist, killed himself because he had to close his practice; traveling with her brother and mother to Hamburg, Germany in 1939 to board the St. Louis, which was bound for Cuba; arriving in Cuba and having to return to Europe, where they ended up in France; getting a visa to immigrate to the United States after staying in France for two-and-a-half years; traveling through Spain and leaving Europe from Lisbon, Portugal on the S.S. Exeter and arriving in the United States on November 10, 1941; living with the sister of Liane's father and her children in New York; earning her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley and working for many years as an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School; and now working as a consultant and a writer.

    Oral history interview with Preben Munch-Nielsen

    Oral history interview with Preben Munch-Nielsen

    Oral History

    Preben Munch-Nielsen, born in 1926 in Snekkersten, Denmark, describes growing up in a Protestant family; attending school in Copenhagen; the German invasion of Denmark in 1940; becoming a courier in the resistance and being one of the youngest resistance fighters; helping to hide refugees in houses near the shore and to get them on boats to Sweden once the Gestapo began hunting down Jews in Denmark in October 1943; taking refuge in Sweden in November 1943 and joining the Danish Brigade, in which he fought as a soldier for eighteen months; helping to smuggle arms into Denmark for resistance fighters; and settling in Denmark in May 1945 after the war.

    Oral history interview with Anny Rubinstein Kast

    Oral history interview with Anny Rubinstein Kast

    Oral History

    Anny Rubinstein Kast, born in Poland in 1926, describes moving to Belgium when she was two months old; her family and her childhood in Belgium; attending school in Antwerp before the war; the German invasion of Belgium on May 10, 1940; someone reporting to the Germans that her family was the only Jewish one left in their neighborhood and then being picked up a few days later; living with the aunt of a friend during her family’s deportation and taking on a false identity; studying German, English, and mathematics lessons during the war; her liberation in 1944 when the English troops entered her town; her uncle finding her and opening up a fur store in Antwerp to support her and other surviving family members; immigrating to Israel after the war; and getting married in 1967.

    Oral history interview with Helen Waterford

    Oral history interview with Helen Waterford

    Oral History

    Helen Waterford, born in Germany in April 14, 1909, discusses her 1933 marriage; her move to Amsterdam in 1934; working for many years to help Jews from Germany relocate to the Netherlands; going into hiding in October 1942 with her husband but without her daughter; the Germans discovering them on August 26, 1944 and interrogating them for two days about the network of people who assisted them in hiding; her deportation to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau; her husband’s death in Auschwitz; remaining in Birkenau until October 1944, when she was forced to work in the Kratzau factory in Czechoslovakia; going into a prisoner of war camp, where she remained until her liberation; traveling to a displaced persons camp at Plzen, Czechoslovakia; returning to the Netherlands, where she reunited with her daughter; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Thomas Ward

    Oral history interview with Thomas Ward

    Oral History

    Thomas Ward, born on August 10, 1921 in St. Louis, MO, describes joining the army when he was twenty years old; serving in General Patton's Third Army; working as a part of a three-person reconnaissance team in the Third Cavalry division; liberating 18,000 prisoners from the Ebensee concentration camp on May 5th, 1945; liberating a neighboring camp for women several days later; taking photographs in the camps (which he sent to the Supreme Allied Command); and his views on Holocaust denial.

    Oral history interview with Fred R. Wohl

    Oral history interview with Fred R. Wohl

    Oral History

    Fred R. Wohl, born in 1914 in Baden-Baden, Germany, describes growing up in Germany after World War I; leaving to work on a farm in Switzerland in 1932 for four months; working in Athens, Greece in 1935 and trying to get a Greek passport for fear of what the Germans were planning; moving to Nicosia, Cyprus in March 1939 with the help of the British Ambassador to Athens; the German invasion of Greece and being interned with refugees in a camp next to the Nicosia prison; being sent to a hotel-camp in the mountains with his father but soon being released; the Nazi invasion of Crete in 1941 and preparing for evacuation; traveling to Tel Aviv, Israel and then to Mwanza, Tanzania; working in a gold mine and contracting black water fever in Tanganyika, Tanzania; and immigrating to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral history interview with Norbert Yasharoff

    Oral History

    Norbert Yasharoff, born in 1930 in Sofia, Bulgaria, describes the anti-Jewish measures enforced by the Nazis when World War II began; Bulgaria joining the Axis Alliance in March 1941, allowing German troops to pass through Sofia; the expulsion of some Jewish families to Poland in March 1943 and a bloody protest soon after; leaving with his family to Pleven, Bulgaria in May 1943 and staying with family members; attending a Gentile school while in Pleven, where his teacher did not force him to perform the Nazi salute; his liberation on September 9, 1944 and returning to Sofia with his family; immigrating to Israel in December 1948; joining the volunteer air force, where he trained as a radar technician; graduating with a degree from Tel Aviv University in Political Science and residing in Israel for twenty years; and working in an American Embassy for nine years until he immigrated to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral history interview with Frank Meissner

    Oral History

    Frank Meissner, born in Třešt̕, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) in 1923, describes his family; joining a Zionist youth group and traveling to Prague, Czech Republic to live with other members of the group in 1937; the group’s fear of anti-Jewish Nazi policies and subsequently leaving Czechoslovakia to settle in Denmark; attending agricultural school at the University of Copenhagen; receiving a call in 1943 from his landlady, who warned him to not return home because the Gestapo had been looking for him; being smuggled onto a fishing boat to Sweden, where he finished his education; traveling to England in September 1944 and starting to contact his family but learning that they had all been taken to Theresienstadt (Terezin) and eventually to Auschwitz, where they perished; returning briefly to Prague and then going to Denmark in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral history interview with Mina Perlberger

    Oral History

    Mina Perlberger, born on December 25, 1918 in Tyczyn, Poland, describes growing up in a strict Hasidic Jewish family; the German invasion of Poland while her family was in the process of moving to Kraków in 1939; her family’s assignment to do forced labor outside of Tyczyn; working as a black market trader until 1942, when her family's home was seized by the Gestapo; being forced into the ghetto in Rzeszów, Poland; the deportation of her parents to Auschwitz in late 1942; escaping the ghetto with her younger sister and hiding with a Polish farmer in exchange for a payment; hiding with the farmer for 21 months until the Soviet Army liberated them in 1944; meeting her future husband, a Soviet Jew, in Blażowa, Poland; marrying her husband and moving to Austria after the war with the help of a Jewish organization; and immigrating to the United States soon after arriving in Austria.

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral history interview with David Klebanow

    Oral History

    David Klebanow, born in 1907 in Barysaŭ, Russia (now Belarus), describes his family and childhood; fleeing to Kiev, Ukraine in 1917 after the Russian Revolution and then to Białystok, Poland; becoming a doctor in 1937 and then being drafted into the Polish Army in 1939; returning to Białystok when he was released from the army and then marrying his wife; being taken to Kaunas, Lithuania and then to Riga, Latvia with his wife; performing abortions to save the lives of pregnant women and staying in Riga for two years; his deportation to Stutthof and then to Danzig, from where they were liberated on March 10, 1945; his wife dying of tuberculosis; working at the Munich University Hospital as an obstetrician after the war; noticing genital abnormalities, sterility problems, and a higher rate of miscarriages among women who had survived concentration camps; and immigrating in 1951 to the United States, where he joined the obstetrics department at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral history interview with Franz Wohlfahrt

    Oral History

    Franz Wohlfahrt, born in 1920 in Velden am Wörthersee, Austria, describes growing up in a family of Jehovah's Witnesses; the arrest of his father in 1936 for peddling in the street as part of his activities as a Jehovah’s Witness; the German annexation of Austria in 1938; refusing to go to a Hitler Youth meetings and say the “Heil Hitler” greeting, which resulted in German troops monitoring his activities; the execution of his father on December 7, 1939 and his brother soon after because they refused to participate in the war and fight for the German state; the general persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses during World War II since they would not worship Hitler; agreeing to do work for the German state but not participate in military exercises, which resulted in his imprisonment in a dungeon for thirty-three days in 1940; being transferred to the Gestapo office in Graz for further questioning; his deportation to a work camp at Allweiter Rodgau, in the Hessen-Nassau province, because he would not fight for the German state; being saved by a camp commandant’s wife because he painted wall paper for her; his liberation by Allied troops while he was still in the camp; and returning home to find that few people he knew had survived.

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Tove Schöbaum Bamberger

    Oral History

    Tove Schöbaum Bamberger, born on October 8, 1934 in Copenhagen, Denmark, describes growing up in a wealthy family; her father’s ownership of a men’s clothing business; attending first and second grade at a Jewish school before her family fled from Denmark on October 2, 1940; taking a train to the seaport in Snekkersten, Denmark and then traveling on a fishing boat until a Swedish ship intercepted them at sea and took them to Sweden, where they settled in Malmö; her father working in a chocolate factory and selling artificial teeth; her mother selling lingerie; attending school with her sister; returning to Copenhagen on May 28, 1945 to find her family home and store undisturbed; and immigrating to the United States with her husband in 1956.

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral history interview with Morris Gordon

    Oral History

    Morris Gordon, born in Latvia, describes immigrating with his father to the United States; growing up in New York, NY; attending City College and Columbia University; being ordained as a rabbi in 1940; volunteering for the military in 1942; his participation in The Flying Tigers; going to India briefly then Burma; traveling through the jungles of Burma to get to different camps and getting lost three times; taking his Torah with him everywhere he went; arriving in Shanghai as a Jewish chaplain and being greeted by a large Jewish community; conducting a Bar Mitzvah with a boy; his memories of the Shanghai Jewish ghetto and its schools; and receiving a chalice from a Catholic chaplain during the war to help him perform his services.

    Oral history interview with Raya Markon

    Oral History

    Raya Markon, born in 1911 in Vilnius, Lithuania, discusses her childhood; going to college for one year in Toulouse, France; getting married in Paris, France in 1936; her husband's mobilization into the French Army in 1938; her escape from Paris two days before the German invasion in 1940; returning to Toulouse to take refuge with friends and the birth of her son; getting a visa to the United States and difficulties in obtaining an exit visa from France; and her and her family's immigration to the United States in November 1942.

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral history interview with Ernest G. Heppner

    Oral History

    Ernest G. Heppner, born in 1921 in Germany, describes his experiences with antisemitism in his youth; participating in a Jewish youth organization; his father’s positive experiences running a factory in the mid-1930s; being kicked out of school and learning how to weld; losing any sense of hope for German Jews after his experiences on Kristallnacht; his family being forced to sell their house and considering immigration; he and his mother getting a place on a steamship to Shanghai, China by giving the captain of the ship some of their Impressionist paintings; arriving in Shanghai in March 1939; his mother finding a job with a youth committee; communicating through letters with his father and sister back home a few times before never hearing from them again; participating in the British Boy Scout Association in Shanghai; seeing the Imperial Japanese Naval Landing Party come into Shanghai after Pearl Harbor and acting as a British spy; the Jews of Shanghai being forced into a ghetto-like area of the city in February 1943; finding a job in a bakery and meeting his future wife in the ghetto; getting married shortly before the end of the war and going to work for the American occupying forces; his memories of life in the ghetto; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral history interview with Emanuel Mandel

    Oral History

    Emanuel Mandel, born in 1936 in Riga, Latvia, describes his family moving to Budapest, Hungary when he was three months old; his family; his father’s work as a cantor that led him to travel around and work in several synagogues in Europe; not understanding that he could not have or do certain things because he was Jewish; the German invasion of Budapest in early 1944; his deportation by cattle car in June 1944 to Bergen-Belsen with his mother; developing pneumonia and not having access to much food while in the camp; developing a sense of comic relief, like by calling a German troop “Popeye,” to survive; participating in a Red Cross inspection of Bergen-Belsen; in January 1945 being taken by German soldiers on a train towards the German-Swiss border and being released in Switzerland, where they were cleaned and fed; traveling to Saint Gallen and then to Caux, Switzerland to stay in a displaced persons center; reuniting with his father after the war; his mother’s decision to go to Heiden after the war to run a one-room school house for six- to fourteen-years olds to learn Hungarian; immigrating to Palestine by a British troop carrier in September 1945 and living in a kibbutz, where his mother took charge of the day shift cooking; and immigrating to the United States in March 1949.

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral history interview with Leo Bretholz

    Oral History

    Leo Bretholz, born on March 6, 1921 in Vienna, Austria, describes his childhood; his father passing away in 1930 and becoming a father figure for his two younger sisters; long-standing antisemitic attitudes transforming into excessive violence after the Anschluss in 1938; the arrest of his friends and his mother encouraging him to flee to Luxembourg, where he had an aunt; being arrested three days after he arrived in Luxembourg, questioned for several hours, and released to a train station; returning to Luxembourg and staying with relatives until he had the opportunity to cross the border into Belgium on November 9, 1938 and go to Antwerp, where he found distant relatives and stayed until May of 1940; receiving an affidavit and visa from an aunt in Baltimore, MD to immigrate to the United States but being unable to leave because Pearl Harbor was bombed the day he was scheduled to go; obtaining the necessary documents to cross into Switzerland in October 1942, but getting arrested and taken to Rivesaltes; his deportation to Drancy, another French detention camp, where he stayed for a short time before he and other prisoners were loaded onto cattle cars for transport; escaping deportation by bending the bars covering one of the train’s windows and squeezing through and jumping out of the train; making his way to Paris, where he obtained a false identification card; his arrest in December and then being sent to prison for nine months until he went to a forced labor camp in Septfonds, France; escaping from the camp and contacting a friend who got him in touch with an underground resistance group in Saint-Vallier, France, which he joined in November 1943; helping children cross the border into Switzerland, making false ID cards, and relaying messages between various resistance organizations; working with the resistance after D-Day and helping the Allied forces; and receiving an affidavit from his aunt in Baltimore that allowed him to immigrate to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski

    Oral History

    Paul Matasovski, born in Bacău, Moldavia (now Romania) in December 1933, describes his family and early childhood; his family getting a radio in 1933 to find out what Hitler was doing in Europe; the political situation with the Iron Guard and General Antonescu; the Jews having their radios taken from their homes but receiving news by passing around sheets of paper; attending a Jewish high school until the end of 1942, when he was sent to work in a textile factory; participating in sabotage activities until he was arrested in the spring of 1944; remaining in a prison near the Carpathian Mountains until Russian forces liberated him; his knowledge of transports and concentration camps during the war; the composition of the people in his underground group and their activities; and returning to his hometown to help clean up the mess after the war.

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral history interview with Zelda Piekarska Brodecki

    Oral History

    Zelda Piekarska Brodecki (Americanized name, Sonia Brodecki), born on July 27, 1928 in Sosnowiec, Poland, describes her family; the German occupation of her town and her family having to close their business; entering the Sosnowiec ghetto and being forced to work in a factory; her deportation from the ghetto to a forced labor camp near Wrocław, Poland; her transfer in 1943 to another labor camp in Klettendorf, Germany (Klecina, Wrocław, Poland); Russian troops liberating her at an ammunition factory in Ludwigsdorf, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen in Germany; returning to Sosnowiec after the war and meeting her cousin there; moving to the Landsberg am Lech displaced persons camp, where she met her husband, Boleslaw Brodecki; and living in Germany until 1949 when she and her husband immigrated to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral history interview with Stefania Podgórska Burzminski

    Oral History

    Stefania Podgórska Burzminski, born in Lipa, Poland, describes her family and childhood; helping her parents run a farm until she decided to move with her sister to Przemyśl and work in a bakery; the Russian invasion and not noticing much of a change in life until the Germans ousted the Russians; living in an apartment near the ghetto and witnessing people being deported from it; developing a relationship with a young man named Josef, who was Jewish and lived in the ghetto; having to explain what a Jew was to her little sister; helping to smuggle food into the ghetto for Josef and his family; moving into a large apartment and taking Josef and twelve other Jews in with her; having an SS man insist upon taking a room in her apartment and always living in fear that he would kill the Jews living there; and her liberation by Russian forces.

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral history interview with Rose Galek Brunswic

    Oral History

    Rose Galek Brunswic, born in Sochocin, Poland in 1920, describes her family; learning Hebrew and participating in a Zionist organization in her youth; moving to Warsaw in the mid-1930s; being forced into the Warsaw ghetto and living with twelve other people; her parents being shot during a roundup; going into hiding with the underground in March 1941; leaving her hiding place and finding another one in the city with an old work friend of her father; being caught by the Germans during a raid and sent by cattle car to Berlin; using her false papers to get a job on a farm; pretending to be a Seventh Day Adventist and playing the organ for the church; getting in trouble for not having the proper identification and having to do translations for a judge as penance; her liberation by American soldiers in 1945 when she was still working on the farm; meeting a Jewish soldier and marrying him; staying in a displaced persons camp after the war until she immigrated to the United States to live with her uncle; and settling in Buffalo, New York, where she attended school.

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral history interview with Renée Schwalb Fritz

    Oral History

    Renée Schwalb Fritz, born in 1937 in Vienna, Austria, describes her family; her father leaving for the United States in 1939 and fleeing with her mother to Belgium; the German occupation of Belgium in 1940 and going into hiding in a convent, where she remained for two years until the Germans became suspicious; the underground taking Renee to a Protestant family's farm and then to an orphanage; reuniting with her mother after the war and discovering that she had survived Auschwitz; joining her father in the United States five years later; going through high school in the US with much difficulty; attending Boston University; and marrying an American man soon after she graduated from college.

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral history interview with Martin Spett

    Oral History

    Martin Spett, born on December 2, 1928 in Tarnów, Poland, describes his childhood; the German occupation of Tarnów in 1939; his family losing their apartment in 1940; hiding in an attic when the first massacre of Jews occurred; having to finally register as a Jew in May 1943 and go to Bergen-Belsen, where he was allegedly to be part of an exchange for German prisoners of war; being liberated on April 13, 1945 by Allied troops during his transport to Theresienstadt; spending some time in Belgium after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral history interview with Ion Cioaba

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral history interview with Niels Bamberger

    Oral History

    Niels Bamberger, born on October 21, 1928 in Würzburg, Germany, describes growing up in a religious family; fleeing from Germany to his mother's hometown of Copenhagen, Denmark in 1932; his family being warned of imminent danger on Rosh Hashanah of 1943; their local grocer helping them to escape to the port town of Snekkersten, Denmark (the closest point between Denmark and Sweden); receiving help from the local resistance forces and hiding in houses until their group of over two hundred could be transported in row boats; a Swedish military boat intercepting his family at sea and taking them to Sweden; attending school in Lund, Sweden while his parents opened a small restaurant; his family’s return to Denmark on May 28, 1945 to find their old home undisturbed; and getting back on his feet after the war.

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral history interview with Ray Buch

    Oral History

    Ray Buch, born on September 18, 1920 in New York City, NY, describes his parents and their emigration from Ukraine; joining the US Army in November 1942 and going into training in Louisiana and Texas for a year; being shipped to England in September 1944; fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and encountering fighting and violence; finding out about the concentration camps and death camps; his unit’s attempts to bury people who had died alongside the roads; arriving in Mauthausen on May 10, 1945 and the scenes of people and depravation he witnessed; forcing the German citizens to bury the dead; spending about thirty days in Mauthausen and then moving around to other camps, like Dachau and Ebensee; and the sacrifices his unit made for the sake of the freedom of Europe and the United States.

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral history interview with Nina Kaleska

    Oral History

    Nina Kaleska, born on April 11, 1929 in Grodno, Poland (now Hrodna, Belarus), describes having a pleasant childhood; her family not being perceived of as Jewish because of their Aryan looks; experiencing antisemitism among her childhood friends in 1938; joining the Young Pioneers after the Russians invaded in 1939; her father’s imprisonment for three to four months for political reasons; the German invasion in 1941 and the formation of two ghettos in Grodno; the Germans selecting one of her cousins, who was considered an electronics genius, for forced labor but then killing him; peasant families offering to hide her and her sister but rejecting because she did not want to be separated from her family; being deported with her sister to Auschwitz in 1941; the death of her sister three months after they arrived; becoming sick in the camp several times and only being saved because of the help she received from a woman named Martha who worked there; being asked by Dr. Mengele if she was Jewish because she did not look Jewish; having to stand guard while the head of her lager had sex with some of the most beautiful women in the lager; going on a death march and being liberated by Allied forces on May 5, 1945; and her immigration to England and then to the United States with the help of the American Joint Distribution Committee.

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral history interview with Judith Meisel

    Oral History

    Judith Meisel, born on February 7, 1929 in Josvainiai, Lithuania, discusses her childhood; moving to Kaunas, Lithuania shortly after her father’s death; being forced into the Kaunas ghetto in 1941; her family’s deportation in 1944 to Stutthof, where her mother was killed; escaping with her sister from a death march out of Stutthof by hiding in a coal bin; receiving shelter in a Catholic nunnery; developing typhus and posing as a Christian in a hospital in Danzig, Poland to receive treatment; finding work on a farm with her sister; moving to Copenhagen, Denmark, where she was sent to school; her liberation on May 5, 1945; living with a Jewish family in Denmark for some time after the war; immigrating to Canada in 1948; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral history interview with Thomas Buergenthal

    Oral History

    Thomas Buergenthal, born in 1934 in Czechoslovakia, describes his family; moving with his family to Žilina, Czechoslovakia in 1938 and facing persecution from the Hlinka Guard; moving to Katowice, Poland and registering with the British Consul; leaving for England on September 1, 1939 but being stopped near the Russian border when their train was bombed by Germans; having to march with a group of refugees to Kielce, Poland and go into its ghetto; the deportation of his grandparents and twenty thousand other ghetto inhabitants in August 1942 to Treblinka while he and his parents were sent to a forced labor camp in Kielce; surviving a massacre of Jewish children and then being transported with his parents to a factory where they made wooden carts for the Eastern Front; his deportation in August 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he worked in the laundry as an errand boy; getting separated from his father and never seeing him again; being forced on a death march to Gliwice, Poland and then to Heinkel concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany in January 1945; his transfer to a sub-camp of Sachsenhausen; his liberation on April 27, 1945 by Russian soldiers; marching with the First Polish Division into Berlin, Germany and Siedlce, Poland and then being placed in a Jewish orphanage in Otwock, Poland; his mother finding him in 1946 and smuggling him into the British zone of Germany; living in Göttingen, Germany and attending high school there; immigrating by himself to the United States in 1951 to live with his uncle; his mother remarrying and staying in Europe; attending Harvard Law School and becoming a professor of International Law at the George Washington University Law School; and serving on the United Nations Human Rights Committee and the United States Holocaust Memorial Council’s Committee on Conscience.

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral history interview with Leif Donde

    Oral History

    Leif Donde, born in 1937 in Copenhagen, Denmark, describes his upbringing in a religious but not Orthodox Jewish family; the German occupation of Denmark in April 1940; seeing the German police begin to arrest Jews in early October 1943 and fleeing with his family by train to the Danish city of Nykøbing Falster, south of Sjælland island; being smuggled by a fishing boat to safety in Sweden; arriving in Trelleborg, Sweden after an eleven-hour nighttime boat ride in October 1943, during which they passed through a German mine field; attending school in Sweden while his parents worked in a garment factory in Uddevalla, Sweden; his family returning to Denmark after the end of the war; and settling in Denmark, where he serves as the Consul General.

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral history interview with Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig

    Oral History

    Elizabeth Kaufmann Koenig, born in Vienna, Austria on March 7, 1924, describes her family and childhood; enjoying the rich cultural life Vienna had to offer before the war; her father’s placement on the Nazi blacklist for being a liberal writer and journalist; attempting to leave Austria and go to France but getting arrested and sent to prison; escaping to Cologne, where her mother managed to attain three visas by giving up some of her jewelry; moving to Paris, where her father found a job as a reporter; attending art school in Paris and meeting her future husband; the deportation of her father and brother to concentration camps when Germany declared war on France; her father’s return home for a short period until he had to join the French Army; running away from Paris and going through several cities until she arrived in Blois, France and began to search for her father; getting separated from her family and asking about their whereabouts wherever she went; reuniting with her mother in Barcus, France; finding a teaching job in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France through a family friend who lived there; her family receiving special visas to move to the United States on December 7, 1941 because her father was an intellectual; attending college in the United States; and marrying Ernest, the man she had earlier met in Paris.

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral history interview with Max Amichai Heppner

    Oral History

    Max Amichai Heppner, born on October 15, 1933 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, describes growing up as an only child; his parents’ escape from Berlin, Germany in 1933; the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands and missing a boat to escape to Sweden; losing several of his family’s possessions to the Nazis; his mother getting captured during a street raid but then being released by a Nazi commander in August 1942; escaping into the countryside with his parents and finding various hiding places with another family; going into hiding with underground forces and then with a farming family; dealing with frequent Nazi raids; meeting several downed Allied pilots while in hiding; his liberation by Scottish soldiers on September 24, 1944; his mother’s attempts to shield him from much of the devastation of the war; and immigrating to the United States to live with his mother’s family.

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral history interview with Charles Bruml

    Oral History

    Charles Bruml, born in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes his family and the Prague Jewish community; being about 28 years old and working in an import-export firm in 1938 when German troops marched into Prague; his family’s deportation to Theresienstadt and finding a job in the camp’s Technical Department; making paintings during his internment that are displayed at the camps today; his deportation to Auschwitz on January 11, 1942 and getting tattooed; being transferred to Buna (Monowitz), where he worked as a painter for the SS men until January 18, 1945; being forced to walk to Gleiwitz, because the Russians neared, and then to Bergen-Belsen, where the Red Cross liberated him; and meeting his wife in Prague as they both tried to sort out the fates of their families.

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral history interview with David Pollack

    Oral History

    David Pollack, born in Prince Albert, Saskatechewan, Canada in 1922, describes growing up in a mildly Jewish family; enlisting in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1942 but not being accepted as a pilot because of his poor eyesight; being trained as a radar technician and stationed first in the Queen Charlotte Islands and then in England in 1943; joining a mobile radar unit outside of Weimar, Germany in 1945 and visiting Buchenwald, where he was shocked by the horrors of the camp; speaking, with the aid of a translator, to many prisoners, taking the names and the addresses of their relatives who were in other countries, and contacting these relatives to inform them that the prisoners would soon be arriving in displaced persons camps and contacting them for help; returning to Canada after the war; and keeping up correspondence with some of the survivors he had helped to reunite with their families.

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral history interview with Eugene Lipman

    Oral History

    Rabbi Eugene Lipman, born in Pittsburgh, PA on October 13, 1919, describes his family; graduating from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio; being sent overseas as an army chaplain in April 1945; after the war helping Jewish survivors at Buchenwald and Dachau before being sent to Plzen, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); joining the Haganah, a group that cared for Jewish survivors and refugees as well as secretly transporting Jews to Palestine; continuing his work with the Haganah in Regensburg, Germany; going home to the United States for a short time in April 1946 but returning in late 1946 with his wife to continue to aid Jews by providing many with false identity papers for them to leave Europe; and returning to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral history interview with Hetty d'Ancona de Leeuwe

    Oral History

    Hetty d’Ancona de Leeuwe, born on May 1, 1930 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, describes her family and early childhood; her father losing his business after the German invasion; the deportation of several of her friends and family in 1942; her father’s participation in the Dutch underground newspaper; leaving Amsterdam in October 1943 and separating from her parents to live with a Dutch Gentile family for two years; her liberation by American and British forces and staying with her foster family for a few months until she reunited with her father; and marrying a Jewish man and immigrating to the United States with him after the war.

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral history interview with Marty Glickman

    Oral History

    Marty Glickman, born in 1917 in the Bronx, NY, describes growing up with parents who were immigrants from Romania; attending Syracuse University, where he was a track athlete chosen to compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics in Germany; being one of two Jews on the United States Olympic track team; arriving in the Olympic Village and being told that he and Sam Stoller, the other Jewish runner, were to be replaced in the 400 meter relay by Ralph Metcalf and Jessie Owens; hearing from the head coach of the Olympic track team that the substitutions were made because the Germans were said to be hiding their best sprinters but believing that he was really replaced because Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, did not want to further embarrass the Nazis by having Jews run and win a race; serving in the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific during World War II; going to the Marshall Islands; and his friendship with Jesse Owens.

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral history interview with Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz

    Oral History

    Susie Gruenbaum Schwarz, born in 1931 in Schlüchtern, Germany, describes her family; moving to Dinxperlo, a village located close to the German border in the Netherlands in 1933; the German invasion of the Netherlands on May 10, 1940; Jews no longer being allowed to own businesses or to attend schools; going into hiding when they heard that the Jews would be rounded up for deportation in 1943; living with her mother in a barn attic that was barely big enough for them to both lie flat; beginning to write a cookbook-diary in 1944 to pass her time; becoming extremely ill because of a lack of ventilation in her living quarters; recovering from her illness but remaining weak; having to leave her hiding place toward the end of the war because of increased Nazi raids; her liberation on April 1, 1945 by Canadian troops; returning to their former village with food and money supplied to them by the farmers who had hidden them; returning to school as her family tried to re-build their lives; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral history interview with Hessy Levinsons Taft

    Oral History

    Hessy Levinsons Taft, born on May 17, 1934 in Berlin, Germany, describes her family and childhood; her parents having her photo taken in 1934 and the photo ending up in a Nazi magazine labeled as a beautiful Berliner baby; her family’s decision to run away to Paris, France, where they were when it fell to the Germans; moving to the French coast near Bordeaux with her mother and sister while her father remained in Paris trying to find a way for the family to leave; her father securing visas for the family to travel to Cuba, where she and her sister began to attend a British school; immigrating to the United States in 1948 and settling in New York, NY; and eventually getting married and starting a family.

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral history interview with Bella Jakubowicz Tovey

    Oral History

    Bella Jakubowicz Tovey, born on September 18, 1926, in Sosnowiec, Poland, describes growing up in a Jewish family; the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and losing her father’s factory and their family furniture; being forced to move into the Sosnowiec ghetto and to work in a factory there in 1941; her family’s deportation to the Bedzin ghetto in 1942; her deportation to the Graeben sub-camp of Gross-Rosen in Germany in 1943 and then to Bergen-Belsen in 1944; her liberation in April 1945; and immigrating to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral history interview with Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz

    Oral History

    Ruth Krautwirth Meyerowitz, born June 23, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, describes her childhood; facing intensifying antisemitic measures that resulted in the loss of her father's business and the closing of her school in the late 1930s; her family’s deportation in 1943 to Auschwitz, where her father was killed; her selection for forced labor and being assigned to work on road repairs; working in the "Kanada" unit sorting possessions brought into the camp; her transfer to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany in November 1944; being sent to Malchow, where she worked in a munitions factory making bullets; her liberation by American soldiers in May 1945 during a death march from the Malchow camp in Germany; traveling to Frankfurt with her mother in August 1945 with hopes of finding the rest of their family; and immigrating with her mother to the United States in early 1947.

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral history interview with Peretz Milbauer

    Oral History

    Peretz Milbauer, born in Brooklyn, New York in October 1915, discusses his life up to World War II; teaching history before he was drafted into the United States Army; being sent overseas in July 1944 and arriving to his station in Remse, Germany on December 5, 1944; liberating prisoners from a death march in Wałbrzych, Poland in December 1944; gathering a list of names of survivors from the death march and sending the list to American newspapers and magazines in an effort to help survivors contact their relatives; and also liberating prisoners at Ebensee, a sub-camp of Mauthausen in Austria, in May 1945.

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral history interview with Judah Nadich

    Oral History

    Judah Nadich, born in 1912 in Baltimore, Maryland, describes his life until World War II and training to be a rabbi; enlisting in the army as a chaplain after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; serving as the senior Jewish chaplain with the United States Army in the United Kingdom and then in France during the war; having his first contact with survivors of Nazi oppression in France; helping Parisian Jews re-build their community; being ordered to Frankfurt, Germany as the Jewish affairs adviser to General Dwight D. Eisenhower and reporting on conditions in displaced persons camps; and returning to the United States in late 1945.

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral history interview with Hana Bruml

    Oral History

    Hana Bruml, born on May 30, 1922 in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes her family and childhood; attending a Zionist elementary school; meeting Rudolph Schiff and marrying him on November 14, 1939; the German invasion of Prague and her father losing his business, receiving ration tickets marked with a “J,” and only being allowed to do certain things at specific times; the deportation of her parents in July 1942 to Theresienstadt followed three weeks later by her and her husband’s deportation to the camp; working in the camp hospital as a nurse; the death of her husband and the development of a romance with Bruno, who worked as an internist in the camp; the special treatment of Danish Jews and a few prominent Austrian and German Jews in Theresienstadt; seeing doctors perform several abortions in the camp to save women; her transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944 and seeing Dr. Mengele; and remaining in Auschwitz until May 5, 1945, when she was liberated.

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral history interview with Benjamin Meed

    Oral History

    Benjamin Meed, born on February 19, 1922 in Warsaw, Poland, describes his family; traveling with a friend in 1939 to Russian territory to escape Nazi persecution; returning to Warsaw because they could not support themselves; joining an underground movement that provided a library and schooling for children; smuggling people to the Aryan side of Warsaw when the ghetto was established; helping his family escape to Praga Południe, Poland, where they hid in a cemetery; beginning to work with a woman named Vladka who was also involved in underground activities; posing as a Christian with Vladka during the war in order to facilitate their work in the underground; moving his hiding place to a bunker which he had built after the Warsaw uprising; jumping onto a Red Cross truck after his liberation to escape persecution by Germans and Poles after the war; reuniting with his parents after the war; and marrying Vladka in Warsaw ten days after liberation.

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral history interview with Johanna Neumann

    Oral History

    Johanna Neumann, born on December 12, 1930 in Hamburg, Germany, describes her early childhood; her memories of Kristallnacht on November 10, 1938; her family’s decision to leave Germany as anti-Jewish measures intensified; obtaining visas for Albania and leaving Germany without many of her possessions; crossing into Italy and setting sail for Albania on March 1, 1939; remaining in Albania during the Italian and German occupations for a total of six and a half years; finally being liberated after a battle between the Germans and the Albanian partisans in December 1944; spending some time in an Italian displaced persons camp at the port of Tricase in the Lecce province of Apulia in southern Italy; immigrating to the United States in September 1946; and living briefly in Israel for three years from 1969 until 1971.

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral history interview with Alice Lang Rosen

    Oral History

    Alice Lang Rosen, born in 1934 in Lambsheim, Germany, describes her early childhood; the deportation of her family to the Gurs camp in France and then to Rivesaltes when she was six years old; the French Red Cross taking her out of the camp and hiding her from the Germans by placing her in a children's home, then in a convent, and then with various Catholic families; being sent to a children's home near Paris after her liberation; having her name put on a list of Jewish children from all over France, which was being compiled by a Polish rabbi; her father tracing her from this list and reuniting with her in Germany in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral history interview with Jay Ipson

    Oral History

    Jay Ipson, born June 5, 1935, in Slobodka (Vilijampolė), Lithuania, describes growing up in religious, well-off family; his father's attempts to move his family to Russia but being turned back at the border; losing their home in the move and moving in with his grandmother, whose house was in the Kaunas ghetto; witnessing the deportations from the ghetto; escaping the ghetto with his mother and father in November 1943; hiding in a farmer's hay wagon and then in one room under the care of a poor, religious Polish Catholic family; his father's construction of a hiding place under the Polish family's potato patch; hiding with all of his extended family in the underground bunker; being liberated by the Russian army; moving back to Kaunas with his parents; attending Jewish school; being forced to run away from Kaunas after his father was declared an enemy of the Soviet Republic; changing his last name to Butremovitch and getting false papers; hiding with a Jewish family in White Russia; leaving Warsaw, Poland and traveling to Germany; receiving help from a German man to cross the border to the American occupied-zone of Germany; living with a German family in Prinz Regenten Strasse in Munich for nine months; immigrating to the United States to live with his aunt in Richmond, VA in June 1947; and joining the US military during the Korean War and becoming a colonel in command of an aviation unit.

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral history interview with Margaret Jastrow Klug

    Oral History

    Margaret Jastrow Klug, born on June 8, 1923 in Rogoźno, Poland, describes her family and childhood; her brother’s immigration to Scotland before the war; the beginning of the war and being arrested because someone had given them her name; jumping from a window of the jail to avoid deportation to Auschwitz but instead being injured and staying in a hospital for two months; being deported to Auschwitz, where she worked in a factory; getting married and having a daughter after the war; immigrating to Israel in 1949; returning to Germany soon after because the climate in Israel was too uncomfortable for her; and immigrating to the United States in the mid-1950s and settling in Atlanta, Georgia.

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral history interview with Solomon Klug

    Oral History

    Solomon Klug, born on July 9, 1923 in Krzepice, Poland, describes growing up in a religious family with one sister and three brothers; seeing his mother and brother shot in his backyard; his deportation in 1940 to Annaberg, Germany, where he worked building the Autobahn; being transferred in 1943 to Markstadt, Germany, where he built bridges, and then to Fuenfteichen, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen, in March 23, 1944 to work in an ammunitions factory; his transport to Wolfsberg, another sub-camp of Gross-Rosen; being sent to Politz, Czechoslovakia, Bergen-Belsen, and finally to Barth-an-der-Ostee, a sub-camp of Ravensbrück; going on a three-day death march after his evacuation from Barth-an-der-Ostee; his liberation on April 30, 1945; going to Berlin, Germany after liberation and meeting his wife Margaret; immigrating to Israel, where they lived for four years, and then returning to Nuremberg to spend a year in a displaced persons camp; and immigrating to the United States in 1955 and settling in Atlanta, Georgia.

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral history interview with Helene Baraf

    Oral History

    Helene Baraf, born July 24, 1927 in Antwerp, Belgium, discusses her family and her childhood in Antwerp before World War II; her family's move to the United States in 1937; her return to Belgium with her mother and brother in 1940; traveling to France with her family by train and on foot after the Germans entered Belgium; her family's life in Lille, France; her brother's arrest by the Gestapo and eventual deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau for failing to properly display his Star of David on his coat; her and her mother's arrest by the Gestapo and their escape during a round up; their rescue from a small hiding place by the members of the underground resistance; her time spent hiding in a convent with other Jewish children in Lille; her attempts to conceal her identity with an assumed name and falsified identification documents; her move from the convent to a "Protestant community" in Roubaix, France, where she attended high school and remained with her mother until after World War II; her friendship with a girl from Roubaix whose family sheltered her and her mother for period of time during the war; the divorce of her parents shortly after the war; and her life in the United States after 1969.

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral history interview with Morris Kornberg

    Oral History

    Morris Kornberg, born in Przedbórz, Poland on January 6, 1918, describes growing up as the youngest of seven children in a strict Orthodox family; the 1939 German invasion and being forced to work in a factory in the ghetto; his imprisonment in Końskie, a prison in Poland, and then in Radom, Poland and Jawischowitz, a sub-camp of Auschwitz; working in a coal mine and receiving special treatment by SS men because of his memory for numbers; his transfer to Troeglitz, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, in January 1945; the evacuation of Troeglitz on April 9, 1945 and escaping on a train with two others; getting caught and forced on a death march to Leitmeritz, a sub-camp of Flossenbürg, and then to Theresienstadt, where he was liberated; staying in a sanitarium outside of Stuttgart, where he met his wife; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral history interview with Michael Diamond

    Oral History

    Michael Diamond, born on July 10, 1919 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), describes his family; his draft into the Czech Army in 1939 but being forced to work in army camps clearing snow off roads and highways when the Slovak State was created; his transfer to Liptovský Mikuláš, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), where he repaired weapons and became a Slovak-German language interpreter; being moved to Vrútky, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), where he had to clean old uniforms; working as an electrician in eastern Slovakia; escaping into hiding in the forest but soon getting captured by the Gestapo; his transport to Sered, a "Sommerlager" in Slovakia; attempting to escape from a transport train and then being sent to Sachsenhausen, Heinkelwerke, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Neuengamme, and Mauthausen; working as an engineer and repairing railroad engines; ending up in Wurttemberg, Germany, where he was marched deeper into Germany as the Allied forces approached; and hiding in a peasant's empty house in Germany until he was liberated by Soviet soldiers.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malach

    Oral History

    Abraham Malach, born on May 12, 1935 in Zwoleń, Poland, describes his family; entering the ghetto in Radom, Poland in 1940 and remaining there until 1942; spending 1942 through 1943 at work camps in Poland, where he worked as a messenger boy; his deportation to Auschwitz in 1944; being removed from the group headed to the gas chambers at his first selection by a female Kapo, who molested him and bribed him to keep silent by giving him food for his family; running away to a monastery when Auschwitz was liberated; eventually being taken by nuns to a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency camp; reuniting with his parents in 1946 in Krakow, Poland; his parents sending him to Israel to finish his high school education; and immigrating to New York, NY after high school when he was admitted to Columbia University.

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral history interview with Michael Bernath

    Oral History

    Michael Bernath, born on February 14, 1923 in Szikszó, Hungary, describes growing up in a family with eleven older siblings; working in Budapest, Hungary as a furrier in 1943 and always getting harassed; joining the underground movement in Budapest and working for American and British intelligence services; the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944 and Hungarian gendarmes rounding up five thousand Jewish people from his town and transporting them to Kassa, Czechoslovakia; being forced into a slave labor camp with about 35,000 other men; his deportation to the Schachendorf concentration camp in Austria in the winter of 1944 and being forced to dig trenches and train tracks in the Austrian Alps; Russian forces liberating him and returning to Budapest to live with his aunt and uncle; and his immigration to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral history interview with Kate Bernath

    Oral History

    Kate Bernath, born in August 27, 1927 in Szikszó, Hungary, describes her family and childhood; living a decent life until March 1944 when the Germans occupied Hungary; dating a man to keep herself amused before the occupation; being rounded up and sent to a ghetto in Kassa (Košice, Slovakia); her deportation to Auschwitz in May 1944; her transfer to a factory in Augsburg, Germany to work in a Messerschmitt factory; hearing Allied bombings every night toward the end of the war; her transfer to Mühldorf, where she had to clean up debris from bombings; the guards disappearing one day and escaping to a farmhouse, where they were caught by an SS soldier; her liberation on May 1, 1946 and going to the Feldafing displaced persons camp; returning to Amsterdam and reuniting with her pre-war boyfriend; and getting married in Leipheim, Germany and then immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral history interview with Paul Kovak

    Oral History

    Paul Kovak, born on December 6, 1938 in Trenčín, Slovakia, describes being born a Jew but converting to Roman Catholicism with his parents; his father’s work as a professor at a small agricultural college; not having to wear the yellow star because of his father’s indispensable position at the school; going into hiding in the second home of a farming family in the mountains in late August 1944 at the time of the Slovak National Uprising; staying in hiding until April 1945, when they were liberated by Russian and Romanian troops; living in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia until 1981; and immigrating to the United States in 1981.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral history interview with Abraham Kolski

    Oral History

    Abraham Kolski, born in 1917 in Izbica Lubelska, Poland, describes his family; the German occupation of Poland and going into the Czestochowa ghetto, where he did forced labor at a metal factory; his deportation on October 2, 1942 to Treblinka, Poland, where he performed forced labor searching for valuables in the clothing of gas chamber victims; participating in the Treblinka uprising on August 2, 1943 and escaping the concentration camp with nine other friends; hiding in a cellar of a home near Treblinka for the remainder of the war; eventually being liberated by the Russian Army; remaining in Poland until 1948, when he married and left for France; immigrating to the United States in 1954; and testifying as a witness to the events at Treblinka in the war crimes trials at Düsseldorf.

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral history interview with Sylvia Kolski

    Oral History

    Sylvia Kolski, born on September 15, 1925 in Tarczyn, Poland, describes her family and childhood; moving with her aunt, uncle, cousins, and parents into the Warsaw ghetto; working for a tailor in the ghetto; hearing rumors that the Jews would be killed on July 22, 1942; hiding money in her clothing, so she could bribe people to save herself; seeing several major deportations from the ghetto; escaping from the ghetto and staying with a family in the countryside; her liberation on January 16, 1945 and returning to Tarczyn; moving to Łódź, Poland, where she met her husband, and then to Paris, France in 1947; and immigrating to the United States when the Vietnam War began.

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral history interview with Steven Springfield

    Oral History

    Steven Springfield, born in 1923 in Riga, Latvia, describes his experiences as a child; the German occupation of Riga in 1941 and having to go into the ghetto; the massacre of about 28,000 Jews from the ghetto in late 1941 at the Rumbula forest; being transferred with his brother to a small ghetto for able-bodied men; his deportation to a labor camp near Kaiserwald in 1943; being moved to Stutthof in 1944 and forced to work in a shipbuilding firm; surviving a death march in 1945 with his brother and being liberated by Soviet forces; accepting a position as an interpreter for the Russian Army; his incarceration by the Russians for allegedly supporting the Nazis but being released when the charges were disproven; locating his pre-war girlfriend and marrying her; moving to Berlin, Germany with his wife and brother; and applying for a visa and immigrating to the United States on March 10, 1947.

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral history interview with Liny Pajgin Yollick

    Oral History

    Liny Pajgin Yollick, born in 1924 in Hague, Netherlands, describes growing up in a wealthy family; the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940; her mother’s plans to escape after her father died; spending six months with her mother and sister trying to escape through southern France by pretending to be Protestant, obtaining visas to travel through Spain and Portugal, and going on one of the last trains to cross into Spain after the Germans took over southern France; boarding a Portuguese ship bound for Dutch Guiana and being placed into a refugee camp; the exiled Dutch government’s arrangement for her to finish her education; and immigrating to the United States, where she worked for some time in the Dutch embassy in Washington, DC before settling in Texas.

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral history interview with Fred Bachner

    Oral History

    Fred Bachner was born on September 28, 1925 in Berlin, Germany and describes his family; his brother’s and father’s deportation to the Polish border after Kristallnacht; moving to Poland in 1939 to join the rest of his family; his brother being taken to a work camp in Poland in 1940; his deportation to Markstädt, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen, and then to Groeditz and Faulbrueck before he was sent to Auschwitz; loading and unloading coal and cement for I.G. Farben, a German industrial company; going on a death march out of Auschwitz to a camp near Dachau, where he found his brother; being placed on another train that was ambushed by British fighter planes; jumping off the train with his brother and hiding in the surrounding area until they located the American soldiers; staying at the Feldafing displaced persons camp after the war; reuniting with his father and immigrating to the United States with his father and brother on January 3, 1947; and being drafted into the United States Army during the Korean War.

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral history interview with Murray Pantirer

    Oral History

    Murray Pantirer was born on June 15, 1925 in Kraków, Poland and discusses his childhood; the German occupation of Kraków in 1939; separating from his family on several occasions in an attempt to find food and other necessities; finally being confined to the Kraków ghetto; his and his brother’s deportation to Płaszów, Poland to do forced labor; his transport to Auschwitz in May 1944, then to Gross-Rosen, and finally to Brünnlitz, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen, to work for German industrialist Oskar Schindler; his liberation on May 10, 1945 and discovering that he was only one of nine family members to survive; returning to Poland after liberation but deciding to leave because of the lingering presence of antisemitism; moving to a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria, where he met and married his wife; arranging to immigrate to America through the American consul in Salzburg, Austria; and immigrating to the United States on the S.S. Marine Fletcher in January 1949.

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral history interview with Barbara Marton Farkas

    Oral History

    Barbara Marton Farkas, born on May 4, 1920 in Beliu, Romania, describes her family and childhood; living in Beliu until 1937, when her family sold their house and store and moved to Oradea, Romania; being refused entrance into the university in 1940 because of the anti-Jewish laws implemented by the Hungarian government, which then controlled the northern Transylvania area; training in a hospital laboratory and working there until the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944; leaving the hospital, which was occupied by the SS, and starting work at a photo company; first wearing the Star of David on April 1, 1944 and going into the Oradea ghetto in May 1944; her family’s deportation to Auschwitz, where she lost her parents; her transfer to Weisswasser, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen in Germany, where she worked in a chemistry lab and then in the Cathode Workshop; staying there from October 1944 through February 1945; her transport through several camps after March 1945 to avoid the approaching Soviet army; ending up on the German-Danish border at Padberg, Germany; the Red Cross assisting the survivors with food and shelter; being taken to Malmö, Sweden the next day and then spending some time in a hospital in Landskrona, Sweden; returning to Romania to study in Cluj from 1946 to 1951; graduating as an industrial pharmacist; immigrating to Israel in 1961; and immigrating to the United States in 1968.

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral history interview with William Farkas

    Oral History

    William Farkas, born in 1916 in Arad, Romania, describes growing up as an only child in a middle class family; attending the Arad Jewish school and studying business administration after high school; joining the Romanian Army after school; not experiencing antisemitism until 1940 when he was expelled from the army because he was Jewish; the Iron Guard coming to power in September 1940; being ordered to report for deportation to labor camps in July 1941 and going to a work camp in Sighişoara, Romania, where he worked as a miner demolishing mountains for a new railway line; being sent home until 1942, when he was transported to Valea Homorod, Romania and then to Kinapist, Romania to do railway work; claiming he was an electrician in 1943 and going to a camp with three friends in Timişoara, Romania, where they worked as auto mechanics in a military garage for one year; his transport in 1944 to Doaga, a labor camp in Romania, where inmates built cement fortresses; hearing that Soviet soldiers were approaching Doaga and being liberated on August 25, 1944; returning home via Bucharest and reuniting with his parents in Arad; finding a wife and immigrating to Israel with her in 1954; and immigrating to the United States in 1961.

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral history interview with Sheila Perec Etons Bernard

    Oral History

    Sheila Etons Bernard (née Sala Perec), born on February 18, 1936 in Chełm, Poland, describes her family and early childhood; her father’s deportation to a labor camp after the war began and never seeing him again; hiding in the shack of a Polish policeman for almost two years with her mother; her mother dying because of a blood clot in her leg; going to a children’s home in Germany for two years; immigrating to Palestine to live with one of her uncles; joining the military, where she met her husband; immigrating to the United States in 1963 because her husband had family in the US; and her thoughts on how the war has affected her life.

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral history interview with Frima L.

    Oral History

    Frima, born in 1936 in Volochys'k, Russia (now Ukraine), describes her family; trying to escape to White Russia with her family after the Nazi invasion but being forced back to live with some distant cousins; her father’s capture by the Germans to serve as an interpreter for them; her sister and mother being forced to work at labor camps during the days; entering the Volochys'k ghetto; getting caught by Germans and claiming that they were not Jewish, which resulted in them going to jail; escaping with her mother and sister to hide in the attic of a barn, where they were almost discovered but managed to escape; the intensifying pogroms against the Jews by Russian and Ukrainian collaborators; pretending to be Christian and going into hiding with an old family friend; eventually reuniting with her mother with the help of several generous Gentiles and staying with her until the end of the war; going into displaced persons camps in Bavaria; going to school in Germany for two and a half years and then moving to France; immigrating to the United States in the 1950s and meeting her husband there; and her considerations on how the war has affected her life.

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral history interview with Esther Terner Raab

    Oral History

    Esther Terner Raab, born on June 11, 1922 in Chelm, Poland, describes growing up as one of two children; the Soviet occupation of her town in 1939; the German invasion of Chelm in 1941 and her family being forced into a ghetto; moving to Siedliszcze, Poland and eventually moving into the ghetto in Siedliszcze; her transport to the labor camp at Staw Noakowski, Poland for a short time before she and her brother were sent to Sobibór in December 1942; arriving at Sobibór three days before Christmas in 1942 and being forced to work in a knitting factory in the camp, knitting woolen socks; witnessing the gassing of Jews at Camp III of the Sobibór compound; participating in the camp uprising of October 14, 1943 but getting wounded during the escape; fleeing to the countryside and getting sheltered by a former customer of her father; reuniting with her brother, who had escaped during a previous transfer; remaining hidden until 1944, when the region in which she hid was freed by the Soviet Red Army; following the Red Army to Berlin, Germany and settling there for a short time after the war; marrying a man in Berlin and then immigrating to the United States shortly after the end of the war; and serving as a witness at the trials of Nazi criminals in the 1965-66 trials in Hagen, Germany.

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral history interview with Guy Stern

    Oral History

    Guy Stern, born on January 14, 1922 in Hildesheim, Germany, describes growing up in a Jewish family; attending a German school, where he had many non-Jewish friends; losing several of his friends after 1933 when they joined the Hitler Youth; his family’s decision to move to the United States after they began to experience increased levels of antisemitism; leaving Germany with a group of children in November 1937 and arriving in New York, NY; moving to St. Louis, Missouri to live with distant relatives; graduating high school in June 1939 and trying to help his family immigrate to the United States; discovering that his parents had perished in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland; attempting to enlist in the US Army in 1941 but being turned away because of his German heritage; receiving a draft notice in 1942 and being trained in military intelligence because of his familiarity with the German language; training at Camp Ritchie in Maryland; working as an interrogator and uncovering the deeds of several war criminals; going to Buchenwald the day after it was liberated and seeing the horrible conditions there; returning to the United States after the war, attending Hofstra College, and then earning his Ph.D. from Columbia University in German Literature and Culture; and helping other survivors write about their Holocaust experiences.

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral history interview with Toby Stern

    Oral History

    Toby Stern, born on July 15, 1920 in Vișeu de Mijloc, Romania, describes growing up as the youngest of six children; marrying when she was seventeen or eighteen; going into hiding with her family shortly after the war began; having one child and miscarrying another while in hiding; her deportation to Auschwitz with her mother and her three-year-old son; giving her child to her mother to carry, since both were guaranteed to be killed, which allowed her to survive; having to do forced labor making uniforms in the camp's tailor shop; going on a death march in early 1945 from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück and then to Malchow, where Russian forces liberated her; going to the New Bromberg displaced persons camp and then returning to Vișeu de Mijloc in search of her husband and family; finding all of her brothers but not her husband, who was rumored to have died in Russia; immigrating to Germany after the war and remarrying while there; and immigrating to the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Ion Butnaru

    Oral History

    Ion Butnaru, born in 1918 in Huși, Moldavia (Romania), describes his family; working for a small newspaper before the war until he was drafted into the Romanian Army in November, 1939; being transferred to the military zone in northern Moldavia in the spring of 1940; his expulsion from the army in August 1940 because he was Jewish; being ordered to return to his regiment to work with the battalions in the Carpathian Mountains on September 1, 1940; being sent back to Huși to clean streets in the summer of 1941; his deportation to a concentration camp in Tîrgu Jiu, Romania, where he remained for four months; returning to Huși, where he was placed in a local camp in the courtyard of the Jewish community and had to wear yellow badges; witnessing the Iron Guard Rebellion in January 1941, during which many Jews were killed; his father being falsely accused of being a communist and getting badly beaten; being forced to clear the streets of snow until the summer of 1942, when he was sent to Bolgrad, Ukraine and then to several other villages in Bessarabia in a forced labor battalion; getting moved to another camp near Bîrlad, Romania in 1943; the Romanian Army surrendering to Soviet forces in August 1944; and immigrating to the United States in 1976.

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral history interview with Jeanine Gutman Butnaru

    Oral History

    Jeanine Gutman Butnaru, born on June 25, 1925 in Bacău, Romania, describes her childhood and family; moving to Bucharest, Romania in 1938; her involvement in the underground resistance movement in Bucharest; working as a volunteer in Jewish hospitals; witnessing the Iron Guard Rebellion of January 21-23, 1941, when Legionaries killed Jews and burned downed their houses and stores; the 1944 American bombing of the railroads that cut the Germans off from Ploiești, Romania, which was rich with oil; hiding in her family’s cellar during the heavy bombardments because Ploiești was near Bucharest; Soviet troops entering Romania at the end of the war; meeting her husband in the Writer's Union; and immigrating to the United States in 1976.

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral history interview with Cecilie Klein-Pollack

    Oral History

    Cecilie Klein-Pollack, born on April 13, 1925 in Yasinya, Ukraine, describes growing up as the youngest of six children in a Jewish family; the death of her father when she was nine years old; her expulsion from high school after the Hungarians annexed Ruthenia; being threatened with deportation and subsequently going into hiding in Budapest, Hungary after her mother and sister were briefly imprisoned there; fleeing to Horinc, Ukraine, where they stayed for a year until her brother was taken for forced labor; moving with her mother to Nyíregyháza, Hungary, where arrangements had been made for her to apprentice in a dental laboratory; traveling to Budapest when she heard that her oldest sister had been arrested and finding out that she had been sent to a labor camp in Bačka Topola, Yugoslavia; traveling to Bačka Topola to arrange for her sister’s release and then returning to Budapest, where she became engaged to her future husband Joe Klein; the German invasion of Budapest in March 1944 and joining up with her and Joe’s families in Chust, Ukraine; being forced into a ghetto and then transported to Auschwitz; arriving in Auschwitz and being sent to Birkenau with her sister; being sheltered by the Blockältester who liked her because she was a talented poet; her and her sister’s transport to Nuremberg and Holleischen; their liberation from Holleischen by Russian troops and returning to Czechoslovakia, where she reunited with her fiancé and married him in Budapest on August 21, 1945; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral history interview with Fred Schwartz

    Oral History

    Fred Schwartz, born on October 30, 1928 in Kotaj, Hungary, describes his childhood; his father’s deportation to a labor camp in 1940; taking over his father’s job delivering seltzer water with his brother; knowing very little of what was happening in Europe from 1940 to 1944; the German invasion of Hungary; the organization of Jews into their town synagogues as the Germans prepared them for deportation; his deportation to Birkenau with his father, mother, and brother; discovering later after the war that his mother had died in Bergen-Belsen; his transfer to a work camp in Wolfsberg where he had to dig tunnels through mountains; being forced on a death march as the Russian forces neared; arriving in Mauthausen where he was liberated by American forces; staying a displaced persons camp for two years until he relocated to Paris, France; waiting to receive an American visa; going to the United States without legal papers and almost being sent back; and reconciling with his past.

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral history interview with Abraham Malnik

    Oral History

    Abraham Malnik, born on January 31, 1927 in Kaunas, Lithuania, describes his childhood and family; the Russian invasion of Lithuania in 1940 and losing most of his family’s belongings; the brutal treatment of Jews by Lithuanians; the establishment of a ghetto in Kaunas that held about thirty thousand people; the Lithuanians beheading the local rabbis; being saved during a selection because his father knew the chief of police; his father’s work in the ghetto fire department; being forced to do several jobs like make toys for German children and clean dirty clothes from the front; the Germans and Lithuanians intensifying their battle against the Jews after the loss of the battle at Stalingrad; being on the last transport from the ghetto to Dachau, where he had to help build a factory for Messerschmitt and pick up dead bodies; his transfers with his father to Flossenbürg and then another camp; getting a German officer in trouble because he attempted to sexually abuse him; his transfer to Theresienstadt, where he was liberated by Russian troops on May 8, 1945; immigrating to the United States without knowing anyone or speaking English; and settling in Washington, DC with his wife, who was a Belgian Holocaust survivor.

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral history interview with Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

    Oral History

    Lilly Appelbaum Malnik, born in Belgium in 1928, describes her family and childhood; her father's move to the United States; waking up one morning in 1940 and discovering that the Germans had invaded; her sister who was taken into hiding by a farmer who later turned her in to the Germans because she would not have sexual relations with him; living with her aunt in the countryside after having her tonsils out; returning to find that her mother and brother had been deported; hiding her Jewish identity and doing odd jobs for the Germans; going into hiding with a Belgian girl with whom she had worked; being caught and deported on the second-to-last transport before the liberation of Belgium; arriving in Birkenau and receiving her identification number and work assignment to the kitchens in Auschwitz; a death march to Bergen-Belsen; the arrival of Allied soldiers at Bergen-Belsen; being taken away by the Red Cross to recover from typhus and physical injuries; returning to Belgium and reuniting with her aunt; and immigrating to United States to be with her father.

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral history interview with Masha Loen

    Oral History

    Masha Loen, born in July 1930 in Kaunas, Lithuania, describes growing up in a religious family with three sisters; her father hiding her family and other Kaunas Jews under the wooden floor planks in his home; being separated from her family in 1941 and taken to the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland; performing forced labor in Stutthof until 1945, when she was taken on a death march as Russian troops approached the camp; making it to a Russian hospital after the German soldiers abandoned the death march; traveling to Łódź, where she found her father who had been liberated from Dachau; taking a transport to Austria; and immigrating to New Orleans, LA in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral history interview with Madeline Deutsch

    Oral History

    Madeline Deutsch, born on April 29, 1930 in Berehove, Czechoslovakia (now in Ukraine), describes her childhood; Hungary taking over her town on November 9, 1938; living under the Hungarians until March 1944 when the Germans invaded; living in a ghetto for two weeks until her transport to Auschwitz, where she and her mother stayed in for one week; being moved near Wrocław, Poland to work at an ammunition factory; her and her mother’s liberation by Russian soldiers on May 8, 1945; discovering that both her father and brother had died; staying with her mother in a displaced persons camp for four years until March 9, 1949 when the two immigrated to the United States; and marrying and having two sons in America.

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Amalie Petranker Salsitz

    Oral History

    Amalie Petranker Salsitz, born in 1922 in Munich, Germany, describes growing up in a Zionist family; moving to Stanislav, Poland (now Ivano-Frankivs'k, Ukraine) when she was a young child; the Russian occupation of Poland in 1939 and the loss of her father’s business; seeing her sister move to Palestine with her new husband; her family’s arrest by the Gestapo in October 1941; moving into the ghetto until her father was deported in 1942; escaping to Kraków, Poland, where she passed as Aryan; working as a chambermaid and finally obtaining employment at a construction firm in Kraków, where she remained until January 1945; traveling to Munich and Palestine after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral history interview with Norman Salsitz

    Oral History

    Norman Salsitz, born in 1920 in Kolbuszowa, Poland, describes growing up in a Zionist Hasidic family; making a failed attempt to immigrate to Palestine in 1938; unsuccessfully trying to join the Polish Army in September 1939; the occupation and destruction of his town; escaping to Russian-occupied Poland for a short period until he returned to Kolbuszowa; going into the Lipie labor camp in 1940; running away from the camp; working for the Germans, building garages for the Wehrmacht; his deportation to the Pustków concentration camp in late 1940; being beaten; escaping from Pustków and moving to the Czechowice ghetto; escaping from the ghetto in November 1942 and helping to establish a partisan unit in the forest near Kolbuszowa; obtaining false documentation with which he joined the Armia Krajowa; fleeing to Germany after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral history interview with Frederic Bernard

    Oral History

    Frederic Bernard, born on August 7, 1912 in Chernivtsi, Romania (Chernivtsi, Ukraine), describes his family; studying medicine at Karls University in Prague, Czechoslovakia; attempting to enter Hungary in 1941 but being turned away by the Hungarian gendarmerie and placed in a ghetto in Oleyëvo-Korolëvka, Ukraine with over 1,500 Jewish people; hiding during an Aktion in 1942 that exterminated most of the ghetto and then later escaping with his wife Gusti; finding a hiding place with a Polish man in a barn in the woods; the Polish man encouraging him to join a Polish resistance group; finding a new hiding place with Gusti in 1943 and joining a Russian resistance group; becoming a courier for the resistance because of his Romanian language ability; joining the Polish Army, where he practiced as a doctor; and immigrating to the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral history interview with Isaac Bitton

    Oral History

    Isaac Bitton, born on March 31, 1926 in Lisbon, Portugal, describes his family and childhood; the small Lisbon Jewish community in which he grew up that hosted thousands of Jewish refugees before and during the war; his family’s work running a soup kitchen to help the Jewish refugees; immigrating to Palestine with his brother aboard the ship Nisassa; being forced into an internment camp when he arrived in Haifa; joining the Palestine Police Railroad Division and then the Jewish Brigade; spending some time in Antwerp, Belgium for the Jewish Brigade but soon returning to Palestine to work for the British military; participating in a movement to encourage the illegal entry of European refugees into Palestine; working with the underground forces of the Haganah, a movement dedicated to preparing for Israeli independence; and his immigration to the United States in 1959.

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral history interview with Max Haber

    Oral History

    Max Haber, born on December 31, 1904 in Essen, Germany, describes his family; attending an Orthodox Jewish school in Germany; moving to Hamburg, Germany and working as a businessman there until 1933, when he moved to Kolomyia, Poland to live with his brother and sister; moving to Katowice, Poland, where he was able to find work; joining the Revisionist party in 1939 and trying to immigrate to Palestine on an illegal transport through Romania; the British Ambassador to Romania telling the Romanians to withdraw his visa since the British were restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine; returning to Kolomyia and staying there until the Soviets invaded in 1939; trying to escape to Romania with his brother-in-law but getting caught and imprisoned; being moved to Kiev, Ukraine in March 1940; receiving a five-year prison sentence and getting transported to Yartsevo, Russia; his transfer to the Mostowits labor camp in Russia, where he was forced to cut trees; his liberation in March 1944 and taking a train to Kotel’nich, Russia with other prisoners; staying with several Russian Jewish families until he found a Ukrainian family who housed him for a short time in exchange for German lessons; traveling to the English zone in Germany; and reuniting with his brother in 1951 in Israel.

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral history interview with William P. Levine

    Oral History

    Major General William P. Levine, born in Duluth, Minnesota on July 1, 1915, describes growing up as the oldest of four brothers; his draft into the United States Army in 1942 and completing Officer Training School in 1943; entering the Intelligence Unit as an Artillery Officer in 1944; being sent to England and later traveling with a unit that began in the Netherlands and worked its way south towards Dachau; moving into Dachau on April 29, 1945 and helping to give out food and medical care to the former prisoners at Dachau; and returning to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral history interview with Leo Schneiderman

    Oral History

    Leo Schneiderman, born on August 18, 1921 in Łódź, Poland, describes his family and childhood; the large Jewish population that had comfortably developed within Łódź before Hitler came to power; Poland preparing for war by drafting young men into the army and by digging trenches; the German invasion and fall of the Polish Army in September 1939; being tricked by the German government to head towards Warsaw with his younger brother and father; returning to Łódź and being forced into the ghetto with his whole family; the closing of the Łódź ghetto in 1940 and the realization that the community needed to organize its own services and methods of self-support; each of his family members taking a job in the ghetto, including his work as a tailor; illegally teaching Yiddish in the ghetto; not understanding why there had to be deportations from the ghetto without realizing the severity of the camps; his deportation to Auschwitz in August 1944; his transport to Kaltwasser, a labor camp in Silesia, to do construction work for a short period until he was transferred to Lärche and then to Wolfsberg, where he worked in a hospital; being forced onto an open cattle car for a deportation and being thrown food while passing through Stará Paka, Czechoslovakia; his liberation by Allied Forces; and speaking for the prosecution against Herr Krison in a 1978 trial in Bochum, West Germany.

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral history interview with Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf

    Oral History

    Adam Starkopf and Pela Starkopf, both born in 1914 in Warsaw, Poland, describe their childhoods and families; Pela’s decision to study at a Warsaw law school before the war; getting married in 1936 and having a daughter in 1941; entering the Warsaw ghetto in 1940; escaping from the ghetto in 1942 by drugging their daughter, so she seemed to be dead; pretending to go to the Jewish cemetery outside of the ghetto to bury their daughter but never returning; their daughter getting tuberculosis and her six week treatment in a hospital; being helped by non-Jews; hiding on the Aryan side as Catholics; their daughter’s discovery that she was Jewish after the war; immigrating to the United States in 1947 on a United States Navy transport; Adam taking various jobs until he opened sporting goods factory; and getting involved in the Penny Project, which began in 1989.

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral history interview with Carla Heijmans Lessing

    Oral History

    Carla Heijmans Lessing, born in 1929 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, describes her family and childhood; the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 and experiencing harsh antisemitic measures; going into hiding with her mother and brother in August 1942 with the assistance of a Catholic priest who helped Jews find hiding places; leaving their first hiding place after three months but, with the priest’s help, finding a new shelter in Delft, in which they hid for thirty months; and her liberation in May 1945.

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral history interview with Edward Lessing

    Oral History

    Edward Lessing, born in the Hague, Netherlands on May 8, 1926, describes moving to the United States in 1929; returning to Delft, Netherlands in 1932 because of the economic depression in the US; entering trade school in 1942 to become a tool maker but having to leave because Jews could no longer attend public school after the German invasion; splitting up from his family after the invasion in October 1942 and finding a place to hide with a farmer, who employed him as a farm hand; relocating to hide in a convent in the Hague with his mother; the German raid of the convent in December 1943, during which he escaped, but his mother was taken to Bergen-Belsen; reuniting with his father and brothers in their hiding place in an abandoned cottage; remaining in this cottage through May 1945 when they returned to Delft; his mother’s liberation from Bergen-Belsen in late 1945; and immigrating with his family to the United States in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral history interview with Werner Goldsmith

    Oral History

    Werner Goldsmith, born in Erfurt, Germany on November 13, 1928, describes his family; the expulsion of Jewish children from German schools in 1938; the death of his father in 1938 and moving with his mother to Berlin, Germany; his mother placing him in the Auerbach Orphanage while she lived with another Jewish woman in West Berlin; his mother arranging for him to be placed in a transport to France while she traveled to England; living in the home of a French count until the invasion of France in 1940; the count being taken prisoner in Germany in 1940 and going into the care of the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants; unsuccessfully attempting to flee to southern France and getting separated from the other children when he was placed in the Rothschild orphanage, where he remained for nine months; moving to Marseilles, France in the spring of 1941; receiving an emergency visa in September 1941 to immigrate to the United States because he had relatives there; getting on a transport from Marseilles to Portugal and then embarking on a Portuguese freighter and sailing to the United States; and living in Jewish foster homes until he reunited with his mother in 1946.

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral history interview with Beatrice Pappenheimer

    Oral History

    Beatrice Pappenheimer, born in October 1932 in Lauterbach, Germany, describes her family and childhood; her parents having to register with the local police; moving to Karlsruhe, Germany after her father had to give up his business in 1936; starting school in Karlsruhe but experiencing much antisemitism; being forced to leave school in November 1938 because of a law forbidding Jews from public schools; the Gestapo forcing her and her family from their house and onto a train in 1939; arriving in the Gurs camp and contracting dysentery; her transfer to the Rivesaltes camp; her mother placing her on a truck run by the Oeuvre de Secours des Enfants and moving into homes in France; reuniting with her sister, who had gone through terrible times in the camps; the bombing of France that picked up in 1943; receiving letters from her grandmother in Palestine, her aunts in New York City, NY, and her uncle and aunt in London, England; arriving in London to be with her uncle and aunt; immigrating to New York City in October 1947 to live with her aunts and attend high school; and her thoughts on her wartime experiences.

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral history interview with John Komski

    Oral History

    John Komski, born in 1915 in Galicia, Poland, describes growing up in a Gentile family; having some Jewish friends at the Academy of Arts in Kraków, where he graduated from in 1939; leaving Kraków when the Germans invaded but returning to join the resistance; escaping to Czechoslovakia, where he was caught by Slovaks who turned him in to the Gestapo; being rounded up in 1940 with 756 other Poles and deported to Auschwitz, where he worked in the architect's office; helping to create the museum in Auschwitz in 1941, collecting items of interest from the incoming inmates; escaping from Auschwitz to a small village, where he received false documents from the underground and boarded a train to Kraków; getting captured in Kraków and sent to prison; his transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau and then to Buchenwald, where he worked as a kitchen chef; his deportation to Gross-Rosen, where he worked in the labor relations office; being transported to Hersbruck towards the end of the war and then forced on a death march to Dachau, where he was liberated; and his immigration to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral history interview with Curtis Whiteway

    Oral History

    Curtis Whiteway, born in Newburyport, MA on November 3, 1925, discusses his draft into the United States Army in December 1943; his basic training in Fort Knox, KY and intensive training with Rangers; transferring to Camp Maxie, TX, where he joined the 99th Division and immediately went to England; crossing into France with his division and participating in several skirmishes with the Germans; fighting the Third Panzer Division, which helped to push American forces further into Germany through the Siegfried Line; fighting near Cologne, Germany and encountering several concentration camps; helping to liberate the few surviving prisoners at Ohrdruf; going south into combat after the arrival of the Red Cross; reaching Dachau 3-B and then liberating the Moosburg prison camp (Stalag VII A) in Germany, which had about 30,000 prisoners, including some American prisoners of war; going to the Landshut sub-camp of Dachau to meet up with English and Canadian troops; and his assignment after the war to work temporarily in Cherbourg, France.

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral history interview with Lore Baer

    Oral History

    Lore Baer, born August 26, 1938 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, discusses her childhood in Amsterdam; how her family moved from Germany to the Netherlands in 1933; developing a close relationship with her maternal grandfather, who was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Bergen-Belsen, where he perished; her family's relationship with Elsa and Sam Izaaks, members of the underground resistance; her time in hiding with the Schouten family and becoming friends with Cornelia Schouten; her memories of living as a Catholic in order to conceal her identity as a Jew; hiding in various places on the Schouten family farm in order to avoid the Germans; her difficult separation from the Schouten family at the end of the war and her readjustment to life in Amsterdam; immigrating to the United States with her parents and settling in the Bronx, New York; and returning to the Netherlands to visit with members of the Schouten family several years after moving to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral history interview with Erich Kulka

    Oral History

    Erich Kulka (né Erich Schön), born on February 18, 1911 in Vsetín, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes his childhood and family; being raised as a conservative Jew; attending a trade school, where he studied forestry and then worked in the family lumber business; smuggling people through the woods after the German annexation of Austria; being caught, arrested, and tortured by the Gestapo in June 1939; being released from prison in August 1939 and resuming work with the underground; his second arrest in 1940, when he was taken to Dachau as a political prisoner and then transferred to Auschwitz, where he was assigned to a work detail with a group of five in the Birkenau camp; assisting in resistance activities in Auschwitz; going on a death march as the Soviets approached and then put on a train from which he escaped; fleeing from Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring in 1968; living in Vienna, Austria for three months; and how all his family now lives in Israel.

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral history interview with Cornelia Schouten

    Oral History

    Cornelia Schouten, born on January 21, 1920 in Huizen, Netherlands, describes growing up as one of five children of a Christian farming family in Oosterblokker, Netherlands; one of her brothers serve in the Dutch Army and fight against the Nazis in 1940; the arrest of her father and uncle during the German occupation of the Netherlands because they were striking in protest of the occupation; her family’s decision to harbor those who resisted the Nazis, including members of the resistance and men who were drafted for forced labor; sheltering the young Jewish girl, Lore Baer, for over two years; Lore’s parents emerging from hiding after the war and reclaiming their daughter; reuniting with Lore several times after the war; and eventually immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral history interview with Drexel Sprecher

    Oral History

    Drexel Sprecher, born on March 25, 1913 in Independence, WI, describes his family; his education at the University of Wisconsin, the London School of Economics, and at the Harvard School of Law; receiving a position on the Labor Board in 1938; his enlistment in the United States Army after the US declared war on Germany; being sent to London, England, where he was assigned to the Inspector General's office; later serving as a prosecutor of Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials; and prosecuting Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth.

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral history interview with Bela Blau

    Oral History

    Bela Blau, born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia) in 1910, describes his family; getting married in 1930 and moving to Zilina, Slovakia; serving in the army for eighteen months and then working as a salesman representing a photo company; having a son in 1937; being dismissed from his job in 1938 because of his Jewish background; being arrested by two Hlinka Guards one day after Yom Kippur in 1942; his and his family’s deportation to Auschwitz, where he was placed in Block 10 and worked on building a bridge above the River Sota; doing writing jobs for an illiterate German Kapo because he spoke German; being assigned to the Kommando Kanada until May 1943 when he became a scribe and met his future second wife Magda; going on a death march in January 1945 from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Mauthausen, where he spent one month until he was transferred to Gusen, where he worked as an engineer fixing petrol tanks, gas tanks, and the wings of Messerschmitt planes; his transfer to Gunskirchen on May 1; and United States forces liberating him on May 7, 1945 in Gunskirchen.

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral history interview with Magda Blau

    Oral History

    Magda Blau, born on August 19, 1916 in Michalovce, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), describes growing up in a Jewish family; becoming a kindergarten teacher; the German invasion and her deportation to Auschwitz, where she worked scrubbing floors for three months until she became an assistant to the block supervisor; being put in charge of the barrack for medical experiments in the autumn of 1942 and becoming the protégé of Dr. Eduard Wirths, the garrison physician; later working in an office and becoming the concentration camp commander of the camp for Hungarian Jews; getting a job counting potatoes in a kitchen and then a job as a concentration camp supervisor in a fabric production facility; going on a death march on January 18, 1945 to Malchow, where they were liberated by the Soviet Army; settling in Prague, Czech Republic for a short time and then immigrating to Israel; and finally immigrating to Australia in 1965.

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral history interview with Barbara Ledermann Rodbell

    Oral History

    Barbara Lederman Rodbell, born in 1925 in Berlin, Germany, describes her childhood; moving to Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1933 with her family; becoming friends with Anne Frank and her family; the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940; her boyfriend getting her false papers through his underground contacts; the deportation of her mother, sister, and father to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz; working for the resistance and surviving using her false papers; helping other Jews find hiding places; joining a ballet company for two years after the war; and immigrating to the United States in November 1947.

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral history interview with Jerry Slivka

    Oral History

    Jerry Slivka, born on July 11, 1915 in Western Ukraine, describes his memories of the Soviet takeover of Russia; moving to the neighboring town of Povorsk, Ukraine with his family; participating with the Zionist movement and joining a kibbutz; moving to Łódź, where he worked as a manager of a village store from 1939 to 1941; entering the Polish Army in 1939 but settling in Soviet-held territory after the takeover of Poland; joining the reserves of the Soviet Army; escaping a German attack and seeking refuge at Soviet military headquarters; being sent to a labor camp in Stalingrad (Volgograd), Russia and then to the railroads east of the Volga because the Soviets were suspicious of him; working in a coal mine near Moscow, Russia for one-and-a-half years before he was freed; his interment in Italy until he could return to Łódź in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral history interview with Rochelle Blackman Slivka

    Oral History

    Rochelle Blackman Slivka, born in 1922 in Vilnius, Lithuania, describes growing up in a Jewish family; the German occupation of Vilnius in June 1941 and moving into the ghetto with her family in October; her mother’s death in the ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1943 and being transported to the Kaiserwald concentration camp in Latvia and later to Stutthof; her father’s murder in an Estonian prison camp because he had served as a Jewish council member; her experiences in the camps until she had to go on a death march, during which the Soviet Army liberated her; beginning to make her way back to Vilnius with her sister but instead going to West Germany; separating from her sister while they both awaited permission to go to the United States; learning nursing during her stay at a German displaced persons camp; immigrating to the United States and arriving in Massachusetts on May 18, 1949; working as a nurse’s aide in an American hospital; and meeting and marrying a Holocaust survivor in the United States in 1952.

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral history interview with Francis Akos

    Oral History

    Francis Akos, born on March 30, 1922 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his childhood; attending a music academy, from which he graduated in 1941; becoming the concertmaster for the Budapest Jewish Community Cultural Center orchestra; being drafted for forced labor into the Hungarian Army in 1943; getting captured with other Jews in Budapest while on leave from the army to get fresh clothes; being sent by train to Neuengamme on November 4, 1944; playing violin in the camp; his evacuation from Neuengamme on May 3, 1945 and being transported by the ship Cap Arcona, a passenger liner that was evacuating refugees from West Prussia; the British mistakenly attacking the Cap Arcona and three other prisoner ships, which resulted in eight thousand deaths; returning to Budapest after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1954.

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral history interview with Beno Helmer

    Oral History

    Beno Helmer, born in 1923 in Teplice, Czechoslovakia, describes his childhood and family; using his foreign language skills to land small movie roles before the war; attempting to settle in Hungary with his family before the war; his family’s deportation to Łódź in 1939 because they did not have immigration papers; arriving in the Łódź ghetto and staying there until he had to begin doing forced labor outside the ghetto in 1942; securing a job posing as a non-Jewish German and collecting information for the underground and becoming an expert at derailing trains; returning to the ghetto when his father became sick and remaining with his family until they were deported to Auschwitz after the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto; his deportations to Gross-Rosen, Krupp Bertha-Werk at Laskowitz-Meleschwitz, Buchenwald, and Ludwigslust; his liberation by American soldiers while in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp; attempting to get back to Poland and on the way joining a Polish forced labor group that was later incorporated into the Russian Army; spending time hunting for Nazi war criminals after the war; and living in Europe for several years until he immigrated to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral history interview with Jerry von Halle

    Oral History

    Jerry von Halle, born on December 2, 1922 in Hamburg, Germany, describes his family and childhood; learning the Hitler salute in school and having to fly the Nazi flag over his house on holidays; moving to Amsterdam, Netherlands with his family in 1933 to get away from the Nazi party in Germany; the German invasion of the Netherlands; the Gestapo arresting and sending him to prison; being sent to Mauthausen with his brother and other boys but returning because he claimed to have tuberculosis; learning to be a shoemaker to avoid deportation; hiding in a house in the countryside with his family but returning to Amsterdam with his mother; going into hiding with his mother in the small apartment that belonged to one of his former teachers; his hider being caught and arrested four weeks before the end of the war and having to find a new place to hide; his liberation by Canadian troops; being arrested after the war with his mother because of their German passports but shortly being released when the authorities realized through what they had been; and immigrating to the United States in 1945.

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall

    Oral History

    Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall, born in 1929 in Klyucharki, Czechoslovakia (Kliucharky, Ukraine), discusses her childhood; her father immigrating to the United States but being unable to arrange for her entire family to come over before the war began; no longer being able to attend school and experiencing increased tensions with her neighbors after the German annexation of Czechoslovakia; being forced to move into the ghetto with her family; being loaded onto a train after spending several weeks in the ghetto and arriving in Auschwitz two and a half days later; pretending that she was 15, so she would be old enough to work; her assignment to carry rocks between two places; being sent to the gas chambers during a selection but getting rescued just before she entered the gas chamber itself; working in an airplane factory with six hundred women; running into a forest with a friend and walking to a town that had been liberated by the Russian military; being given an apartment, food, clothing, and medical attention by the Russians; returning home to find her house destroyed; living in her grandmother’s house with other survivors and living off of the money her father sent her; learning that she had an uncle who had survived and sneaking across the border into non-communist Czechoslovakia to reunite with him; and immigrating to the United States in 1947 with her father.

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral history interview with Ralph Codikow

    Oral History

    Ralph Codikow, born in 1930, in Kaunas, Lithuania, describes his family; the German occupation of Lithuania in 1941 and his brother shortly thereafter being shot at the Seventh Fort; his and his mother’s confinement to the Kaunas ghetto, where his mother saved them by pretending to be married to a male friend; his mother using her husband’s Lithuanian military service papers to forgo deportation to the Ninth Fort; being saved by his work in a ceramics factory when the children’s Aktions were decreasing the number of children in the ghetto; his and his mother’s deportation to Stutthof, where they were separated; his transfer to Landsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau in Germany, and then to Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau; contracting measles but being considered healthy enough to go on a forced march to Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Germany, in the winter; his liberation at Buchenwald in April 1945; moving to France after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral history interview with Ruth Borsos

    Oral History

    Ruth Borsos, born in 1923 in Frankfurt, Germany, describes her family; moving to the Netherlands after Kristallnacht in 1938; her and her father obtaining permits to sail to the United States but not being able to do so when Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940; her deportation to Westerbork in 1943 and then to Bergen-Belsen in 1944; being interned with her father in a camp near the Swiss border when an exchange agreement with the Allies broke down; being chosen to be traded for German prisoners because of their foreign passports; their liberation from the internment camp by French forces on April 23, 1945; spending some time in a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration camp after the war; returning to the Netherlands in 1947 and receiving a visa to immigrate to the United States; and marrying another Holocaust survivor, whom she met in Washington, DC.

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral history interview with Simone Marguerite Lipman

    Oral History

    Simone Marguerite Lipman (née Weil), born on April 4, 1920 in Ringendorf, France, describes her family; participating in a Jewish scouting organization, Les Eclaireurs Israélites de France, with her brother; moving to Strasbourg, France, a city with a vibrant Jewish community; graduating from high school in 1938 and moving to southern France to care for her elderly grandmother; relocating to Blâmont, France because of fears of Nazi invasion; training in early childhood education and working at a private school in Paris, France for a few months until she returned to take care of her mother who was extremely ill; the German invasion of France in May 1940; packing up her family’s belongings and driving towards southern France; arriving in Périgeaux, France, where her family had to register as Jews; going to the Rivesaltes camp in France to work for the Organization for Children’s Rescue, for which she distributed food, cared for the children, and tried to find ways to get them out of the camp; helping to rescue hundreds of children with the Catholic Church after the Nazis began to round up children in late 1942; working to reopen many children’s homes after the war ended; receiving a scholarship from America’s National Council of Jewish Women for her work during the war; moving to the United States in 1946 to attend Tulane University, where she received a master’s degree in social work; returning to Europe, where she trained employees of children’s homes to deal with the special needs of young Holocaust survivors; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral history interview with Shony Alex Braun

    Oral History

    Shony Alex Braun, born on July 14, 1930 in Transylvania, Romania (possibly Cristuru Secuiesc, Romania), describes his family and early childhood; learning to play the violin at age five; the occupation of his town by Hungarian forces in 1940 and by the Germans in 1944; being deported to Auschwitz in May 1944; his transfer into the Natzweiler (Struthof) camp system in France and then to Dachau, where American forces liberated him in April 1945; his immigration to the United States in 1950; and becoming a professional composer and violinist.

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral history interview with Doriane Kurz

    Oral History

    Doriane Kurz, born in Vienna, Austria in March 1936, describes her family and early childhood; moving to Maastricht, Netherlands and then Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1939 for her father’s business; experiencing several Nazi air raids over Amsterdam; Dutch Jews losing their businesses in 1942; her parents being imprisoned for trying to escape from the country and then getting deported to Westerbork; her father’s transfer to Auschwitz on November 10, 1942 and never being heard from again; her mother’s return to Amsterdam to take care of her and her brother; going into hiding with two farmers in the countryside; her capture and deportation to Westerbork with her mother and brother at the end of 1943; their transfer to Bergen-Belsen; contracting typhus in March 1944; being liberated by English troops while on a train ride; going to a displaced persons camp in Maastricht in June 1945; her mother’s death in March 1945 due to cancer; and immigrating to the United States in July 1945 with her brother to live with her uncle.

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral history interview with David Lieberman

    Oral History

    David Lieberman, born in Częstochowa, Poland on December 31, 1925, describes his family; living through pogroms as a young child; having to move into the town’s ghetto and perform forced labor after the German occupation; seeing many of his family members deported to camps; his deportation to Treblinka, where he escaped after eleven days by cutting a hole in the fence with wire cutters that he had stolen; running with two friends to the house of a nearby farmer who put the three onto a train headed back to Częstochowa; reuniting with one brother, his sister, and his mother upon his return; being taken to another concentration camp, where he worked in a munitions factory as a bullet maker; the camp’s liberation and traveling by train to Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, where he entered a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency camp; traveling to Italy with the intention of taking a boat to Palestine but being returned to Karlovy Vary by the Italian government; and soon immigrating to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral history interview with Laura Margolis

    Oral History

    Laura Margolis, born in Constantinople, Turkey in 1903, describes her family; immigrating to the United States in 1908 and settling in Ohio; becoming a social worker for the Jewish Welfare Society of Cleveland after graduating from college; joining the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and going to Havana, Cuba, where she was in charge of sheltering and feeding Jewish refugees; her transfer to Shanghai, China in May 1941, where she aided over 8,000 Jewish refugees; her capture by Japanese forces after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and going into an internment camp; faking an illness to be transported to an American hospital, where she knew a doctor; the doctor lying about her health and refusing to release her from the hospital; returning to the United States as part of a prisoner of war exchange in 1944; being sent to Barcelona, Spain in 1945 by the JDC to aid Jewish refugees; helping to organize a parcel-sending program to former prisoners of concentration camps after their liberation; moving to Israel in 1953; and returning to the United States in 1983 to retire.

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral history interview with Paul Strassmann

    Oral History

    Paul Strassman, born on January 24, 1929 in Trenčín, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia), discusses his father’s work as an army officer for Austria-Hungary in World War I; the antisemitism his family experienced in the 1930s, which led them to consider escaping the country; his father divesting his share of his business; getting baptized, so they could avoid deportation; going into hiding in late August 1944; his father’s brief emergence from hiding and getting caught by the Gestapo, who sent him to Sachsenhausen; joining the Jegorov Brigade, a partisan group, in September 1944 and remaining in it until April 1945; joining the Czech Army in April 1945 as a noncommissioned officer and going to his station in Bratislava, Slovakia until the end of the war; remaining in Czechoslovakia but leaving just before the Communists took power in 1948; living briefly in Paris, France and London, England before immigrating to the United States in October 1948; and discovering that he was the sole survivor of his family.

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral history interview with Ernest James

    Oral History

    Ernest James, born in 1920 in Ord, NE, describes his family; joining the California National Guard in 1940; holding the position of sergeant and being called into active service in 1941; being stationed along the coast of San Francisco, CA and then going on to serve as platoon leader and company commander of the 238th Engineer Combat Battalion in the later years of the war; his unit’s attachment to the 1st Army and the 7th Corps; landing in Europe, where they swept through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany; reaching Nordhausen in April 1945 and finding workers from a V-2 missile and arms plant; ordering the German civilians to begin burying the large number of people who had already died; and assisting in the guarding of a nearby camp containing approximately 80,000-100,000 military prisoners of war.

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral history interview with Chaim Engel

    Oral History

    Chaim Engel, born in January 1916, describes growing up in Łódź, Poland; his experiences with feeling different as a Jew growing up; fighting in the Polish Army during the war and getting captured as a prisoner of war; being released and traveling to Lublin to work as a farmhand; his father’s and step-mother’s transport to Sobibór in June 1942; going to Izbica Lubelska with a friend to join a partisan unit; being caught and sent on a transport in September 1942 with about eight hundred people to Sobibór, where he worked sorting the clothes of people who had come into the camp; getting beaten for stealing pants on a couple of occasions; meeting his future wife Selma when they were both assigned to sort clothes; participating in the Sobibór uprising and escaping with Selma to a farm where they stayed until June 1944; his liberation by Russian troops and going to Parczew, Poland, where he and Selma had a child and started to re-organize their lives; moving to Holland, where they stayed until 1951 when they immigrated to Israel; and his and Selma’s immigration to the United States in 1957.

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral history interview with Selma Engel

    Oral History

    Selma Engel (née Wynberg), born in Groningen, Netherlands in 1922, describes her family and childhood; moving to Zwolle, Netherlands when she was seven years old; her family’s ownership of a kosher hotel; her father dying of a heart attack in 1941; the German invasion of the Netherlands and the confiscation of her family’s hotel; moving with her mother into the home of another Jewish family; receiving help from a Catholic priest in 1942 to hide in a non-Jewish family’s home; never seeing her mother and brothers again; hiding in a nurse’s home in Utrecht, Netherlands for a few months until she moved into another family’s house, where the police soon discovered her; being sent to an Amsterdam prison for three months; her deportation in 1943 to the transit camp in Vught, Netherlands, from which she went to Westerbork, where she worked in the laundry room; her transfer to Sobibór, where she had to sort clothes and clean the woods and railroads; contracting typhus; meeting Chaim, her future husband, when they had to dance in front of the Germans; escaping with Chaim from Sobibór during the uprising and hiding in the woods for several weeks; staying with a farmer in exchange for money for nine months; the farmer taking her and Chaim to Chełm, Poland in 1944; their liberation in July 1944; immigrating to Israel in 1951; and immigrating to the United States in 1957.

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral history interview with Morris Engelson

    Oral History

    Morris Engelson, born in 1935 in Paberze, Lithuania, describes his family; his father’s work in the grain business; the Soviet invasion in 1939; the German invasion in 1941 and forcing the Jews of Paberze into a ghetto; dressing up as a peasant woman with his mother to escape the ghetto that was soon liquidated by the Einsatzgruppen in September 1941; moving around and hiding in different farms with his mother; being smuggled to the Lithuanian-Polish border and ending up in another ghetto; reuniting with his father in April 1943 and hiding in a barn and then a farmer’s attic; moving westward towards the end of the war and arriving in the American zone in Germany; going to a Berlin displaced persons camp and later to the Gobrasa displaced persons camp in Bavaria after the war; and immigrating to the United States after four years.

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral history interview with Lonia Mosak

    Oral History

    Lonia Mosak, born on July 20, 1922 in Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki, Poland, describes her family; moving to Ciechanów, Poland when she was young; attending a separate Jewish school in Poland and serving in a Zionist youth group; completing her school education in 1936; becoming seriously ill with typhus after the German invasion of Poland in 1939 but recovering even though Jewish physicians could not use medicine to contain the epidemic; her internment in Neustadt, a labor camp in Germany; being split up from her family in 1942 and transported to Auschwitz, where she remained until January 18, 1945 doing forced labor; being forced on a death march to Gross-Rosen and then to Ravensbrück, where she was liberated by the Soviet Army on April 30, 1945; returning to Ciechanów after her liberation; residing for short periods in Łódź and Bialystok to await the return of her last brother from Russia; marrying in Austria after the war; immigrating to a Polish-Jewish neighborhood of Chicago, IL in 1946; and having two children and eventually bringing her brother to the United States.

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral history interview with Agnes Grossman Aranyi

    Oral History

    Agnes Grossman Aranyi, born on May 2, 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her family and childhood; her father being drafted into forced labor camps from 1939 until 1942 when he was finally deported; attending Jewish school until 1942 when the war began in Hungary; the restrictions on Jewish life in Budapest; being warned by a friend to disappear because he knew that the round-ups were to begin soon; meeting a woman who worked for the underground and who took them to live as Christians in a Swedish house set up by Raoul Wallenberg; the Germans invading their home and forcing them into a ghetto; the Russians arriving to liberate the Budapest ghetto; living under Russian oppression until 1956, when she escaped to Austria with her fiancé during the Hungarian Revolution; and immigrating to North Carolina shortly thereafter.

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral history interview with David Bergman

    Oral History

    David Bergman, born on May 3, 1931 in Beckov, Czechoslovakia (present day Velykyĭ Bychkiv, Ukraine), describes his family and childhood; the German occupation of his town, previously annexed by Hungary, in 1944; his deportation to Auschwitz in late 1944; being transferred with his father to Płaszow, Gross-Rosen, and then Reichenbach an der Fils; being among three of 150 people in a cattle car who survived a transport to Dachau; being placed on a train to Innsbruck, Austria three days before the Americans arrived in Dachau; his liberation while on a death march from Innsbruck toward the front line of combat between United States and German troops; going into in an American hospital and rehabilitating; traveling to his old family home and finding it occupied by a Russian family; discovering that everyone in his family except him had perished; immigrating to the United States, where he settled in Cleveland, Ohio; and joining the American military to fight in the Korean War.

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral history interview with Lila Lam Nowakowska

    Oral History

    Lila Lam Nawakowska, born on November 24, 1924 in Stanislawów, Poland (Stanislav, Ukraine), describes growing up in a large family; the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the Soviet occupation of Stanislav until June 1941, when the Soviets withdrew, and the Germans entered and constructed a ghetto; her father becoming the chairperson of the ghetto’s Judenrat because he was such an influential businessman in their community; remaining in the ghetto with her family until December 1942, when they were able to obtain falsified Aryan papers and escape on the eve of the ghetto's liquidation in January 1943; renting an apartment in Warsaw, Poland and remaining there until the Warsaw uprising, when she was transported to Mauthausen; briefly spending time doing forced labor in Steyr, a sub-camp of Mauthausen and in Znojmo, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); her liberation by Soviet soldiers in May 1945; and reuniting with her mother and future husband shortly after the end of the war.

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral history interview with Yaffa Rosenthal

    Oral History

    Yaffa Rosenthal, born in Solotvyno, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine) on October 7, 1926, describes her family and childhood; her experiences with antisemitism as a child; the Ukrainians taking over her town in 1938 and learning in a different language in school; her father losing his job and having to work in mines and on a cattle farm to support his family; receiving a notice that her family would be taken away in the early summer of 1941; her deportation to Yasinya (IAsinia), Ukraine and then being marched toward Galicia, Poland; escaping from the Germans and going to live with her uncle in Oradea, Romania and then with her sister in Budapest, Hungary; having a somewhat normal life until the German occupation of Hungary in 1944; hiding in the Budapest ghetto until January 1945 when she was liberated by Russian troops; trying to survive after the war and receiving help from the Swedish Red Cross; reuniting with her sister in Debrecen, Hungary and then returning with her to Budapest; participating in the Budapest Zionist organization and immigrating to Israel in 1948; getting married to an American man in 1959; and immigrating to the United States to settle in New York, NY.

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral history interview with Eve Wagszul Rich

    Oral History

    Eve Wagszul Rich, born in Kovel', Ukraine, describes her family and childhood; the German invasion and having to move into the ghetto; the Germans bursting into her home one night and killing her father in front of her; immediately running away into the forest and going to nearby villages, where she met peasants who gave her some food; going into hiding with a group of Carmelite Nuns; the Germans discovering her and sending her to Majdanek; escaping with a friend during a transport and going to Bavaria to work on a farm; her liberation by American forces; and immigrating to New York to live with her grandmother’s sister.

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral history interview with Magda Mezei Lapedus

    Oral History

    Magda Mezei Lapidus, born on July 18, 1923 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her family and childhood; attending the Commercial Academy of Budapest for two years; first realizing the danger posed by the Nazis when they invaded Austria in 1938; seeing several young Hungarian men shipped out to labor camps starting in 1941; her brother being taken away to a labor camp in 1943; the German invasion of Hungary on March 19, 1944; being forced into the Budapest ghetto and living in the Star of David House; her father returning to live with them in June 1944; being forced on a march with her father to the outskirts of Budapest, at which point she was separated from her father and never saw him again; hiding in a bush on her march and ripping her identifying star off and returning to Budapest to reunite with her mother and brother; going to the Spanish Legation near the ghetto and receiving a safety pass to move into a house protected from German invasion; remaining in the house until January 18, 1945, when the Russians liberated Budapest; and discovering the fate of her father.

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral history interview with Avraham Ronai

    Oral History

    Avraham Ronai, born on September 14, 1932 in Budapest, Hungary, describes growing up in a religious family; attending a secular public school and a Jewish school at night in Budapest; not experiencing many difficulties under the pro-Nazi Hungarian regime; the German invasion of Budapest in March 1944 but not really suffering until the Nazis took full control over Hungary in October 1944; the Nazis rounding up Jews into ghettos and deporting them; seeking help at the Spanish Embassy in Budapest and receiving a space in a Spanish safe-house due to the efforts of Giorgio Perlasca; remaining in the safe-house until the Soviets liberated Budapest in 1945; and immigrating to Israel in 1949 because of the oppressive Hungarian Communist regime.

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral history interview with Eva Konigsberg Lang

    Oral History

    Eva Konigsberg Lang, born on April 1925 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her childhood and family; the Jewish community losing several of its rights when the war began; her relatives arriving from Czechoslovakia to live with her; being forbidden to attend school after March 1944; receiving a protective pass to get food; hearing that the wife of any man in forced labor would not be deported and getting married in 1944; hiding in a Spanish protective house on St. Paul Street and getting food supplies provided by the Jewish Council; the German occupation of Budapest; forging a telegram to prove that they were under Spanish protection and to save themselves from the Arrow Cross; and reflecting on how certain Spanish diplomats saved her life during the war.

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral history interview with Cornelius Loen

    Oral History

    Cornelius Loen, born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) on May 2, 1922, describes growing up with a Jewish father and Gentile mother; the German invasion of his town on January 23, 1942 and German troops killing two of his uncles; escaping with his family to Budapest, Hungary, where they lived for ten months; his deportation to a forced labor camp in Hungary, where he remained until 1944; escaping to a nearby barn, where he hid for three days, during the liquidation of the camp; Russian troops liberating him while he hid in this barn; walking to a nearby displaced persons camp, where he met his future wife Masha; taking a Russian transport to Budapest and reuniting with his parents; discovering that his father had survived a concentration camp and his mother had helped to hide and save many Jewish people after her family was taken away; and immigrating to Los Angeles, CA in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral history interview with Thomas Blatt

    Oral History

    Thomas Blatt, born in 1927 in Izbica Lubelska, Poland, describes growing up in an Orthodox family; the establishment of a ghetto run by the Germans after the war began in September 1939; working in a garage, which protected him from early ghetto roundups; trying to escape to Hungary with false papers in 1942 but getting caught; his and his family’s deportation to Sobibór, where his family was gassed immediately; the Germans choosing him as a laborer because of his mechanical skills; participating in and escaping during the Sobibór uprising on October 14, 1943 by escaping through the wire fences and avoiding the land mines; going into hiding with a friend on several farms; hiding in a stable and then in an abandoned brick factory; working as a courier for the Polish underground; and immigrating to the United States in 1959.

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral history interview with Anita Magnus Frank

    Oral History

    Anita Magnus Frank, born on January 29, 1936 in Emmen, Netherlands, describes her family; her move to Breda, Netherlands, where her family was living when the war broke out; the German invasion of 1940 and being told to leave because the Germans were going to bomb the town; walking thirty kilometers to a farm, where they stayed for five days; returning to Breda and experiencing increased persecution; obtaining false passports and assuming Dutch names to shield their Jewish identities in 1942 (Verified from other sources, the name of the individual who assisted Anita and her family was Govardus Pinxteren, who was later honored as Righteous Among the Nations); going into hiding first in a non-Jewish neighbor's home and then in a Quaker family’s home in Bilthoven, Netherlands; living as “normal” Dutch schoolchildren except having to hide their Jewish identities and constantly being in fear; leaving their hiding place in August 1944 because the Quaker family was too scared to keep them; returning to Limburg with her parents; the liberation of Limburg in September 1944; returning to Breda in April 1945 and living in an uninhabitable, bombed house for six months until they could move into a bigger and better house in the same town; and immigrating to the United States on December 7, 1952 because antisemitism was still a problem after the war.

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral history interview with Guta Blass Weintraub

    Oral History

    Guta Blass Weintraub, born on January 22, 1924 in Łódź, Poland, describes her childhood and family; her experiences with antisemitism in her youth; attending a private, Jewish, all-girls high school until the German invasion in September 1939; moving from Łódź to Wierzbnik-Starachowice in December 1939 because of fears about what the Germans had planned; the formation of a ghetto and having to share a home with at least one other family; meeting her future husband when he came to her home in the ghetto asking for her father to make him a suit with special pockets; being rounded up in the ghetto’s marketplace and sent to labor camps; managing to smuggle out some pictures with her as she, her mother, and her father were taken to a woodworking camp; surviving several shootings and experiencing starvation; her deportation to Auschwitz in 1942 and staying there until 1944, when she was transferred to Ravensbrück; her liberation by the Swedish Red Cross; and traveling to Sweden to recover.

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral history interview with Henry Schmelzer

    Oral History

    Henry Schmelzer, born in March 1924 in Vienna, Austria, describes growing up as the youngest of four children in a middle-class family; graduating from a Jewish high school in 1938 shortly before it closed; his brothers fleeing, while he and the rest of his family endured Nazi raids on their home until they were evicted; his father losing his business and having severe depression; escaping to England on December 18, 1938 and finding refuge at a children's camp; remaining in England throughout the war and living with a group of young Zionists; enlisting in the British Army in 1943; being sent to a mountain unit, the 52nd Division; receiving his degree at the London School of Economics; spending 18 years in Israel; and immigrating to the United States in 1969.

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral history interview with Helen Liebowitz Goldkind

    Oral History

    Helen Liebowitz Goldkind, born in Volosyanka, Czechoslovakia (Ukraine) on July 9, 1928, describes her childhood and family; the Hungarian occupation of Czechoslovakia and going into a ghetto in Uzhgorod, Ukraine; maintaining religious traditions in the ghetto; the Germans taking over the ghetto and deporting her and her family to Auschwitz; her transport to another camp and hearing bombs going off during the train ride; arriving in a German camp and working in a munitions factory; going on a truck with two hundred other girls to Bergen-Belsen, where English troops eventually liberated her; the Swedish Red Cross offering to take care of her and others in Sweden; discovering that only one of her sisters survived the war and had immigrated to the United States; and following her sister to the United States, where she settled in New York, NY and got married.

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Johanne Eva Liebmann

    Oral History

    Johanne Eva Liebmann (née Hirsch), born in 1924 in Karlsruhe, Germany, describes her family and childhood; her family’s deportation to the Gurs camp in southern France in October 1940; being rescued by the Children's Aid Society in September 1941 and hiding in a children’s home in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France until 1943, when she obtained false papers and crossed into Switzerland; discovering that her mother had died in Auschwitz; getting married in Geneva, Switzerland in 1945 and having a daughter in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral history interview with Max Liebmann

    Oral History

    Max Liebmann, born on September 3, 1921 in Mannheim, Germany, describes his family and childhood; attending school until December 1937, when he had to quit because of the antisemitism he was experiencing; his memories of Kristallnacht; his father travelling to Greece and Italy to do business since he could no longer do it in Germany; he and his mother being called into a Wehrmacht office shortly after the war began in September 1939; being made to do forced labor harvesting fields in East Germany; being deported with his mother to the Gurs concentration camp in France; playing the cello as part of several concerts given at Gurs; meeting his future wife in the camp through a connection his mother made; managing inventories for French camp officials; his transfer to the Talluyers camp in July 1942; escaping to Le Chambon, France to reunite with his girlfriend for a short period until they both had to find hiding places; finding a guide to take him through France and into Switzerland; arriving in Ouchy, Switzerland and receiving work papers on December 22, 1942; reuniting with his girlfriend in Switzerland on February 28, 1943 and marrying her in Geneva on April, 14, 1945; having a daughter in 1946; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral history interview with Giorgio Perlasca

    Oral History

    Giorgio Perlasca, born on January 31, 1910 in Como, Italy, describes growing up with a father who worked for the Italian government in Padua; fighting in the Spanish Civil War and later taking a position in an Italian trade firm; working around Eastern Europe after Italy entered World War II in 1940; maintaining an official position with the Italian Trade Commission and living in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1941 and 1942; continuing to work for the Italian government until the fall of Admiral Miklos Horthy in 1944; his internment by the Hungarian government from April to October 1944 after the Germans took control of Hungary; escaping his internment with falsified papers provided by a member of the Swiss Diplomatic Corps; adopting a Spanish nationality because of his veteran status from the Spanish Civil War; posing as the Spanish Charge d'Affaires after the flight of the appointed Charge d'Affaires for Spain in December 1944; helping to establish of several safe-houses in Budapest to shelter Jews under Spanish protection; coordinating his efforts with representatives of other neutral nations, including Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden, and the representatives of the Vatican, Portugal, and Switzerland, to shelter and save Jews from deportation; and returning to Italy to start a family in February 1945.

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral history interview with David J. Selznick

    Oral History

    David J. Selznick, born in Anykščiai, Lithuania in 1912, describes growing up as the youngest child in a large family; going to Ukmergė, Lithuania to study at a yeshiva in order to become a rabbi; his father’s death shortly before his twelfth birthday and becoming the legal master of his father's estate; deciding to sell off his family's farm and livestock and move to Kaunas, Lithuania; attending a Yiddish night school in Kaunas and working during the day as a retailer of office supplies; his experiences with antisemitism, which hurt his business; selling his business to two Christians but remaining as a silent partner; receiving a visa to serve as a diplomatic envoy to New York because of his business connections but instead deciding to leave for Portugal; returning to Kaunas in 1936 because he was worried about his mother and sisters; his deportation to the Kaunas ghetto in 1941; performing forced labor until late 1944 because he had worked for the ghetto Kommandant; smuggling food to the Jewish prisoners in the ghetto; escaping during the liquidation of the Kaunas ghetto in July 1944 and fleeing into the countryside, where he hid with some other Jews; his liberation by the Soviet Army; and immigrating to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral history interview with Elisabeth Model

    Oral History

    Elisabeth Model (née Dittmann), born in Bayreuth, Germany in 1897, describes her family; getting married in 1922 and moving to Amsterdam, where she worked as a sculptor; returning to Germany after Kristallnacht to help her mother emigrate; helping her mother sneak into the Netherlands with the help of a Dutch underground organization; her husband being imprisoned for one month by the Nazis after being falsely accused of smuggling money into the Netherlands; bribing a woman at the Spanish Consulate to give her and her husband exit visas in 1941; traveling to Madrid, Spain; and eventually arriving in to New York, NY in 1942.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral history interview with Joseph Levine

    Oral History

    Joseph Levine, born in Molodezhnyi, Russia on July 20, 1907, describes the difficulties his family faced in World War I; his family’s immigration to San Francisco, CA on February 12, 1917 and then settling in New Haven, CT; attending Franklin and Marshall College and then the graduate school for Jewish social work; working with the Jewish Board of Guardians for six years until 1941; starting to work as a parole officer in 1941; joining the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in 1945 as a social worker; going to Schwandorf, Germany, where he worked with many Polish Jews; his transfer to Dachau in October of 1945, where he also worked closely with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration; bearing witness to the war crime trials at Nuremberg; and returning to the United States, where he worked as the executive secretary of the Indiana Jewish Historical Society.

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral history interview with Eugenia Blau Szamosi

    Oral History

    Eugenia Blau Szamosi, born in Transylvania in 1914, describes her family, childhood, and growing up in Budapest, Hungary; her experiences with antisemitism in Hungary; marrying in November 1941 and having a son the following year and a girl the next; her husband avoiding forced labor by spending time in a mental hospital; having to move into the Jewish section of the town and wear the yellow star after the German invasion of Hungary; escaping from the Budapest ghetto and looking for a flat in town; pretending to be a Transylvanian refugee because she had Aryan looks; returning to the ghetto to work with her husband in a children’s home and await deportation; getting the supplies to make shutzpasses for people; getting Spanish passports for her and her husband, which helped to save them from deportation; her family’s liberation and her husband’s work for the International Red Cross after the war; and immigrating to Israel in June 1949.

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral history interview with Irene Dynkiewicz Silver

    Oral History

    Irene Dynkiewicz Silver, born in January 1933 in Łódź, Poland, describes her family and the Jewish community in her town before the war; her family’s move to Warsaw just as the German bombardment of Warsaw began; the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto wall; learning how to read and write from one of her cousins; wearing a kerchief and putting on lipstick to look older and avoid deportation during ghetto-round ups; going into hiding in January 1943 with a woman who had managed to attain a Christian identity for her; not being able to leave the home in which she hid and reading to pass her time; attending school for the first time after the war; traveling to London with several other children to attend a boarding school established by a rabbi; and immigrating to Brooklyn, NY in January 1950 to live with her aunt and uncle.

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral history interview with Alice Lok Cahana

    Oral History

    Alice Lok Cahana, born on February 7, 1929 in Sárvár, Hungary, discusses her childhood; her relationships with her parents, grandfather, and siblings; her experiences in the ghetto in Sárvár, which was situated in a brick factory; her work with children in the ghetto; her deportation by train to Auschwitz; her experiences in "C Lager" of Auschwitz; her memories of selections by Dr. Josef Mengele; her successful rescue of her sister Edith from the infirmary in Auschwitz; her survival of the Auschwitz gas chamber because of a malfunction in the chamber; her memories of camp guard Irma Grese; her transfer from Auschwitz to the Guben concentration camp where she worked in an ammunition factory; her participation in a death march with a group from Guben; her escape and subsequent return to the death march group; her separation from her sister in Bergen-Belsen; her evacuation from Bergen-Belsen and transport to a hospital in Sweden; her reunion with her father in Hungary; her illegal immigration to Israel by boat; her return to Sweden with her husband Moshe Cahana; the Cahana family's move to the United States; and her thoughts on the rescue efforts of Raoul Wallenberg in Hungary.

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral history interview with Eva Brust Cooper

    Oral History

    Eva Brust Cooper, born in 1934 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses her childhood; living on the Pest side of the Danube River; her memories of the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944; the various types of persecution experienced by the Jews in Budapest including the wearing of yellow Stars of David; her father receiving papers from Raoul Wallenberg to avoid deportation; the family's time in hiding in various locations around Budapest; her and her mother's attempts to appear Catholic by going to church, learning the Catechism, and acquiring false identification papers; her family's return to Budapest at the end of World War II; her father's participation in negotiations with Adolf Eichmann in hopes of reducing the number of Hungarian Jews to be deported; her family's immigration to the United States and their new life in New York City; and her activities with various Holocaust survivor groups.

    Oral history interview with Jacob Vogel

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral history interview with Frieda Belinfante

    Oral History

    Frieda Belinfante, born in 1904 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, describes her family; being raised without a religion because her father was Jewish and her mother was Gentile; the death of her sister in 1915 after an appendectomy and the divorce of her parents soon after; the death of her father in 1923 from natural causes; not being surprised by the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands; getting married in 1931 and divorcing in 1936; becoming the first female conductor of a professional orchestra in Amsterdam; participating in the cultural commission of Amsterdam and receiving instructions from the Nazis about what artists should or should not do; making false identification cards to help save people; discovering her homosexuality but trying to keep it a secret during the war; living disguised as a man for three months; taking on a new female identity and fleeing to Switzerland; participating in several activities of sabotage with other gay and lesbian refugees; returning to Amsterdam after the war and discovering the fates of the members of the resistance group in which she participated; immigrating to the United States in 1947 for a change of scenery in her work; participating in a string of concerts in the US; and her life in America.

    Oral history interview with Philip Vock

    Oral History

    Philip Vock, born in 1929 in Paris, France, discusses his family background and childhood; the German invasion of France in 1940; the confiscation of the family business by the Germans; antisemitism that he encountered in the media and in personal contacts; leaving the occupied zone of France in 1941 and finding refuge in a town on the Spanish border; the German occupation of their town in November 1942; fleeing to Nice, France, which was occupied by the Italians; being denounced to and arrested by the Gestapo as they were preparing to move to another town; being transported to Drancy concentration camp in 1943; life in Drancy and the possibility of escape from the camp; his deportation to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944; the intake process at Auschwitz and then his outside work detail; the black market within Auschwitz; a death march in January 1945 as the Allies were approaching the camp; life in Buchenwald and liberation; returning to Paris in April 1945; the return of his mother and uncle; and nightmares that he had after liberation.

    Oral history interview with Joseph Gatenio

    Oral History

    Joseph Gatenio, born in 1929 in Thessalonike, Greece, discusses his childhood; the German occupation of Thessalonike in 1940; his deportation from Greece with his family in 1943; the week-long journey to Birkenau; selections at Birkenau; the deaths of family members; his participation in the camp orchestra; how orchestra members helped him survive; being forced to leave the orchestra; the brutality of the SS and Kapos; being transferred from Birkenau to Henkel, then Sachsenhausen, Ohrdruf, Sachsenhausen again, Neubrandenburg, Ravensbrück, and finally Ludwigslust; the appalling conditions in the camps; staying in Ludwigslust until May 1 when they were transported to another camp; his liberation by American soldiers the next day; joining the Russian liberators and wandering throughout Europe for a few months; returning to Thessalonike in December 1945; and the long-term effects of his experiences during the Holocaust on his well-being.

    Oral history interview with Mariette Moscovici

    Oral History

    Mariette Moscovici, born on January 24, 1916 in Iasi, Romania, discusses her family; her father, Hani Garfiender, who was a merchant and owned a store for travel items; her mother, Cecile Garfiender, who was a housewife; attending Alexandru Labrian elementary school; attending Institute Notre Dame for high school; living in Iasi on Cuza Voda street and later on Ice Bratianu street; Rumania entering the war on June 22, 1941; German soldiers entering on the night of June 29, 1941 and taking away all the Jewish men from the shelter; going to the Jewish community the next morning to ask about the fate of the Jewish men and not receiving an answer; stopping at a friend’s house on the way home to warn the men in the family about the arrest of the Jewish men; being stopped on the way home and directed into a convoy; finding her mother and sister in the convoy; being taken to the police headquarters; more Jews arriving at the headquarters wearing pajamas and night gowns because they were taken without anytime to get dressed; the women and girls being released while the men and boys over the age 13 were detained; the chaos of the scene; her father arriving at the shelter in the afternoon; the numerous false alarms to concentrate the population in shelters; the German soldiers enter the shelter around 5pm and demanding their jewelry and money; giving one of the soldiers her money and being instructed by the soldier to go home and not enter the shelters; leaving her aunt’s house with her family the next morning (June 30, 1941) and going home; seeing posters on wall that state the “Communist Jews” of Iasi have been arrested and killed and the rest of the population can continue their lives; staying home and not knowing what happened to other people; going to a market with her cousin dressed like peasants and seeing dead bodies on the street; Jews not being allowed to travel; and the propaganda in the news.

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral history interview with Henry van den Boogard

    Oral History

    Henry van den Boogard, born in Holland in 1915, discusses his childhood in Tilburg, Netherlands; his early education and seminary days; his ordination to the priesthood and first mass in 1942; his memories of Jews being helped by non-Jews in the Netherlands; his personal activities with the resistance movement in southern Netherlands such as making false identification papers for various persons, smuggling children into the Netherlands for hiding, and finding hiding places in homes for Jews and other persons; his dealings with the black market in the Netherlands in order to clothe and feed people in hiding; his reflections on antisemitism in the Netherlands; the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940; the feelings of native Hollanders toward the "Dutch Nazis"; and his life after World War II in the United States where he worked to integrate Catholic churches in Virginia.

    Oral history interview with Jack Moss

    Oral History

    Jack Moss (né Jakuv Mozelsio), born in 1924 in Łódź, Poland, discusses his family background; his encounters with Polish antisemitism; his family's feelings about the possibility of a German occupation; the restrictions imposed on Jews by the Germans; the lucrative business that the Germans brought to his father's tannery; odd jobs that he did at the request of the Germans, including helping to tear down a statue of Tadeusz Kościuszko in Plac Wolności; a German friend who agreed to be a stand-in owner of the tannery, so it would not be confiscated; his uncle, aunt, and other family members fleeing to Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Poland for safety while he and his parents stayed in Łódź; the return of his sister and cousin from Tomaszów Mazowiecki; and how the rest of his family in Tomaszów Mazowiecki perished while he and the others who remained in Łódź were saved.

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral history interview with Boleslaw Dytlow

    Oral History

    Boleslaw Dytlow, born in 1932 in Pruszków, Poland, describes growing up in a Romani family; the German occupation in September 1939; moving to Warsaw, Poland with his family and earning money there as a musician; being captured on the streets in Warsaw in late 1942 and delivered into the Warsaw ghetto; meeting other Romanies in the ghetto and forming a plan to escape; escaping to the Aryan side in the spring of 1943; leaving Warsaw and only traveling by night; being ambushed by German soldiers on the outskirts of Kielce, Poland; successfully overpowering the Germans and escaping back to Warsaw; and remaining hidden outside of Warsaw until the end of the war.

    Oral history interview with Mel London

    Oral History

    Mel London, born in 1923, discusses growing up in the Bronx, NY with immigrant parents; his awareness of the political situation in Europe before World War II; his concern for family in Europe; his identification with being Jewish; enlisting in the United States Army signal corps in May 1943; going to Officer Candidate School; antisemitism he encountered in the army and prejudice because of his friendships with black soldiers; seeing the aftermath of World War II in Europe; his knowledge of the Nuremberg war crime trials; becoming a documentary filmmaker; the request to interview Albert Speer after his book "Inside the Third Reich" was published in 1970; preparing for the interview; different attitudes towards Speer among Germans of different generations; and his perceptions of Speer.

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral history interview with Henry Cohen

    Oral History

    Henry Cohen, born in 1922 in New York City, NY, describes growing up in a family of Jewish immigrants; receiving a master’s degree in city planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology; enlisting in the United States Army in 1944 and fighting with the infantry during the German campaign; his appointment as the director of the Föhrenwald displaced persons camp in Germany in January of 1946; leading the camp until July 1946; and returning to the United States to teach at the City College of New York.

    Oral history interview with Gisela Feldman

    Oral History

    Gisela Feldman, born in 1923, discusses her first encounters with antisemitism in Berlin, Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933 and her political awareness at that time; her father's deportation to Poland in 1938 because he was a Polish citizen; the confiscation of her family's apartment; being barred from going to school; her mother obtaining visas to Cuba and booking passage on the SS St. Louis; her father not being able to leave Poland in time to join them on the SS St. Louis; departing with her mother and sister from Germany in 1939; the atmosphere on board the ship; their arrival in Cuba and the announcement that their visas were no longer valid; the desperation of some passengers on board; sailing near the coast of the United States during the return journey to Europe; her family being selected to disembark in England; her job as a domestic in a convalescent home for Jewish refugees in Broadstairs and then as a nanny for a family with two children in London; her involvement in war work, making uniforms and gunpowder bags; meeting and marrying her husband in London in 1943; her mother's attempts to get permission for her father to emigrate from Poland; and her life in England after the war.

    Oral history interview with Bert Fleming and Irene Fleming

    Oral History

    Bert Fleming and Irene Fleming describe how Bert grew up in Warsaw and Łódź; Bert’s family’s deportation to Hannover, Germany before Kristallnacht; Bert’s deportation from Hannover in 1938, receiving aid from the Joint Distribution Committee, and going through the camps; Irene witnessing people being smuggled from her ghetto and fleeing to Siberia; Irene holding on to her violin through her time in the camps; their experiences with Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski and his relationship with the Nazis in the Łódź ghetto; Bert having to shave his head and watch people steal food while in the camps; Bert’s work in several different factories and the transport of all of the goods he produced to Germany; and their immigration to New York and life after the war.

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral history interview with Norman Belfer

    Oral History

    Norman Belfer, born on September 27, 1922 in Wodzislaw, Poland, describes growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family; the German invasion of Wodzislaw in 1939 and hiding in his family’s factory warehouse until they were discovered; the confiscation of his father’s feather and down business; being forced to clean roads around the town with other youth; going to work for a nearby German company while the rest of his family went into hiding in an underground shelter outside of Wodzislaw; his family’s capture and transfer into the Kraków ghetto; returning home, where he retrieved some of the money his family had buried before they had left; hiding for several weeks in his father’s former factory; joining his family in the Kraków ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto on March 13, 1943; his family’s transfer to Płaszów, where an SS guard shot his father, and his mother and sisters were sent elsewhere; being transferred with his brother to Mauthausen, where they volunteered as carpenters until they were sent to Melk; digging tunnels and moving machinery for several months at Melk with his brother; going on a barge to Linz and then going on a death march to Ebensee; his liberation by American forces on May 5, 1945; walking to Salzburg with his brother but deciding to go to Palestine through Italy; and remaining and working in Italy until he immigrated to the United States in 1950.

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral history interview with Carol Stern Steinhardt

    Oral History

    Carola Stern Steinhardt, born on March 8, 1925 in Nieder Ohmen, Germany, describes losing her non-Jewish friends after 1933; her experiences during Kristallnacht; attending a boarding school in Bad Nauheim until the Gestapo stormed it and harassed students; her father’s deportation to Buchenwald; her mother’s and sister’s arrival in Bad Nauheim; going to Berlin to do hard labor at an airplane factory until her deportation to Auschwitz in March 1943; her selection to be a camp “beautician,” which involved cutting the hair off of incoming prisoners; reuniting with her sister in August 1944 and learning that her parents had died; going on a march to Ravensbrück in January 1945; staying in Ravensbrück for four weeks until having to march to Malchow, where she worked in the camp kitchen; her liberation by American forces in May 1945; her internment in the Kammer displaced persons camp in Austria; and immigrating to the United States in July 1946 on an army transport.

    Oral history interview with Haim Shmueli

    Oral History

    Haim Shmueli (né Heinz Ruman Shmoll), born in 1935 in was born in 1935 in Usti nad Labem, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes his family and childhood; his mother’s conversion to Judaism, which she renounced when Hitler came to power; moving to Germany in 1938; his father’s involvement in the underground movement; his deportation to Theresienstadt and his memories of the children’s part of the camp; participating in the propaganda movie filmed in Theresienstadt; his liberation from Theresienstadt in 1945; reuniting with his father after the war; and immigrating to Israel with his father in 1949.

    Oral history interview with Itka Zygmuntowicz

    Oral History

    Itka Zygmuntowicz, born April 15, 1926 in Poland (possibly Ciechanów), discusses her family and childhood in Poland before World War II; her experiences with antisemitism before the war; relations between her family and Gentiles in her hometown; her knowledge of politics as a child and involvement in the Zionist movement; the German occupation of her hometown and the restrictions that the Germans imposed on the Jewish population; the confiscation of her family's valuables; a beating that she and her mother suffered at the hands of the Gestapo for not revealing information; her family's deportation to the ghetto in Nové Město in 1941; the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942 and the mass deportation to Auschwitz; her arrival at Auschwitz and her separation from her parents and younger siblings who perished in the camp; finding a friend named Binna in the camp; her forms of spiritual, mental, and physical resistance as a prisoner; her contact with the guards in the camp; her experience sorting the belongings of dead prisoners in the "Kanada" warehouse; a death march in January 1945 to Ravensbrück concentration camp and then a transport to Malchow concentration camp; her liberation during Passover in 1945; recuperating at a hospital in Sweden after the war through the help of the Swedish Red Cross; living in a displaced persons camp in Sweden; leaving the camp with two friends and getting a job; meeting and marrying her husband and the birth of her son in 1948; and her immigration to the United States in 1953.

    Oral history interview with Gertrude Granirer Flor

    Oral History

    Gertrude Granirer Flor, born in 1921 in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, discusses her childhood; the lack of antisemitism she encountered growing up; the Soviet occupation in 1940 and the confiscation of Jewish property; Soviet propaganda and the pressure to inform on others; the arrest and execution of her step-father; involuntary deportations by the Soviets to Siberia, including the deportation of her mother; escaping from a deportation and finding refuge at the conservatory of the Universitatea din Cernauți; meeting and marrying her husband, Sam; the German occupation of Chernivtsi; German restrictions and the establishment of the ghetto in Chernivtsi; the help that the mayor of Chernivtsi extended to the Jewish population; deportation by train to a stone quarry where she and her husband stayed for several weeks; her husband telling the Romanian authorities that he was a dentist, so that they would be transferred to a work detail in a hospital; being liberated by Russian partisans after being in hiding for several days; returning to Chernivtsi and joining the Czech Army; being part of the liberation of Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); immigrating to South America with a stopover in the United States on the way; living in Columbia with an uncle on his coffee plantation for six months and then immigrating to the United States; her feelings about her new country and the difficulties she experienced as an immigrant; and how her experiences during the Holocaust have affected her life.

    Oral history interview with Renee Scheuer

    Oral History

    Renee Scheuer, born in 1909 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her childhood; antisemitism in Vienna before World War II; her and her husband’s arrest in November 1938 and the order to leave Austria in three days; traveling to Cologne, Germany and then to Belgium on foot; living in a refugee camp in Antwerp, Belgium; the occupation of Belgium by Germany in 1939 and their attempt to escape to France; returning to Belgium and living in Brussels where they had to wear Star of David badges; receiving a notice to report to a concentration camp; she and her husband going into hiding in Brussels in 1942 and staying in different hiding places until liberation in 1945; the feelings that she had during the events of the Holocaust; the resistance of the Belgian population against the Germans; the fates of her mother and sister; returning to visit Vienna in the 1970s; her immigration to the United States in 1950; and settling in New York City.

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral history interview with Bent Melchior

    Oral History

    Bent Melchoir, born in Denmark, describes growing up with a father who was a rabbi; the ease of relations between Jews and Christians in Denmark; the help that the Danish Christian community gave to the Jewish community to help them escape to Sweden; raising money with his brother to get Jews out of Denmark; the Danish resistance movement; leaving Copenhagen and arriving in Sweden by small boat; returning to Denmark three weeks after liberation; his surprise at the jubilant welcome given by the Danes when the Jews returned; the re-opening of the local synagogue for the fall holidays in 1945; and working on behalf of Soviet Jewry after the war.

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral history interview with Reuven Paikowski

    Oral History

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral history interview with Renata Laqueur

    Oral History

    Renata Laqueur, born on November 3, 1919 in Brzeg, Poland, describes growing up in Amsterdam; never considering herself Jewish and attending a Christian school as a child; the German invasion in 1940 and registering as a Jew; her father’s decision to volunteer for the German Army as a medical research officer; her marriage to Paul Goldschmidt on December 24, 1941; becoming involved in the underground movement with Paul; her arrest on February 18, 1943, when the Gestapo took her to a prison for ten days until her transfer to the Vught transit camp in the Netherlands; her transport to the Westerbork transit camp, from where she was soon released because of her father’s connections; being arrested again in November 1943; her and Paul’s transport to Bergen-Belsen on March 15, 1944; writing a daily diary about her experiences in the camp; her liberation by the Soviet Army on April 23, 1945; recovering from illness in a field hospital outside of Dresden; spending a week in a displaced persons camp near Kassel; returning to Amsterdam on July 26, 1945; and immigrating to the United States through Canada in 1952.

    Oral history interview with Carl Hirsch

    Oral History

    Carl Hirsch, born in 1912, discusses his childhood in Vienna, Austria and Chernivtsi, Ukraine; his schooling in mathematics and engineering in his university studies; his work as a civil engineer and service in the Romanian Army before World War II; his first experiences with antisemitism when Romania occupied Chernivtsi and when he lived in Bucharest; Soviet occupation of Chernivtsi from 1940 to 1941; the deportation of business owners in Chernivtsi to Siberia; the Soviet withdrawal in June 1941 and Jews fleeing with them; the takeover of the town by Germans and Romanians and the persecution of Jews; finding a job with the railway, so he would not be taken for forced labor; the establishment of the ghetto in Chernivtsi; his marriage to Lotte; witnessing deportations from Chernivtsi; the influx of Romanians into Chernivtsi; the return of many Jews who had fled with the Russians; the integration of Chernivtsi into the Soviet Union in 1945; leaving Chernivtsi and living in Romania from 1945 until 1961; and immigrating to the United States in 1962.

    Oral history interview with Lotte Hirsch

    Oral History

    Lotte Hirsch, born in 1918 in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, describes her childhood; her encounters with antisemitism while she attended university; the Soviet occupation of Chernivtsi from 1940 to 1941 and having to stop her university studies and work in a factory; witnessing deportations to Siberia carried out by the Russians; Romanian and German troops taking over Chernivtsi and establishing a ghetto and several restrictions on the Jewish population; hearing about executions carried out by the German and Romanian soldiers; how her fiancé Carl was able to obtain an exemption from deportation because of his profession as an engineer; her marriage to Carl in a civil ceremony in the mayor's office; life under the occupation; witnessing more deportations in 1942; receiving better treatment after a new governor of Bukovina was instated; the return of Carl's cousin from deportation to Transnistria; her liberation by the Russians in 1944; and her immigration to the United States in 1962.

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral history interview with Walter Meyer

    Oral History

    Walter Meyer, born on May 31, 1926 in Kassel, Germany, describes growing up as a Catholic in a diverse religious community in Düsseldorf; his experiences during Kristallnacht; joining the Hitler Youth in 1940 but then deciding to organize another group to oppose the Hitler Youth; his recruitment into a military academy, to which his father did not allow him to go; assisting French prisoners of war in 1943 until the Gestapo caught him and placed him in a Düsseldorf prison; his transfer to a prison near Frankfurt, where he remained until the spring of 1944 when the prison director recommended him for the army; his deportation to Sachsenhausen and then Ravensbrück; escaping from Ravensbrück and hiding with a farmer who lived nearby; returning to Berlin and then Düsseldorf; recovering from tuberculosis after returning home; and immigrating to the United States in 1958.

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral history interview with Dora Kramen Dimitro

    Oral History

    Dora Kramen Dimitro, born on January 22, 1922 in Eišiškės, Poland (now Lithuania), describes growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home with her parents and three siblings; attending Hebrew and Polish schools and experiencing antisemitism; the Russian arrival in Eišiškės in 1939; losing their rights as Jewish citizens when the Germans invaded in 1941; the Germans ordering them to assemble at the synagogue, where they were kept for two days and nights before many were taken away and shot; escaping with her boyfriend with the help of a Lithuanian police officer; the murder of most of her family on September 25 and 26, 1941; going to the Radun ghetto, where she met up with her father, sister, and boyfriend and stayed for ten months until they decided to escape because of ghetto liquidation warnings; running into the woods and trading valuables for food and clothing; living in the woods until late 1942 or early 1943 when they moved into the Hrodna ghetto in Belarus because they had heard of its better conditions; the transports from the ghetto two to three months after her arrival; fleeing to the Nacha Forest in Belarus; joining Jewish and Soviet partisans and staying in their underground bunker through the winter; hiding in homes or in the forest until the Russians liberated her in July 1944; returning to Eišiškės but fleeing when a group of Poles attacked the few remaining Jews there; marrying her boyfriend and living in Vilnius and Warsaw before moving to Israel in 1957; immigrating to the United States in March 1959 with her sister's help; and giving birth to a son soon after her arrival in the United States.

    Oral history interview with Herma Barber

    Oral History

    Herma Barber, born in 1921 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her childhood; experiencing antisemitism after the Anschluss in 1938; her and her parents' unsuccessful attempts to immigrate to the United States and their decision to go to Yugoslavia instead; their journey into Yugoslavia by foot; their arrest in Zagreb, Croatia and spending a week in jail; being confined to the town of Samobor after their release from jail; deportation by the Ustaša in 1941 to Mostar, which the Italian military occupied; being moved to Čapljina by the Italians; traveling to Split, Croatia without permission and being arrested and put in jail by the Italians for a week; being moved to Dubrovnik, Croatia, where she worked in a restaurant and also did knitting for a store; not having enough to eat; going to an Italian-run concentration camp in 1943; their escape from the camp to a partisan-controlled area of Yugoslavia; being in the same town as Randolph Churchill during a British diplomatic mission to the partisans in Drvar in 1944; moving constantly with help from partisans; she and her parents escaping separately to Bari, Italy in 1944 and 1945; her life in the refugee camp at Bari and her marriage in 1946; and her parents' immigration to the United States in 1946 and her immigration to the United States in 1949.

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral history interview with William Zeck and Belle Mayer Zeck

    Oral History

    William Zeck (born on March 3, 1915 in New York City, NY) and Belle Mayer Zeck (born on February 22, 1919 in Port Henry, NY) describe their families and childhoods; Belle's work as a New York lawyer and getting a job working for the General Counsel of the Treasury and working on the Foreign Funds Control Bureau; helping the bureau to enforce the Trading With the Enemy Act, which forbade communication with and transmissions to German occupied countries; working on a book analyzing Yugoslavia’s financial laws and investigating Germany’s external assets in the United States; Belle becoming an unofficial expert on German financial affairs at the Department of the Treasury and attending the commission for the Allied nations to outline the principles of law for prosecution and trial of Europe’s major war criminals; Belle meeting William when they were both preparing for the Nuremberg Trials; the deterioration of Belle's health as she prepared for the trials and having to go home; Belle returning to Nuremberg in 1947 for the start of the trial; going back to work for the Department of the Treasury to organize the reconstruction loans for the United Kingdom, France, and Germany; their friendship with Telford Taylor; and William’s return to the United States after six years.

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral history interview with Michel Reynders

    Oral History

    Michel Reynders, born on June 29, 1930, in Uccle, Belgium, describes his experiences as the nephew of Father Bruno Reynders, who ran a rescue network that saved about 350 Jews; growing up in a tight-knit Catholic family; helping Father Bruno in his efforts to hide Jewish children by coercing local families to take them into their homes; being unaware of antisemitism until the war; helping a young girl who had fled from Fascist Italy; the German occupation and the following food shortages, imposed curfews, censored textbooks, and Jewish transports out of Belgium; beginning to observe the restrictions placed on Jewish neighbors in 1942 and realizing that it was primarily Jews who were being taken for forced labor in Germany; his introduction to the resistance movement around the end of 1942 and serving as an escort and messenger for his uncle's rescue service; initially having no idea that the children his uncle asked him to escort were Jewish or that Father Bruno was secretly hiding them throughout Belgium; eventually understanding what his family was doing and that his uncle's actions were secret and extremely risky; his family's decision to hide several Jews; graduating from medical school in 1959 and immigrating to the United States in 1961; and being named as the Honorary Vice-Consul of Belgium.

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral history interview with Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

    Oral History

    Marthe Hoffnung Cohn, born on April 13, 1920 in Metz, France, describes her childhood; being forced by the French government to move out of Metz along with all of its other rich families; moving to Poitiers, France, where, in June 1940, Jewish refugees started coming; attending a Red Cross nursing school in Poitiers; escaping with her family to the unoccupied side of France in the summer of 1942; the arrest of her sister Stephanie, who later died in Auschwitz; becoming involved in resistance and rescue operations, which enabled her to get her parents, grandmother, two sisters, and a cousin to the unoccupied zone of France; finishing nursing school in Marseilles; leaving Marseilles for Paris, where she lived with one of her sisters and found a job with a family that did not know she was Jewish; joining the French Army after the liberation of Paris; doing intelligence work for the Army because she could speak German; going undercover as a German nurse and receiving two Croix de Guerre medals, signed by Generals De Lattre and De Gaulle, for her work; going to Vietnam with the French Army after the war; and immigrating to the United States in 1956.

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral history interview with Miriam Kabacznik Shulman

    Oral History

    Miriam Kabacznik Shulman, born on June 26, 1918, in Eišiškės, Poland (Lithuania), describes her childhood; her father’s death of typhus during World War I and living with her mother and two brothers; the Russian arrival in Eišiškės in September 1939 and the nationalization of her family’s tannery business; the Lithuanian takeover in 1940 followed by the German invasion on June 23, 1941; the German implementation of edicts that restricted and isolated Jews; the murder of most of the town’s Jews by an einsatzgruppen squad between September 25 and 26, 1941; the help their family’s friends and co-workers gave them throughout the war by hiding money and providing information and hiding places; hiding from the Germans from 1941 through 1944, when they were liberated by Russian soldiers; returning to their home in June 1944 to find an elderly couple living there; deciding to allow the couple to stay and inviting about twenty other Jews to live in their home; living through a Polish pogrom in 1944; fleeing to Vilnius the day after the pogrom and never returning to her home; spending the next years of her life in several displaced persons camps; meeting her future husband Norman in an Italian prison; and immigrating with Norman to the United States, where they had two children.

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral history interview with Anna Szyller Palarczyk

    Oral History

    Anna Szyller Palarczyk, born on July 21, 1918 in Kraków, Poland, describes her family; studying law in Kraków before World War II; working for the underground organization Armed Struggle Alliance; the arrest of everyone in her underground group in June 1942 and their deportation to Montelupich, where they faced harsh interrogations; her transport on August 17, 1942 to Auschwitz, where she was selected as a cleaning woman for Lauder Kommandant Otto Schmidt; walking to the Birkenau camp and being admitted to the sick-room in Birkenau for flu-like symptoms; her experiences in camp with having little food and seeing dead bodies lying around her; the women guards, including Margot Drexler (Dreschel); Katya Singer, who was from Mariková, Slovakia and was appointed as a Raportschreiberin (assistant to the guards) and her activities in the camp; making friends in the camp, which helped her to survive emotionally; the roll calls and selections she went through; the black market in Auschwitz; the Red Cross sending packages to Jewish women in the camps; concerts that were played sometimes in the camps; discovering the fates of her family and friends after the war; and seeing the Russian Army unite with the American Army during liberation.

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral history interview with Steven Galezewski

    Oral History

    Steven Galezewski, born on May 11, 1923 in Inowroclaw, Poland, describes his childhood; joining the Polish underground in Mińsk Mazowiecki, Poland; recalling that, in 1940, the Nazis ordered all the Jews to wear an armband with the Star of David; the relocation of his community into the Mińsk ghetto at the end of 1940; the liquidation of the ghetto on August 21, 1942 and the survival of only 282 tradesmen who were still useful to the Nazi war effort; participating in underground activities, which included blowing up buildings or means of transportation; his resistance unit being sent under Soviet command; being stationed in Lublin, Poland; providing security for the public hanging of five SS officers in Majdanek in 1944; remaining in Soviet hands from March to July 1945; being perceived by the Soviet Union as a potentially subversive element supporting the Polish government-in-exile and then receiving a prison sentence from the Soviets; his transport to Siberia, where Polish guerrillas freed him; escaping into the American zone; joining the Polish Army in Italy but returning from Italy in 1947 and joining the British Army; immigrating to the United States in February 1951; and joining the US Army in 1956.

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral history interview with George Havas

    Oral History

    George Havas, born in 1929 in Mukacheve, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine), describes the Hungarian takeover of his town after the Germans took the Sudetenland; his father no longer being allowed to practice medicine; the German takeover of Mukacheve in March 1944; his transport to Auschwitz on May 15, 1944; learning after the war that his father had died in the Sonderkommando uprising in Auschwitz; being transferred to Mauthausen and then to Ebensee, where he stayed for one year until liberation; working in the tunnels at Ebensee, where he was able to make contacts and bring back news; the death of his brother and several of his friends in Ebensee; his liberation on May 6, 1945 and leaving for Prague on June 7; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral history interview with Maria Rosenbloom

    Oral History

    Maria Rosenbloom, born on December 26, 1918 in Kolomyia, Poland (Ukraine), describes her Orthodox Jewish family; learning the violin and playing it every weekend in the Hatikva before the war; feeling increased antisemitic sentiments and fleeing with her family into the Carpathian Mountains; attending a special gymnasium for girls in Poland; starting university in 1936 in Lvov, Poland (L'viv, Ukraine) and never being allowed to sit down because she was Jewish; vacationing with a boyfriend in the Carpathian Mountains until the Soviet invasion on September 1, 1939; getting married in 1940; the Soviets taking away her father’s store because of nationalization policies; opening a pharmacy with her husband in 1940 in a small town called Glen-na-novaria [phonetic] and being pestered by the Russians for condoms; the Nazi invasion on June 21, 1941 and registering with the troops; contracting pneumonia and being treated with leeches; moving into the ghetto after Passover in 1942; working in the ghetto soup kitchen; escaping from the ghetto on Christmas in 1942 and going to live with her friend Blancka; discovering the fates of her family during the war and finding a job in a German hospital; taking a train to Warsaw, Poland in April 1943 and hearing rumors about what was happening to the Jews; living in fear that she would be caught because of her prominent Jewish features; joining the resistance movement; the chaos of the Warsaw uprising in 1944; having to join a Hitler parade in 1944 in an attempt to fit in; taking a train to Heidelberg, Germany hoping to reunite with Blancka; the German surrender of Heidelberg to the Americans and deciding to learn English; working for the US Army and then the Joint Distribution Committee; immigrating to the United States in September 1947; and becoming a social worker.

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