Collections Search - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Oral history interview with Elie Alevy

Oral History

Elie Alevy, born in Salonica, Greece to a Sephardic father and Romaniote mother, describes growing up in a family that observed Jewish traditions and ethics; living in the Salonica ghetto and then being transported to Birkenau in March 1943; his experience during the month-long death march from Birkenau to Dachau; being moved to the camp Waldlager V due to overcrowding at Dachau; performing forced labor at Waldlager V (Mühldorf) on a secret airport for the Nazis; escaping from Waldlager V; working as a UNWRA aid worker for Greeks in displaced person camps; being liberated by the Americans; returning to Greece; reuniting with relatives in France; and moving to Chile to avoid future European conflicts.

Oral history interview with Henry Allouche

Oral History

Henry Allouche, born on October 15, 1940 in Paris, France, describes his few memories of his life during the Holocaust; lacking any memory of his mother, sister, and brother, who were deported and murdered at Sobibor; his faint memories of being in the countryside in a small house with a man and a woman and a few other children; his belief that he was hidden with this family; being afraid to go alone at night to an outhouse in the garden; being with his father in Lyon, France after the war around 1945; how his father made small ceramic boats for him to play with; how his memories are filled in sketchily by his father, who did not talk much, and his own personal research; how around 1941 and 1942 his father worked in a leather factory in Paris and was told to flee because the Germans were coming; how his father fled to Lyon and his mother, forewarned about the Vel d'Hiv roundup, took Henry, his brother, and his sister towards Spain; arriving in Orthez, France and being arrested on October 5, 1942 by the German police; how documents indicate that they were sent to Camp Merignac on October 26, 1942; being transferred by convoy number four to Drancy; how he was hospitalized on November 20, 1942 and sent to Hospital Rothschild with a hernia; how there is conflicting information about when he left the hospital, but it was between December 20, 1942 and March 3, 1943; how he was liberated on March 3, 1943; being cared for by a Hospital Rothschild social worker named Claire Herman; how his father said Claire took him from the hospital and probably hid him; how his mother, sister, and brother were transferred from Drancy to Beaune-la-Rolande then returned to Drancy on March 24, 1943 were then deported on the 53rd convoy to Sobibor on March 25, 1943; how his father found him in 1943 and they returned to Paris; how he eventually got married and had three children and five grandchildren; and how it was painful to wait so long to fill in the gaps in his knowledge and his inability to complete the task.

Oral history interview with Adolfo Altman

Oral History

Adolfo Altman, born in 1934 in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, describes his family’s move to Warsaw at the outbreak of World War II; suffering from hunger and cholera; being sent with his family to Siberia in 1940; his membership in the Komsomol (All-Union Leninist Young Communist League); being freed by the Polish government-in-exile from Siberia; moving to Tajikistan with his family and their living conditions; returning to Poland after the war and being given a house belonging to displaced miners; moving to Chile with his family with assistance from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; his feelings about losing much of his family; his life in Chile; and his beliefs regarding Judaism.

Oral history interview with Denisse Avram

Oral History

Denisse Avram, born on November 5, 1937 in Chernivtsi, Romania (present day Ukraine), describes being moved with her family to a ghetto in 1939; her father being sent to Russia; her experiences and the conditions in the ghetto; moving to Siret, Romania to her maternal grandparents’ home in 1944; losing family members; moving to Ploiești, Romania with her family after her father’s return in 1945; her family’s immigration to Chile via France and Brazil in 1948 with the assistance of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; her experiences growing up in South America; and her reflections on the Holocaust.

Oral history interview with Tamara Baron

Oral History

Tamara Baron, born on September 13, 1935 in Leipzig, Germany, describes hiding from the Nazis when they came for her family; her family’s inability to get visas from other countries; her memories of escaping to Chile via Poland and England by the time she was four years old; being dependent on the radio for news about the war; losing many friends and her father’s family in the war; teaching the Holocaust and Jewish history to non-Jews; and her hesitancy to reveal her Jewish identity in her post-war life.

Oral history interview with Carmen Barros

Oral History

Carmen Aida Barros Alfonso, born January 7, 1925 in Ñuñoa, Santiago, Chile, describes growing up as the daughter of Tobías Barros, the Chilean ambassador to Germany; arriving in Berlin, Germany June 15, 1940, the day after Paris fell to the Germans, and being received by the charge d’afairs and Chilean writer, Carlos Morla Lynch; how lack of lights at night during that time marked her for life; the ambassador’s house and the use of the basement as a bunker; the xenophobic attitudes of her German classmates; being home-schooled; her family’s trip to Paris, France, where they met other Chileans; hiding a Jewish friend of their maid for three months; how after her father’s post in Berlin ended they traveled to Biarritz, France and Lisbon, Portugal before boarding the Cabo de Hornos in Cadiz, Spain and returning to Chile; and Lynch’s role in the transfer of Jews from Germany to Switzerland after the war.

Oral history interview with Victoria Behar

Oral History

Victoria Behar, born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1920, describes her private school education growing up in Germany; the complete separation between Jews and non-Jews; marrying and moving to Chile before the war began; her father and sister being sent to Theresienstadt; the death of her father and bringing her mother and sister to Chile after the war ended; and her life after the war, including a second marriage to the British consul in Chile.

Oral history interview with Exequiel ben Dov Pollak

Oral History

Exequiel ben Dov Pollak, born in 1924 in Borsa, Maramures, Romania, describes how his town had 3,000 inhabitants and the Jews lived in the lowlands and the gentiles lived in the mountains; the relationship between the Jews and the gentiles; how arson destroyed three-quarters of the Jews’ wooden houses and how the Iron Guard was to blame; speaking only Yiddish at home; how his grandparents also spoke Hungarian; his Bar Mitzvah; his extended family and how many were shot in front of their homes; his childhood and being orphaned by age 4; attending public school; examples of cruelty against the Jews; reading Marx and Engels before being expelled from school; how at the end of 1939, at age 13, he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Gura Humorului, Bukovina, Romania; his shock at seeing civilization and modern life (i.e. electricity and cars); his grandparents’ textile plant; how in 1940 the Russians entered Chernivtsi, Ukraine; being offered to go to a university; boarding a train that had 20 cars full of Jews and hearing the Russians with accordions singing communist slogans; being transferred to a cattle train and travelling for 23 days with meager food supplies; how many died of dysentery or were sent to replace soldiers in factories; arriving in Chevarkul e Kostriende to build wooden houses; being transferred to the Urals, to Chelabinsky (Chelyabinsk, Russia) to a tank factory; being given heavy clothes; getting sick, but having to work anyway; missing two days of work; being condemned to eight years in jail for abandoning his job during the war; conditions in the prison; teaching German to another inmate and learning Russian; working in the kitchen, stealing food for the barracks, and the prison’s library; being sent to the North Pole to a place called Barkuta (possibly Vorkuta, Komi, Russia); working to hollow a mountain; cutting trees down; being there for four years; having his punishment reduced; being freed with a stipend; taking a real passenger train and his decision to escape; wandering for over 20 days; going through Moscow on November 7, the day of the revolution, and seeing Stalin from a block away; arriving in Chernovitz (Chernivtsi, Ukraine) and trying to locate his relatives’ house and finding his Aunt Perla Pollak; how she managed to get him false papers by the name of Katz and then Kalisher to leave Siret, Romania; going to his family in Gura Humorului; deciding to go to Israel; training in face-to-face combat; moving to Bulgaria to board two illegal ships (Pan York and Pan Kresh) to Israel; meeting his cousin, Yosel Pollak; being caught by four British ships and taken to Cyprus; staying there between 1947 and 1949; learning to shoot in preparation for the Haganah; being a judo trainer; meeting an uncle, Moises; arriving in Israel; going to Givat Brenner; working in the kibbutz juice factory, Rimon; moving to Tel-Aviv, to work in an ice factory; his army service; fighting in the 1956 war and suffering hearing loss; and going to Chile to be with his family.

Oral history interview with Federica Berczeller

Oral History

Federica Berczeller, born in 1912 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her family and her youth; finishing her studies at a Jewish school and going to work with her mother at her mother’s cosmetology institute; her marriage in 1938 to an attorney, who was called to the reserves a few weeks after the start of the war; refusing an offered visa to Chile then accepting it after the situation in Budapest became worse; the difficulties of getting her husband freed from the army; the survival of her immediate family and the loss of much of her extended family; arrival with her husband in Valparaiso, Chile in 1938; raising a family in Chile; the immigration of her and her husband’s families to Chile in 1947; her sister’s view of Chile; and her husband’s work with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

Oral history interview with Eva Block

Oral History

Eva Block, born October 16, 1919 in Berlin, Germany, describes her family; growing up Jewish; attending a Jewish group; antisemitism of Nazis in her community; her memories of Kristallnacht; leaving Germany in 1938 with the family she worked for; her journey to Cochabamba, Bolivia; learning Spanish in free classes sponsored by the Joint; marrying her Austrian husband in 1943; not knowing how her family died; visiting Germany in 1978; her daughter; and her self-perceptions.

Oral history interview with Walter Borchheim

Oral History

Walter Borchheim, born in 1926 in Breslau, Germany (present day Wroclaw, Poland), describes moving to Berlin, Germany in 1932, where he saw the rise of Nazism, the burning of the Reichstag, and the Olympic Games of 1936; the damage to his father’s shop during Kristallnacht; the relocation of his family and friends to concentration camps; his family’s success in bribing someone for visas to Uruguay and the difficulties of getting passports and transit visas; getting visas to Chile; his reflections on the beginning of Nazism; the experiences of his non-Jewish maternal family, including a cousin who took trains from Breslau to Auschwitz; his secular education; his father’s Zionist family; his view on the origins of anti-Semitism in Germany; his life as a German citizen in Chile after the war; receiving reparations; the return of his parents to Germany; and his view on religious tolerance in Chile.

Oral history interview with Brigitte Callomon

Oral History

Brigitte Callomon (née Jonas), born September 15, 1926 in Neisse, Germany (present day Nysa, Poland), describes her childhood in an upper-middle class family; the imprisonment of her grandfather; the relocation of her father to Buchenwald; the ransacking of her family home; the return of the men in the family under the condition that they would leave Germany; the internment of her grandparents in Auschwitz; how her parents could only get transport for the children out of Germany; traveling to Glasgow, Scotland and living there from 1942 to 1945; being considered an enemy alien; communication via letters during the war; working for the Refugees Children Aid Committee; receiving a visa to Chile; and meeting her parents in Chile.

Oral history interview with Isidoro Brodsky

Oral History

Isidoro Brodsky describes his family hosting a refugee family from Germany; the lack of information in Chile about the war; his reaction to learning that his mother’s entire family died in Auschwitz; becoming a radio announcer; the psychological impact the Holocaust has had on him; his education in Chile; and forming a Zionist youth movement.

Oral history interview with Marcelo Cohen

Oral History

Marcelo Cohen, born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (present day Croatia) on May 28, 1937, describes his parents, Khaym and Victoria Kohen, who were originally from Macedonia, were wealthy before the war, and survived for decades after the war in Miami, FL; his childhood memories, including a pair of little white booties he received at age two; how the Germans entered Zagreb and were searching for his father because he was one of the leaders of the Jewish community; how his father had been informed beforehand and managed to escape, wearing his pajamas and riding in a taxi for three days; how a German officer pointed a pistol at his mother’s head while she was being interrogated about the whereabouts of her husband; moving to Monastir, Tunisia to be with friends in 1941; his memories of eating fresh tomatoes from their garden; being in Monastir for a few months; how his father was warned about deportations by the local chief of police; how despite the warnings to the Jewish community, there were only 12 to 15 who decided to flee in less than 24 hours; how his family was the last to cross the bridge before the Nazis blocked it; the extermination of the 35,000 Jews who remained; how partisans helped Marcelo’s family move through the fields, despite the Germans’ dogs pursuing them; staying for a night in an abandoned church and moving in the direction of Albania; crossing a lake by boat as Nazis, who had surrounded the hills around the lake with anti-aircraft batteries, were sweeping the lake with searchlights; how they never zeroed in on the boats; arriving in Albania and encountering Italian policemen and Nazis, who had been informed about a group of escapees; how he and his parents passed the interrogation easily, as they had the fake passports; how his uncles and their families, with incomplete documentation, were confined to a village in Albania for the rest of the war; how the Jews who did not have any documentation were shot by Nazi soldiers on the spot; how his father’s fake name was Constantino Pako; boarding a ship in the Albanian port of Durrës; arriving in Bari, Italy; how the Nazis always looked for them, but under the name Kohen; living in Milan, Bologna, and Rome, although his father wanted to reach Switzerland; how his father spoke German well and played poker nightly with the SS and Gestapo agents, thus he knew what was going on; how his father would rehearse with him about their presumed ancestors because there were many Nazis in the hotel where they lived in Rome; how when the Allies entered Rome at the end of the war the Nazis urged his father to leave and he replied,” I am not afraid of them”; not knowing what happened to his family in Albania; how his mother’s family was wiped out and his father found a surviving brother, whom he brought to Chile; how there were close escapes from the Nazis in Bologna, but the family had documents identifying them as members of the Fascist Party; how his family survived the war financially thanks to his mother’s jewels and some cash his father had; losing their suitcase of money during an air raid in Bologna but retrieving it under grave danger; his lack of schooling; going to a Hebrew institute after the war; being an altar boy for a priest in the church; stealing an Allied jeep by hot-starting it; immigrating to Chile, where his mother had family; how his father encouraged him to study engineering; starting a construction business; living in Chile until the Allende crisis; moving to Miami; how his children don’t know much about his past; how a cousin wrote his mother’s story; personally forgetting the horrible scenes; how his father was not religious and his mother tried; the lack of Judaism in his life in Italy and how no one knew their Jewish identities; meeting his family that survived in Albania; how his parents spoke little about the war during their lives after the war and his father never wanted to go back to Yugoslavia to claim his property; how his father did not trust anyone and during the war he did not know the extent of the Jewish tragedy; his views on Germans; physically fighting anti-Semites after the war; his views on the Jewish resistance; and feeling like he did not have a youth because of the war.

Oral history interview with Leo de Jong

Oral History

Leo De Jong, born in 1930 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, describes his family and his father’s role as a cantor in the local synagogue; the refugees who asked for assistance from his family beginning in 1933; the German government’s gradual implementation of antisemitic laws; going from a public school to a Jewish school in 1942; a resistance group in the Jewish ghetto; his sister who went into hiding for nearly two years; his bar mitzvah in August 1943; being taken with his parents and brother to Westerbork transit camp in September 1943 and then to Bergen-Belsen four months later; the artifacts his family hid with a non-Jewish friend; his aunts who had immigrated to Chile in 1939 and the Paraguayan identification cards they had sent he and his family; the conditions in Westerbork; the trip to Bergen-Belsen and their lives in Sternenlager; being transported in April 1945 to a death camp in Leipzig, Germany on what was later called the “Lost Train” and being stopped on April 23 and liberated near Tröbitz, Germany; the death of his father and brother shortly after; being taken care of by the Red Cross; returning to Holland and meeting up with his sister; his schooling after the war; his sister moving to Israel in 1946; he and his mother relocating to Chile in 1951; traveling back and forth between Chile and Israel; his memories of the suffering during the war; and his feelings on his story and his faith in God.

Oral history interview with José Deutsch

Oral History

Jose Deutsch, born on November 8, 1931 in Bucharest, Romania, describes his family and moving to Oradea, Romania, a predominantly Jewish city where they lived until 1942; his mother’s conversion to Judaism before being married; the relocation of his step brother to England in 1938; life before the war, including his family’s Jewish traditions, his father’s occupation, his education, living conditions, neighbors, and his friends; the antisemitic events that affected him; the impact of his brother-in-law’s deportation to a Russian labor camp in 1941; moving to Budapest, Hungary with his family in 1942; the relocation of his sister, aunt, and uncle to Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Theresienstadt; the fate of his pediatrician and school principal; the antisemitic laws; his father’s detainment and deportation to the Kecskemet ghetto; declaring himself a Christian to avoid deportation to a death camp; fleeing with his mother to a farm in northern Hungary and their lives there; his mother changing his birth certificate Mosaic to Roman-Catholic; visiting his father in Hódmezővásárhely, Hungary; his mother’s successful attempt to get his father released; living in Gizella 32; his father’s experience avoiding deportation to a forced labor camp; encountering Russian soldier at his family’s residence in January 1945; life after the war; the help he received from the Joint; his Bar Mitzvah in 1944 and the theft of his tallit; his experiences under a communist government; moving to Vienna, Austria to be with his sister; his parents’ relocation to Vienna a year later; immigrating to Chile at the outbreak of the Korean War; and visiting his home country years later.

Oral history interview with Pablo Dukes

Oral History

Pablo Dukes, born in 1928 in an area of Czechoslovakia that is now Slovakia, describes his family, community, and education before the war; studying at a Jewish school in Budapest, Hungary from 1941 to 1944; the antisemitism he experienced from his teachers; being deported to Auschwitz in 1944; the death march from Auschwitz to Katowice, Poland; being transported by train to an empty hangar and then to Flossenbürg, Germany; evacuating the camp; the Allies bombing the train and walking through Bavaria until he reached a village; returning to his town after the war; living in Budapest; returning to Slovakia; immigrating to Israel in 1949; and immigrating many years later to Chile to join his uncle and brother.

Oral history interview with Pedro Feldman

Oral History

Pedro Feldman, born August 27, 1925 in Vienna, Austria, describes his high bourgeoisie family and his ancestors; his youth and attending public school; his lack of exposure to antisemitism until Hitler was in power; his father’s role as the human resource officer at Danube National Ship Company; the measures taken by his family to prevent his father from being deported to Dachau; being kicked out of public school and finishing at a Jewish school; the family’s immigration to Holland at the end of 1938; their immigration to Chile via France; the fates of his grandparents; and returning to Vienna after the war.

Oral history interview with David Feuerstein

Oral History

David Feuerstein, born in Cieszyn, Poland in 1925, describes his orthodox family; being a part of the Zionist movement, Hashomer Hatzair; attending both a catholic school and a heder; how is faith helped him throughout the war; moving with his family in 1933 to Sosnowiec, Poland, where they had a diary store; going to the Hashomer Hatzair summer colony in Jeleśnia, Poland; seeing a tank for the first time; returning home in August 1939 and professing with his rabbi that Hitler would kill the Jews, which was met with disbelief; leaving for Katowice, Poland; being forced to clean the streets in 1941; how his family was sent to Auschwitz; how his mother corresponded with him until she, his father, and their three children were killed in the gas chambers on August 15, 1943; the survival of his little brother; being sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and living in block 8 with Dutch Jews; a day in the camp; receiving his tattoo in 1942; being sent to Warsaw, Poland, with 1,000 other Jews; being quarantined upon arrival; working in the kitchen for the SS; working with the resistance in Warsaw and Auschwitz and killing a few Nazis; fighting in the forest on August 15, 1944; becoming a lieutenant in the Polish army; traveling to Switzerland illegally; being helped by the American embassy in Zurich, Switzerland; living in Argentina and Chile; his reflections on the war years and his survival; how Stalin lied to the Allies and they could have stopped the war 25 months earlier; his admiration of Churchill; his belief that whoever is silent is an accomplice; how he is not looking for vengeance; and still having dreams of the war.

Oral history interview with Lenka Folkman

Oral History

Lenka Folkman, born in 1915 in Lemešany, Czechoslovakia (with in present day Prešov, Slovakia), describes her parents and siblings; moving with her family to Košice, Slovakia; attending school; the family’s religious observances; the death of her mother when Lenka was two years old; her attempts to immigrate to Palestine; immigrating in 1935 to Chile where her sister lived with help from HIAS; her education in public schools; the fear of communism before the war began; family members who were taken to concentration camps; the survivors in her family; supporting her father financially from Chile; her marriage in 1936 and her children; and losing her faith in God after the war.

Oral history interview with Gerda Fraenkel

Oral History

Gerda Fraenkel de Kulka, born May 8, 1922 in Berlin, Germany, describes her family; her life before the war; the antisemitic laws; being expelled from school and returning in the 1990s to be given a certificate of completion; the atmosphere of her home and life at the beginning of Nazi-Germany; her experiences with antisemitism in school; immigrating with her family to Bolivia in 1939; the family’s experience living in the mountains and getting jobs; her marriage to an Austrian man; her husband’s work in an American uranium and tungsten mine; the living conditions at her mother-in-law’s home; moving to Cochabamba, Bolivia to work in the hotel industry; relocating to Santiago, Chile; her husband’s position as honorary Consul of Austria; and her children’s accomplishments.

Oral history interview with Edith Frank

Oral History

Edith Frank, born November 20, 1919 in Vienna, Austria, describes her parents; her family’s religious observances and their community; her education; working with her father who was a smithy; the beginning of antisemitism in Austria and Hitler’s rise; the effects of antisemitic laws on her community; her experience during Kristallnacht; being relocated and dealing with food rationing; trying to get a visa from a foreign embassy; the experiences of her aunt’s family on the ship, the St. Louis, and subsequently being sent to Theresienstadt; the experiences of her and her family trying to emigrate; arriving in Valparaiso, Chile and traveling to Temuco, Chile; assimilating into the Jewish community; getting a job; her marriage to a man from Odessa, Ukraine; and her father’s business.

Oral history interview with Renate Fried

Oral History

Renate Fried (née Benjamin), born April 4, 1922 in Ratibor, Upper Silesia, Germany (present day Racibórz, Poland), describes her family; attending public school until 1936; relocating to Sweden with 40 other children for 10 years under a program put in place by the HIAS and managed by a person named Pozner; the effects of Kristallnacht on her parents’ shops; the immigration of her mother and brother to Chile via Italy in 1939; her parents’ work in Chile; her immigration to Chile in 1946 with her husband and daughter; her divorce and later marriage to Pablo Fried; her children; and her great-grandchildren.

Oral history interview with Victoria Cohen

Oral History

Victoria Cohen, born in Monastir, Turkey (present day Bitola, Macedonia), describes life before the war; her education in French schools; her marriage to a wealthy man before the war and the birth of her son in 1937; secretly escaping to Italy with her husband and child where they received forged Albanian passports; relocating to Rome and staying in a hotel for a year; hiding their Jewish identity; playing cards with the Gestapo; seeing the Jewish Brigade and the retreat of the Nazis; declining an invitation from some Germans to flee after the British came; staying in Rome after the war; finding out about her brother in Chile; her views on who is at fault for the Holocaust; and her family now.

Oral history interview with Inge Frohlich

Oral History

Inge Frohlich, born in 1918 in Ratibor, Upper Silesia, Germany (present day Racibórz, Poland), describes her family; her family’s religious observances; the absence of anti-Semitism before Hitler was in power; her desire to leave Germany because of Hitler’s regime and her family’s reluctance to leave; her relocation to Florence, Italy in 1935; the forced relocation of her father and brother to Buchenwald in 1937 and their experiences; her move to England to be a nurse; her experiences crossing borders while visiting her family in Germany; managing to get family members to England; her mother’s success in liquidating the family business and bringing much of their belongings to Chile; the impact of the Holocaust on her faith and outlook; her life in England and the fear of war; visiting and working in Berlin in for 10 years during the 1970s; and her life in Chile.

Oral history interview with Marcel Frydman

Oral History

Marcel Frydman, born in France, describes being taken when he was four years old with his mother and sister to the Pithiviers internment camp, where his father had been taken months earlier; seeing his mother being taken to the Drancy internment camp; finding out later that his mother was sent to Auschwitz; being sick as a child and going to the Rothschild Hospital and later to Chateau du Moulinet; being transferred with his sister to an orphanage where they were treated well; memories of children throwing rocks at trucks filled with German soldiers when the war was ending; not knowing that he was Jewish; going to Castle La Guette after leaving the orphanage; his extended family; and being taken care of by María Edwards, who received the Legion d’Honneur in 1953.

Oral history interview with Heidi Fuchs

Oral History

Heidi (born Aldeheidi) Fuchs (born in Vienna, Austria in 1913 on the eve of WWI) describes how her father went to war; meeting her father when she was 4 years old; her parents, Richard Fuchs and Blanca Lurie; how her nanny came from Bohemia and stayed with the family for 20 years; how their economic situation was good before the war but afterwards they depended on special aid from the Americans to eat; going to kindergarten where she had many friends; practicing many sports as she was growing up; how her family was very assimilated with the rest of society and lived completely without religion; how her husband, Carlos Roth, was a plastic surgeon; being warned that the Nazis were rounding up physicians and fleeing to her mother’s apartment; trying to find another country to flee to; finding a relative in Argentina; how her husband could not work as a physician and was hired as a cleaning person in the clinic of the Argentinean Company of Electricity (CADE) and was allowed to perform some surgery there, but would be ordered to clean up the blood after; managing to bring her mother and grandmother to Argentina; how her father had died in Austria; her son, Miguel, and his profession; moving with her son to Chile; sharing her experience with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren; and visiting Vienna after the war.

Oral history interview with Saúl Gloger

Oral History

Saúl Gloger, born March 5, 1920 in Gryn’kovtse, Poland (present day Ukraine), describes living for 11 years in Chortkiv, Poland (present day Ukraine); being taken to a concentration camp in Ternopil, Ukraine; his early life and family; the gathering of survivors in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil after the war and being aided by the Joint; studying in Kopychyntsi, Ukraine before the war; living in Chortkiv until the war began; the loss of his father; antisemitism in Poland; being a Jew during the time of the Nazis; hiding in the forests; working for the Russians as a lathe operator for the railroads until 1941; his regret that he did not flee from the Russians; and the arrival of the Nazis.

Oral history interview with Chaja Golubowicz

Oral History

Chaja Golubowicz, born August 25, 1928 in Holszany, Poland (present day Halshany, Belarus), describes the Russians arriving in 1939; her siblings; the arrival of the Nazis in 1941 and being sent to the ghetto; the living conditions in the ghetto; the death of male family members; her grandparents’ occupations; working in the forest of Holszany; being taken by train to Pia and life there; being transported by train and truck with her sister through Lithuania to a concentration camp; living in the concentration camp for a year and a half; typhus outbreaks in the concentration camp; going to Kaunas, Lithuania and working in the airport; being transferred from the Kaunas ghetto to Kazlų Rūda, Lithuania; witnessing many deaths; being sold with her sister as a slave; going to Paneriai, Lithuania, where they were spared from being killed; marching toward the Ninth Fort in Kaunas, Lithuania and escaping into the forest; joining the partisans and traveling with them; conducting missions with the partisans; returning with her sister to Łódź, Poland after the war; finding her brother-in-law; longing to go to Israel; and her outlook after the Holocaust.

Oral history interview with Gerda Gross

Oral History

Gerda Gross, born in Breslau, Germany (Wroclaw, Poland) in 1912, describes her Bavarian father, who peddled merchandise; how her father and mother were married in 1910; how her father went to fight in WWI; attending school for 10 years; how the family was observant; how in her religiously mixed school the rabbi taught religion and how the majority of the children were Evangelists; being prevented from studying when Hitler came to power; working in a children’s clothing factory owned by Jews until she was dismissed for being a Jew; being prevented from working in gentile-owned stores because of the laws in 1937; how some Germans tried to help her family, but she turned them down; being married on October 6, 1938 by Rabbi Hoffman in a small synagogue, which was burned to the ground that night; leaving for Chile in 1939; how on Kristallnacht, while walking in the street with her husband, they were told to hurry up because they could not be seen outside; deciding to leave Germany and traveling with her husband’s family to Valparaiso, Chile; the fates of her parents; living in Concepción, Chile; the birth of her son; moving to Santiago, Chile when her son found work there; visiting Germany once after the war; how she feels that antisemitism is reemerging; hearing slurs against the Jews in Chile; her thoughts on Jewish children today; and the high rate of mixed marriages.

Oral history interview with Margot Guthman

Oral History

Margot Guthman (née Miriam Levy Schapps), born in the suburbs of Berlin, Germany on October 23, 1923, describes her parents, Leo Levi and Mina Levi Shapps, and her sister; her father’s fish supplying business; their summer house outside Berlin; how her father was observant, but not orthodox, and holidays were observed with the immediate family; how Berlin was a beautiful, busy, and cultural city and the Jewish community was united and helpful; going to a non-Jewish school and pursuing Jewish studies in the afternoon; being active in a youth organization; playing sports; being kicked out of school at age 13; taking courses as a nanny in case they had to leave Germany; the changes after the anti-Jewish laws; how the Nazis took away her father’s shop and exchanged it for a small shop in a small neighborhood; having her own police dog and thus not being arrested when the Hitler youth approached her; not knowing about concentration camps; moving often; experiencing Kristallnacht; how her father, as a partially-incapacitated veteran, thought he would be immune to Nazi persecution; her father’s arrest on the way to their summer home; how a client of the store managed to have him released on the condition that they would leave Germany within a month; how a cousin in Chile got them all the appropriate papers; leaving within a month and exchanging their jewels and valuables for supplies; sailing on the Copiapo to Valparaiso, Chile; spending Passover in the ship in Washington, where the Jewish community provided them with all the Passover needs, and hosted them in individual homes; arriving in Chile in March 1939; starting to work immediately as a nurse-maid; how her father opened an inn for immigrants from Germany called Pension Levy; learning Spanish; how Jewish life in Chile was very good; meeting her future husband, who was also a refugee from Germany; being married for 62 years; her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren; Jewish life in Chile; how her family brought other members of the family to Chile later on; returning to Germany to visit the burial sites of her family; claiming the family’s summer house, which had been taken over by a Russian family; the death of her husband; and receiving reparations from Germany once a month.

Oral history interview with Edith Hahn

Oral History

Edith Hahn de Kraus, born in 1917 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, describes her parents and their backgrounds; her childhood in Prague and her family; her education and getting a bachelor’s degree; having only Jewish friends; how her father hired a rabbi to teach her; working for her father’s import business and learning several languages; her father’s death in 1938; her hobbies and family vacations; how her family was not very devout; how her parents belonged to the Bnai-Brith; how her mother gave her an ultimatum on March 15, 1939, to marry or be sent to England; getting married in November 1939; being sent to live in the ghetto in 1941; how her mother went to Paris, France to deposit her jewels in 1939; being sent to Terezin in 1942 before her husband or her mother; living accommodations in the camp; working with the laundry; meeting people whom she would have never known in Prague; intellectual pursuits in the camp, including performances of Brecht’s Three Penny Opera and Verdi’s Requiem; their diet; a volley ball team; being prevented from going to Auschwitz in 1943 because she was in the hospital suffering from a contagious infection; managing to get her mother off the list for deportation to Auschwitz; how her mother died in the camp from dysentery; being sent to Auschwitz in September 1944; a visit of the Danish Red Cross; arriving in Auschwitz and not being tattooed; her sister’s preparation to go to Palestine in 1936; processing in Auschwitz and the facilities; being transferred to work in Germany, 30 km from Dresden; falling ill with scarlet fever; seeing Dresden in fire in February; exchanging gifts for birthdays; walking to Mauthausen and eating grass; her husband’s death in Auschwitz in December 1944; being liberated from Mauthausen by the Americans; returning to Prague and getting her apartment back; moving to Chile in June 1947; feeling accepted in Chile; not being able to forgive the Germans; and believing she survived due to luck.

Oral history interview with Hildegard Haymann

Oral History

Hilla Haymann (née Hildegard Haymann), born in Berlin, Germany, describes her upper-middle class family; her happy childhood; going to German schools until 1938 when they had to transfer to Jewish schools; how her brother belonged to a Zionist youth movement and in October 1938 left for Palestine; not being permitted to go to school on November 9, 1938; returning home by train and seeing a roundup of Jewish men and the synagogue burning; getting visas from Chile; how she was registered to go with a children’s illegal transport to Palestine via Holland; how she decided to go to Chile instead; how she and her father were mobilized to fortify their building’s bunker but were not allowed to take refuge there; departing for Chile on November 28, 1939; sailing on the Augustus from Geneva; how Pablo Neruda was also on the voyage; being sent to an agricultural settlement; eventually moving to Santiago, Chile; how her brother joined the Israeli Army and the Jewish Brigade and was sent to Rome, Italy for intelligence work; seeing her brother after 10 years apart; and how she never married.

Oral history interview with Rodolfo Haymann

Oral History

Rodolfo Haymann, born in 1921 in Berlin, Germany, describes his family; his memories of the persecution of the Jews in Berlin; joining a Zionist youth group; his sympathy for socialists and communists; his Zionist youth group being caught by the S.S. and put under surveillance; his parents’ decision to send him to Eretz Israel (Palestine); his journey to Palestine; working and studying in a kibbutz for seven years; his training with the Palmach; how his parents had visas to Chile but were unable to find passage on a ship; being inducted into the Information Service of Eretz Israel; being appointed as a front-line investigator; his memories of entering Rome, Italy with the British Army and encountering other Jews; being unaware of the extermination camps; the difficulty of celebrating the end of the war after so much tragedy; his memories of finding relatives who survived and relatives who were collaborators; being sent on a mission to Trieste, Italy towards the end of the war and helping Jewish refugees cross the border; visiting Palestine after the war and being given a mission to accompany thousands of German prisoners in Africa back to Germany; his memories of being injured when two Yugoslavian S.S. sympathizers tried to escape; spending three months in a British hospital in Lebanon; his return to the kibbutz and being assigned to obtain maps from the British cartography section; getting a visa to Chile; his recollections of the voyage and the ship’s captain, who reported that he had taken Jewish survivors to Palestine; being under suspicion by the Argentinean authorities; and reuniting with his family.

Oral history interview with Annelise Hentschel

Oral History

Annelise Hentschel, born in Berlin, Germany in 1921, discusses her divorced parents; her parents’ leather factory; living with her grandmother; attending a public school; being a rhythmic gymnast and taking part in the 1936 Berlin Olympics; being in the youth group at her synagogue; vacationing in Sweden, Holland, and Switzerland; graduating from school and being trained in the leather factory; how the Nazis took over the factory and sold all the merchandise in a public auction; doing forced labor in a different leather factory for eight months; working as a the personal assistant of the Argentinean ambassador until Argentina cut diplomatic ties with Germany and she was fired; her mother’s deportation; working at a New Year’s party at the Chilean embassy, where the guests were the top diplomats in Germany and also Germany’s top generals, and how at the end of the party a false report circulated that General Paulus had taken Sebastopol; the auction of her home and being kicked out of the auction; returning to the Chilean embassy and being sent to a castle that was safe from the Allie’s bombardment; how the Chilean ambassador tried to get her a German passport; leaving Germany in October for Biarritz, France; being exchanged for 25 German prisoners in Lisbon, Portugal and being allowed to proceed to Chile; and being imprisoned on the ship by British officers and interrogated.

Oral history interview with Lore Hepner

Oral History

Lore Eva Hepner Halbershtam, born July 23, 1929 in Berlin, Germany, describes her family; leaving Berlin at age 9; her happy childhood; how her family was not particularly observant; attending a public school and how she was requested to leave; attending the Dr. Leonore Goldschmidt Schule; how life was good for the family until November 10, 1938; seeing the impact of Kristallnacht on the way to school, including the destroyed Jewish stores and the smoke rising from a nearby synagogue that had been burned; her father being rounded up with other Jewish men and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp; her mother finding visas for the family to Cuba; being afraid of her father when he returned from the camp after six weeks; being put on a kinder transport to Holland; living with her siblings in a camp near Rotterdam for three months; her parents’ leaving Germany in May 1939; sailing on the Orduna in first class from Liverpool, England; the death of her paternal grandmother in Germany in 1942; arriving in Havana, Cuba the day after the St. Louis and not being allowed to disembark; continuing on to Valparaiso, Chile; being helped by people in first class to get visas for Chile; being financially assisted by a relative in the United States for a few years; living in Santiago, Chile; her schooling; corresponding with relatives in Holland; and her life in Chile.

Oral history interview with Kurt Herdan

Oral History

Kurt Herdan, born in Austria in 1926, describes living in Czernowitz, Romania (Chernivtsi, Ukraine); his family and speaking German at home; how the dynamics with his friends changed after 1936; living under Hitler and Stalin regimes; attending a half German and half Rumanian school around age 13; the Russian invasion on June 28, 1940; suffering more under the Soviets than under the Nazis; being moved to the ghetto on October 10, 1941; being transported to Transnistria; his father bribing the mayor of the city to allow them to return home; how from July 1941 until May 1942 the young people had to go to work in the city, mainly restoring the bridge over the river Pruth (Prut) River, which had been bombed; the deportation of young people to work camps in Romania until 1944; his jobs in labor camps and finding humor in the camps; being not very religious but being allowed to observe Kol Nidre in a labor camp in 1943; being one of 500 men accused of sabotage on February 14, 1943 and being saved from execution because of a difference of opinion between the Rumanian and the German commandos; being liberated; going to Bucharest, Romania; being taken care for several days by a Nazi opera singer; enrolling in the fine arts school in Bucharest; his various jobs; living under the communists from 1944 to 1950; immigrating to Israel; being involved in the opening of the road to Eilat; joining his parents in Chile in 1953; exhibiting his art in Germany in 1989 and refusing to tell the Germans about his life during the war; including a window in each of his paintings to represent the two years he lived without one during the war; and including the German word for “now what” in his art.

Oral history interview with Rita Herdan

Oral History

Rita Herdan (née Rujel Leie), born on June 1, 1921 in Czernowitz, Bukovina, Romania (Chernivtsi, Ukraine), describes her Austrian parents; speaking German at home; attending a German school and later a Romanian school; experiencing antisemitism even before the war; her family’s many non-Jewish friends; living very well, in a beautiful house with a garden and fruit trees; wanting to attend college during the Soviet occupation and her father preventing her; her brother’s conscription into the army when the war started; the evacuation of people from Czernowitz; being sent to the ghetto; her mother giving all her belongings to neighbors for safe keeping and their refusal to return them; her father bribing an official so they could return to Czernowitz; how their house had been emptied; being helped by German and Romanian friends; her father working in a polyclinic; being afraid of the Russians; being forced to chop trees; the Russians sending people to the Urals to work; her father hiding her in the polyclinic; escaping Czernowitz; trying to get to the Joint in Bucharest, Romania to unite with her brother; her brother’s pursuit of a career in art; working in Bucharest as a secretary and tutoring the daughter of the German kitchen worker of the Joint in exchange for food; reuniting with her parents in Bucharest after the war; her parents obtaining a visa for her to go to Chile; the six month voyage, including a sojourn of three months in Paris, France; managing to bring her parents and brother to Chile; and her life in Chile.

Oral history interview with Carlos Heymann

Oral History

Carlos Heyman, born in Vienna, Austria in 1920, describes living with his family in Czernowitz, Romania (Chernivtsi, Ukraine); speaking several languages, including Ruthenian, German, and Yiddish; his family observing only the main Jewish holidays; attending public school; being in student associations and going to organized activities in the town and hikes in the Carpathian Mountains; having a horse and loving to ride; living in Czernowitz until the age of 19 when he completed the first year of medical school; hearing that bad times were approaching for Jews and deciding to stop his studies; the prevalence of antisemitism even before Hitler’s rise; deciding to immigrate to Chile because he could not withstand the anti-Jewish laws and was afraid of being inducted into the army; his family’s powdered milk factory in Romania, which was overburdened with special taxes; emigrating in 1939 without his parents; his parents’ staying in Romania and providing powdered milk to the German Army; the recruitment of Jewish women to go to work in the copper mines and the young men to the army; sending correspondence to his parents via Vienna, Austria; his first job as a peddler in Chile; marring at age 22 in 1942; his parents’ immigration to Chile later on; and his parents starting a new factory like the one they had in Romania.

Oral history interview with Herta Honig

Oral History

Herta Honig de Stern, born June 24, 1921 in Vienna, Austria, describes her assimilated family and happy childhood; only attending synagogue for the High Holidays; her father’s large imported fabric store in the center of the city; attending a public school and then a private school; frequenting the theatre and the opera at a very young age; her French tutor; the gradual rise of Nazism and seeing Nazi propaganda; having to clean the propaganda off walls; her parents sending her and her brother out of Austria; living with an aunt in Czechoslovakia; being sent to the British Institute, where she learned Czech; her father’s store being taken away during the Anschluss; her parents’ leaving for Czechoslovakia; her parents exchanging jewelry to the secretary of the Chilean consul in Czechoslovakia for visas; arriving in Chile in 1939 on a British ship; and getting married soon after and having a child.

Oral history interview with Helga Horwitz

Oral History

Helga Horwitz, born in Berlin, Germany in 1927, describes her father and his men’s and boys’ clothes manufacturing business; living in the Grunewald neighborhood in an apartment building that provided gardens for each apartment; how the family was well-to-do and her father was very charitable, even taking care of two families; walking daily with her family in the forest; being sent to a Jewish school in 1933; her older sister; her father’s status as a decorated veteran of WWI; her Jewish and non-Jewish friends; how her parents always considered themselves Germans of Jewish faith; attending school until 1938 and not experiencing antisemitism, though her parents did; their experience on Kristallnacht; how her parents, out of fear, went to Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) to see a great aunt and her father was arrested and deported to Buchenwald, where his lower spine was broken; hearing about the destruction of the synagogue; her father’s vow never to say anything about what occurred at the concentration camp when he was released; her mother’s attempts to find visas; her father’s hospitalization and being forced to turn over all the goods of the factory; being sent four visas from an aunt in Switzerland; being aided by the Joint upon arriving in Switzerland; working on a farm in the Alps and experiencing language barriers; her mother finding visas to North Africa, but being advised not to go there; having their Swiss visas extended by a gentile who was taken to jail soon after for extending visas for 1,000 other people who were in transit from Austria; contracting whooping cough from her sister; obtaining visas to Chile via her sister’s friends in Chile; concealing her cough during the journey; her grandmother also managing to get to Chile through the charity of the Joint; the death of most of her extended family; her mother’s work as a nurse in an immigrants’ home in Chile; going to school and learning to make artificial flowers; and studying mechanical dentistry and becoming a dental assistant.

Oral history interview with Enrique Kaczor

Oral History

Enrique Kaczor, born in Warsaw, Poland, on April 23, 1911, describes his two sisters; his observant Jewish family; finishing technical school after high school; going into the army at age 23; being in Grodno (now in Belarus) and staying in the army for 8 months; being an accomplished soccer player and playing for the army; not experiencing antisemitism; working in a company as a technician after his military service; escaping when the Germans invaded with his sister and her brothers-in-law towards Vilnius, Lithuania by train; being taken prisoner by the Germans and being freed by partisans; avoiding bombings and going to Bialystok, Poland, to a relative’s home (the wife of the city’s mayor); receiving a visa for Japan from Chiune Sugihara; going to Vladivostok, Russia and boarding a cattle ship destined for Kobe, Japan; receiving support from the Jewish community in Kobe; he and his brother-in-law playing bridge with the Chilean consul and being convinced by a Jewish employee of the consulate to immigrate to Chile; arriving in Santiago, Chile, on a ship that was half for passengers and half for cattle; his brother-in-law having difficulty with the immigration office in Chile; going to Valparaiso around 1941 or 1942; lessons learned during their immigration; establishing a business in Chile; the losses he suffered during the war; supporting the foundation of the Home for the Aged in Chile; volunteering to serve the Polish army at the Polish consul in Chile but not being permitted to go because of the cost; and his desire to find his lost relatives in Poland.

Oral history interview with Juan Carlos Kantor

Oral History

Juan Carlos Kantor Edelstein, born in Prague, Czech Republic on March 26, 1938, describes his family leaving Europe when he was one year old; going on a ship to Buenos Aires and found their way to Santiago, Chile; his father, who had been a lawyer, took a long time to adjust to life in Chile; his family arriving with some economic means and did not have as hard a time as many other immigrants; the family leaving Czechoslovakia because his father had one a large law suit and they began receiving threats; the extended family staying in Czechoslovakia; how his maternal family were observant and his paternal family were assimilated; his father being the “chargee d’affairs” of the Czech embassy representing the exiled government in London; the family deciding not to return to Czechoslovakia; the effects of the war on his mother; his family not affiliating with the Jewish community in Chile; going back to Judaism when he was an adult; marrying a Jewish woman; his older brother marring a non-Jew and living as a Catholic; and his belief in the value of testimonies.

Oral history interview with Gitla Klajman

Oral History

Gitla Klajman Greenbaum Shadman, born in Sosnowiec, Poland, on August 16, 1925, describes her family; completing seven years of elementary education until 1939; entering the Youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair, when she was 12 years old; learning many Hebrew songs; speaking Yiddish at home and being observant; feeling antisemitism starting in 1935; the boycotts of Jewish shops; the beginning of the war and her father being detain then released; volunteering with her sister to work; the deportation on May 14, 1942, and her father being taken; being sent with her family to a ghetto outside the city in mid-July 1942; working in a factory; being interned for three days in March 1943; the pack her mother provisioned for each of her children; being deported to a women’s camp in Germany, where she and her sister worked in the kitchen of a factory; their camp being within the purview of Gross-Rosen; conditions at the camp and her job in a textile factory; getting her hand caught in a machine on November 23, 1943 and receiving medical care; conditions in the camp in February 1945; the evacuation of the camp and walking for a day before being transported by cattle car to Bergen-Belsen; conditions in the camp and the epidemic of cholera and typhus; her sister contracting typhus; selling their hidden jewelry for potatoes; hearing shootings at night; the neighboring camp for Jewish Dutch families and an orphanage for Dutch children; being watched by Hungarian soldiers; being liberated and watching as a Dutch captain searched the camp for his family; the British Army finding that all the flour had been poisoned; the Red Cross arriving; being taken to the Bergen Belsen city, where she and her sister found friends and acquaintances from their town; the large Jewish community in Hanover; her uncle’s survival in northern France; receiving help from the OSE; meeting her brother-in-law in Paris, France and celebrating the liberation of Leon Blum; meeting her future husband, who had been at Buchenwald with Blum; training as a high fashion couturier; immigrating to Paraguay then going to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in February 1948; going to Arica, Chile, in 1962; her children and grandchildren; and the importance of giving her testimony.

Oral history interview with Adalberto Klein

Oral History

Adalberto (Avrum) Klein, born on November 3, 1926 in Giorokuta, Transylvania (the town belonged to Hungary after Hitler’s invasion), describes his town and family; the family farm, where they grew wheat, had sheep and made cheese; his two older sisters Anna and Margarita; his observant parents, who kept kosher, observed all the holidays, and for Shabbat they walked to services in another town; going to school 30 km away in Simleu Silvaniei, Romania; studying electrical installations; training and working in Debrecen, Hungary; working in Budapest, Hungary; Nazis entering the country and the restrictions placed on Jews; returning to his hometown; being sent to a ghetto, which was the site of a brick factory belonging to his uncle, Francisco Klein; being loaded on a train and taken to Auschwitz Birkenau at a month and a half; going through selection and the conditions in the camp; going to Buchenwald and then to a labor camp in Bochum, Germany to an ammunition factory; working as an electrician; collecting tobacco from discarded cigarette butts and trading it for food; American bombers constantly flying over them and finding refuge in a bunker; being in charge of finding and disassembling the timed-release bombs that were dropped; the escapes of inmates; being caught stealing potatoes and being beaten; starvation in the camp; having to rebuild the factory after it was damaged by the bombs; being evacuated by train to Buchenwald, where they stayed about a month and a half; joining a group of non-Jews in one of the selections and being given plenty of food; being evacuated again to a forest and possibly Dachau; being taken to an airport; the continued death march; being liberated by an American tank; contracting stomach typhus and being taken to a German hospital then an American field hospital; being diagnosed with a hernia; being sent back home; the loss of much of his family; buying land and horses; keeping correspondence with his relatives in Chile; and immigrating to Chile.

Oral history interview with Judith Klein

Oral History

Judith Klein Farago (née Tove Leah), born in Berehove, Chekoslovakia (now Ukraine), on October 10, 1925, describes her parents, who were married in Budapest, Hungary, and their backgrounds; her extended family and their fates during the Holocaust; her pious father; her three sisters and brother; being taunted by other children for not being able to talk normally; doing well in school; family vacations; being kicked out of school when she was in second grade; Hungarians entering the city; the Jews being moved to a ghetto; her father being taken then released; her father’s view of the Holocaust; gathering for deportation; a maternal uncle who had sent them all tickets to the United States in 1938 and her father’s reluctance to leave; her father turning down an invitation by the rabbi to move to Israel in 1939; being sent to Auschwitz on a cattle train in 1944; arriving in the camp and the guards mistaking her and her sister for twins, but being saved at the last minute when someone else pointed out they were not; being put in lager A with her sister and being sent to work in a quarry; stealing some potatoes and being caught; being sentenced to death and being spared; the roll-calls; the death of her sister and burying her; liberation; meeting Francois Mitterrand, who kissed her hand; the atrocities she witnessed during the war; returning home, where Russians were living in their home and refusing to stay there; meeting her future husband when sleeping in the streets and marrying soon after; moving to Hungary in 1945; deciding to immigrate to Chile; moving to the United States in 1970, seeking medical care for her husband; and living in the US until 1996.

Oral history interview with Lea Kleiner

Oral History

Lea Kleiner, born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia), on March 16, 1929, describes her Czech mother and Polish father; living in Zagreb until 1939 in an apartment; she and her friends being exposed to ultra violet light in winter in order to make up for the lack of sun; her cousins from Czechoslovakia visiting; her extended family; attending a Jewish school with her sister; learning Hebrew and Yugoslavian (in Cyrillic characters) and speaking German, Czech, and Polish at home; their Hungarian nanny; her mother’s religious family; her family observing Shabbat and holidays; her father being a successful merchant and liquidating the business at the beginning of 1939; how her father was an ardent Zionist and visited Israel in 1933 and 1936; her family leaving Zagreb in March 1939 for Paris, France; living in Paris for a few months then going to Deauville, France; how the family plan had been to put the children in a boarding school in England; witnessing aerial attacks in Deauville; not being allowed to stay in England, spending a night in jail, and being sent to Paris under heavy escort; her mother getting visas to Chile; departing from Genoa on a voyage to Chile; their passports being examined in Marseille, France; how the Jews travelling in third were taken off the boat and interned in camps in France; arriving in Valparaiso, Chile; moving to Santiago, Chile, where they shared an apartment with another family for a while; attending an English school but feeling very alien and asking to be transferred to a local high school; her father never acclimating to Chile and never mastering the language; her parents receiving correspondence from Europe, but never sharing the information with their daughters; the death of most of her maternal relatives in Auschwitz; marrying a non-Jew and divorcing him later; her two children and three grandchildren; giving refuge to child victims of the dictatorship in Chile; and how her message is to never forget.

Oral history interview with Alegra Koen

Oral History

Alegra Koen, born in Bitola, Yugoslavia (now in Macedonia), on September 17, 1922, describes the presence of antisemitism before the war; how they were all fearful and most of the neighbors were Christian; her father’s work in money exchange; having four brothers; attending gymnasium for four years instead of eight and having one hour a week of Jewish religion instruction; how one night the chief of police, a friend of her older brother, warned them to leave their house before 6 a.m. because they were going to be taken; leaving with her brothers but her parents staying behind; going with smugglers by truck to Tirana, Albania, which was occupied by the Italians; not having any false documents like many other refugees there; how her older, married brother (who had documents for himself, his wife, and son) fabricated a story for her and the other brothers were taken immediately to prison; being helped by some Albanese; staying with a family that had two girls of Alegra’s age; how later on she stayed with her cousin and aunt and they rented a house together for a year; her imprisoned brothers being freed then sent to a small town, Kabalia, where they were interned; joining her brothers so as to take care of them; being supported by the Joint supported but often being hungry; eating pork since it was raised nearby; the local war between Germans and Italians and using her youth and beauty to persuade them not to kill her brothers; going back to Zagreb, Yugoslavia after the liberation; not finding her home or her parents; the food kitchens for those returning and sleeping in a school building; how an old friend of her brother’s found her while she was waiting in the food line and told her he had gotten his own house back; how he and his parents had hid in the mountain and he was a partisan; moving in with his family and getting married in 1947; the ghetto in Monastir (Bitola); how after the war her older brother supported them all, working in textiles, and the family lived in Zagreb; saying they were Bulgarians because of the antisemitic atmosphere; believing Pavelik to be worse than Hitler; being given papers that said they were Bulgarians; her bother Chaim having an Albanese passport and living in Bari, Italy; how life was hard during the war; her other brothers escaping Tito and Communism by immigrating to Chile; joining her brothers after her husband died and bringing her son Dario; not liking Chile, returning home briefly, and then going back to Chile; and her belief that the Holocaust should not be forgotten.

Oral history interview with Salomone Koen

Oral History

Shlomo ben Mordechai Hacohen (Salomone Koen), born in Monastir, Yugoslavia (Bitola, Macedonia), describes the Jewish population in Monastir; his parents, Mordechai and Clara, and siblings, Chaim, Abraham, Mois, and Allegra; being the youngest sibling; his family being very observant; the interactions of the Jews and non-Jews; all his brothers attending a yeshiva until the public schools opened to Jews; his non-Jewish friends; being bullied in school for being Jewish; his education; being active in the Hashomer Hatzair; his father’s role as the chief rabbi in the town; the German invasion and the conflicts between Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes; the killing and deportation of Croatian and Slovenian Jews; his father being deported to a concentration camp; escaping to the mountains with the partisans; being in a high position with the partisans because he knew the languages of the small towns; his activities with the partisans; fighting with Haim Bar-Lev (né Brotzlewsky), who also sent the partisans armaments and other supplies; the partisans helping people escape to Albania; crossing into Albania in 1941 with his brothers (Abraham and Mois) using Muslim names and being arrested; deciding to confess he was Jewish and be sent to the concentration camp because he could not stand life in the Albanian jail; being released and becoming Albanese citizens through someone’s bribery; becoming the leader of the partisans at the Tirana hospital; escaping to the mountains and receiving help from farmers; liberation in Yugoslavia; the Yugoslavian communists; being named the commander of Opicina, Italy (a town on the border with Slovenia); making arrangements for the returning Jewish refugees to go to Palestine; his brother, Chaim, going to Chile; the rest of the family joining him in Chile later; and the effects of the war on the family.

Oral history interview with Peter Krausz-Engel

Oral History

Peter Krausz-Engel, born in Budapest, Hungary on June 21, 1933, describes his family; Jewish life in Budapest; his family’s businesses; his parents divorcing and being raised by his grandparents; visiting his father, who lived 242 km away; the Nazis beginning round ups in his father’s town and his father being taken to do forced labor on railroads until 1942; his father being sent to collect the mines on the Russian front and escaping with some friends to the Russian side; his mother losing her job and going to work for a German family in 1944; attending a regular public school until 1943; having to wear the yellow patch and live in a building designated for Jews only; the deportation of his mother on November 10, 1944; living with an aunt; the brutality of the Fascist party in Hungary; the actions of a Catholic priest during the war; moving into the ghetto with his grandparents; witnessing the Russian army enter the city in March 1945; returning to their apartment and his mother coming back after being in Lichtenberg concentration camp; attending school again; the return of his father, who died soon after of polio; being registered as a communist in order to study; completing his university studies and entering the military academy; becoming an officer in the Hungarian army; leaving Hungary in 1956 after the revolution and walking to Austria; going to Vienna then Linz; immigrating to Chile and bringing his mother over a year later; and his doubts about his faith.

Oral history interview with Johanna Krawczyk

Oral History

Johanna Krawczyk (née Tukhshnyder), born in Russia in 1941, describes her parents, who escaped to Russia from Poland as Jewish refugees during the war; how her parents were sent to Siberia, but escaped in 1939 and were liberated from Siberia in 1940; her parents moving to Central Russia; returning to Poland in 1945; her parents having progressive ideas and belonged to the BUND; how the reality of Russia did not coalesce with their ideals; never living as a Jewish family; how between the ages of 4 and 8 she heard and understood the Yiddish language, in which her parents would discuss the fate of their close relatives; her maternal grandparents surviving; her father’s family being thrown from a balcony in Chelm; how Chelm’s streets had been paved by the tombstones of the Jewish cemetery; the murder of all of her paternal cousins in concentration camps; how before the war two uncles left for Palestine and an aunt went to South America for economic reasons; how the return to Poland from Russia was very painful and sad, and she remembers her parents crying bitterly; the efforts of all citizens to rebuild the city, including school children; keeping their Judaism hidden; being taunted at school for her religion, and changing schools often to avoid the suffering; her family moving to Israel when the Jews were allowed to leave Poland; how it was a tough experience and they arrived in 1957; being a teenager, and having no Jewish knowledge or background; how their neighborhood was populated by poor people, mainly from Morocco; her father being unable to do the only job offered to him; being shunned because she was white and wanting to return to Poland; her aunt visiting from Chile and inviting them to go to Chile; how her family had never adapted to changes easily, neither to Israel nor to Chile; the journey on a ship to Buenos Aires; the Andean train; having to learn another language and adapt to a new environment; not experiencing antisemitism in Chile; and her dilemma between being a Jew and a citizen of the world.

Oral history interview with Ossy Kreisberger

Oral History

Ossy Kreisberger, born in 1935 near Czernowice, Rumania (Chernivtsi, Ukraine), describes his mildly observant family; his memories of when the Germans arrived in Rumania; being an only child and living in a town where there were only 11 Jews (his family and the Deutch family); his father’s wood cutting business; finding refuge from the Rumanian soldiers in a neighbor’s barn and the owner telling on them to the Rumanian soldiers; the murder of seven members in the Deutch family; the gunshot wounds he and his parents received; being taken to a detention location prior to being taken to a concentration camp; his family escaping to a wheat field and returning to the detention area; being made to walk to Czernowice and going to the house of a maternal uncle; the murder of the other people in their group soon after; his family living there for many years; going to school and changing towns often; returning to Czernowice when the Russians entered; his father doing forced labor (building a stadium); waiting for emigration papers to be sent from abroad from 1945 to 1947; going to a yeshiva in Paris, France; arriving in 1949 in Chile; not assigning any importance to material things because of his experiences; adjusting to the permanency of living in one place; and his love of family.

Oral history interview with Erica Kurz

Oral History

Erica Kurz, born in September 1926 in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, describes how her family was still suffering economically from WWI; being an only child; her parents, numerous aunts and uncles, and her beloved grandmother; attending a coed, non-religious elementary school for four years; speaking German at home; attending high school for three years; the Russians arriving when the war began and being 13 years old; her parents losing their belongings and being labeled as bourgeois; her father finding work in a bakery; her family hiding in parks and other places to avoid being deported to Siberia; their family not wanting to give them shelter; the German invasion and being moved to the ghetto; after a few months being sent to Transnistria; being in in Mogilev (possibly Mohyliv-Podil's'kyi, Ukraine) for a couple of months; being sent to Skazeret, 10 km away; being sent money from family in Bucharest, Romania; living in houses that had been partially demolished; being marched to Tyvrov (Tyvriv, Ukraine), escorted by Ukrainians; being put in a ghetto and her father being forced to do labor; being hit by a Romanian soldier; she and her mother knitting sweaters and selling them; being felled by an attack of furuncles in her legs and not being able to walk or work; her father fixing shoes then being taken for six months for forced labor; the Russians arriving; staying in Tyvrov another year and her father working as a glazier; her family befriending a Russian Jewish soldier, who gave them the complete works of Sholem Aleichem; hosting people from the community in their home at night because her house had electricity; listening to the news; going to Bucharest at the end of 1945; going to Paris, France in May 1947 in order to immigrate to Chile; meeting many Sephardic Jews; ration cards; sailing to Chile in the ship La Groix in June 1947; joining a Jewish group and finding out about the camps; life in Chile and her husband Leon Geller; living a non-religious life; and not feeling hate.

Oral history interview with Juan Lamac

Oral History

Juan Lamac, born in Pilsner, Czechoslovakia (Plzen, Czech Republic) around 1922, describes the Jewish community in Pilsner; being an only child; attending public school and being active in many Jewish and German organizations; having to go to work when the Germans invaded; food rations; the Austrian Jewish refugees who passed through Czechoslovakia; his family being sent to Theresienstadt; surviving the killings at Riditze (a camp for political prisoners); avoiding being sent to Auschwitz at first then being sent in 1944; the selection process; his father staying with him; being in Birkenau for four months; in May 1944 being sent to work for four months in odd jobs; being sent with his father to Blechhammer; the Allied bombings at that factory; the hanging of 40 prisoners because they had managed to find shoe laces to tie their shoes; the sleeping accommodations; he and his father being sick and taken to a hospital; the German guards disappearing as the Russians approached; escaping with two others; encountering the Russians and being taken for interrogation by a Jewish female commander who spoke to them in Yiddish, which he did not understand; returning to the Czech Republic and being interrogated by Czech commanders; wanting to fight the Germans and joining the Czech Legion; being in the army for two months; going to Prague, Czech Republic and not finding any relatives; studying at a university in Prague and getting married; working for a Bata Shoes company; going to Chile in 1949 and the death of his wife soon after their arrival; the Theresienstadt Kapo, Otto Krause, who was in the room next to his, and served for 10 years in jail after the war; and Krause also going to Chile and offering to help Juan.

Oral history interview with Max Locker

Oral History

Max (né Meir) Zaidik Locker, born around 1926 in Rosilna, Poland (now part of Ukraine), describes his parents, Gedaliya and Fryma, and grandfathers, Samson and Meir; being one of four children; his happy childhood; his father being a yeshiva graduate; going to Cheder at age four; going to public school in the afternoons; finishing school at age 11; the large Ukrainian population in Rosilna and the 35 Jewish families; his father’s occupation as a forester; the harsh winters and the prevalence of tuberculosis; his family’s relationship with the town’s mayor and priest; the hearing about the rise of Hitler and the Anschluss; being sent to Ivano-Frankivs'ka, Ukraine for school; the Nazis arriving in Rosilna and most of his family escaping to the forest, except for his father who stayed behind; finding out that his father was shot and killed while they were in the forest; how when the trucks come in to evacuate the Jews to the ghetto the children escaped to the forest and his mother stayed behind; his mother being sent to the ghetto and killed; going to Perehins'ke, Ukraine with his siblings and working in the forest; changing addresses; and the book he wrote about his experiences.

Oral history interview with Raoul Malachowski

Oral History

Raoul Malachowski, born in 1916 in Poland, describes his Swedish mother and Polish father; his Gentile family moving to Finland in 1921; training in the Polish General Consulate in Hamburg, Germany; living in Germany and seeing the changes there; his encounters with the rising Nazi-Stalin ideology; the persecution of intellectuals and the aristocracy; his mother’s arrest and death during the war; his father’s family dying in Katin; his Polish family hiding Jewish children during the occupation; being posted to defend Warsaw, Poland, in the Modlin Fort; being taken prisoner with his father; escaping to Łódź, Poland; reopening the Red Cross in Łódź; being imprisoned with other employees of the Red Cross; opening a secret Red Cross; helping Jewish families find information on detained and hidden relatives; working for the Polish government in exile; being imprisoned, tortured, and interrogated; hearing about his mother’s death; being transported to a transit camp nearby; being taken to Vienna, Austria and from there to Mauthausen; working in a quarry; the Norwegian intellectuals in the camp; being transported to Guzen II; working underground in enlarging the tunnels; speaking privately with someone named von Strauss; the typhoid epidemic; liberation in May 1945; and his father finding him.

Oral history interview with Ruth Markowitz

Oral History

Ruth Markowitz de Strauss, born at the end of 1924, describes being an only child of a Jewish German couple; her assimilated, middle class family; attending a public school and then the Goethe Shule; not experiencing much antisemitism, except from an art teachers; attending a Jewish school, where there was a high number of Jewish refugees; meeting Eastern European Jews; experiencing segregation; her German friend becoming a Nazi; the events during Kristallnacht and her father avoiding the first roundup; finding refuge with her mother at the home of an English family; awaiting the visa for Sweden; leaving for Sweden on her own at age 13; how at the border the black shirts came by her compartment and she was taken off the train with her suitcases and made to undress as they looked for valuables; arriving at the Malmo school; the Zionist atmosphere at her school and being in the school for a year; her parents getting a visa to Chile, which required her to return to Berlin, Germany; returning to Germany by the end of October of 1939; traveling on the German ship, Horace; the ship being stopped in Marseille, France and all the passports being checked and her father being forced to leave the ship; her father being sent to a concentration camp in France and eventually leaving for Chile; her mother working as a housekeeper; her work as a nanny and a German teacher; her family reuniting after a year; studying to be a secretary; getting married and having three children; and becoming a nurse and working for the Red Cross.

Oral history interview with Hans Mendel

Oral History

Hans Mendel Meier, born on March 22, 1922 in Munich, Germany, describes his younger brother; his father, who was a shoe businessman; his childhood; attending operas; being kicked out of school because he was Jewish; being sent by his parents to Florence, Italy to a private boarding school, where he stayed for a year and a half; being sent to England and attending the Technical Institute in Lester, to learn about the shoe industry; getting a job in a sporting shoes factory in Blackburn, Lancashire; traveling to Germany on a holiday in 1938; his father being sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht and his release after a month; his parents obtaining visas to Chile; working in England until 1946; the panic in England over German and Austrian refugees; being interned for a year then returning to the factory in Blackburn; his rise in the factory ranks until he was the officer in charge of acquisitions in the company that had 300 workers; reuniting with his parents in Chile in 1946; more details on his internment, during which time he was interested in politics and subscribed to The Times of London; volunteering to the Home Guard, for civil defense, where he served until the end of the war; and the voyage to South America.

Oral history interview with Frida Mendelovich

Oral History

Frida Mendelovich Wolf, born in the commune of Vad, Rumania (7 km from the capital), describes her large family; her Czechoslovakian mother; her family’s observation of the holidays; her father’s quarry; education in her town; her happy childhood; the Nazi invasion and being sent to the ghetto; her father’s secretary sending them food in the ghetto; being sent to a concentration camp and avoiding the crematorium; being in Birkenau, Auschwitz, Kaufering, and Dachau; her belief that God helped her survive; her three children, seven grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren; undergoing many operations after the war; one of her brothers serving in the military and never knowing what happened to him; being liberated by the Americans; meeting her husband, a Sephardic Greek Jew originally from Salonika, Greece, in the camp; being helped by an uncle in the United States to buy a house and get food; going to Chile, where her husband was an electrician; and the importance of Holocaust testimony to prevent Holocaust denial.

Oral history interview with Maurice Meyers

Oral History

Maurice Meyers, born in Ostrowiec, Poland after WWI, describes his parents, who were very religious; attending cheder and public school; his parents’ haberdashery; being the fifth of six children; preparing to attend college but not being able to because the Jewish quota had been filled; working in the family store; antisemitism before the war; his parents taking in a refugee couple from Germany; the German invasion and fleeing towards Russia with four others; going to Rivne, Ukraine; staying with a Jewish family for a few months; his family living in the ghetto in Ostrowiec and returning home; being detained by an officer of the Wehrmacht and sent back to Russia; successfully returning home in 1941; the killing of important Jews in Ostrowiec in 1940; working in a steel mill, manufacturing heavy springs for railroads; hearing about deportations in October 1942; the roundup of Jews including his mother; buying false identity papers; hiding in Warsaw, Poland until February 10, 1943 when he was arrested and sent to the Pawiak prison; being in a hospital for three days; working in a Gestapo kitchen in the Warsaw ghetto; escaping from a work detail and finding his sister; finding another hiding place; witnessing the burning of the ghetto after the uprising in April; escaping the Gestapo and staying in a town near Warsaw in 1944; earning money making cigarettes; being liberated by the Russian troops in January 1945; walking to Łódź, Poland; selling goods that were found in apartments; marrying his former girlfriend in December 1945; opening a textile business; the communist government; leaving Poland and joining the Israeli Breicha movement; going to Germany for three years; and immigrating to the United States in February 1949.

Oral history interview with Ursula Michels

Oral History

Ursula Michels, born on August 12, 1916, in Berlin, Germany, describes her childhood and youth; her friends, who were mostly Christians; her older sister; living in a very nice apartment; attending a public elementary school; being ignored by their neighbors once Hitler came to power; her father being a salesman in the south of Germany, representing several companies, and his dismissal when Hitler came to power; leaving their apartment and selling their belongings; getting visas for Chile; her sister getting married and going to Chile early; boarding a ship in Bremen, Germany; the pain of leaving their large extended family; not being able to leave from Bremen and returning to Berlin; her sister sending them tickets to sail from Italy; arriving in Valparaiso, Chile; her father manufacturing ties and selling those to different stores; her work taking care of children as a nurse-maid; becoming a nurse; and only one of her cousins surviving the concentration camps.

Oral history interview with Jack Miller

Oral History

Jack Miller (né Muller), born in 1928 in Slovakia, discusses his family, which owned forests, lots, and a medical clinic; speaking Czech, Hungarian, and German at home; his mother’s birth in New York; 20 people hiding for nine months in a bunker that the family had built; the family being revealed; the Germans taking the eldest to the gas chambers; how after the Slovakian revolution, the man who was in charge, a priest named Dr. Josef Tisson, was paid by the Nazis to turn in Jews; his blond brother being sent to relatives in Roznava; his family being transported to Ravensbrück in cattle cars; deaths by Zyklon B; being in the camp for 13 months; being liberated by the Canadians from Ludwigslust concentration camp ; speaking English with the liberators; pretending to be dead in order to go to the hospital; riding his bicycle after a few days after liberation and wearing a Nazi uniform to stay warm; hearing a story of a German widower being sexually assaulted by Russian soldiers; returning to his town and learning that his mother survived; working for the Gillett Company in Boston, MA; his company paying for his psychological treatment after the war; and retiring in Chile.

Oral history interview with Ruth Nathan

Oral History

Ruth Nathan, born in Frankfurt, Germany on February 17, 1922, describes living with her parents and two brothers (one older and one younger); living in an apartment together with her grandmother until 1932, when they moved more to the center of the city; attending a Jewish school; her father’s men’s clothing store; how at the end of the 1920s times were harder; her experiences as a child and realizing how things were changing after 1933; her parents having to close the store but continuing to work at home; her aunt and uncle leaving for England in 1934 because of the social conditions in Germany; examples of antisemitism and the fear in her family; finishing school in 1936; the Jewish organizations that provided education for those preparing to immigrate to Israel; working in a kindergarten in a synagogue; Kristallnacht and her father agreeing to leave the country; waiting a year for visas; her father and brother being taken by the Gestapo but sent home soon after; how many of the children she took care of were sent on Kindertransports; she and her brother sneaking out at night to greet the men who returning from Buchenwald; her family leaving Frankfurt on November 29, 1939; and the items they took with them including a painting.

Oral history interview with Tina Pardo

Oral History

Tina Pardo Roesti, born in Monastir (Bitola), Macedonia in 1937, describes her childhood and being an only child; her parents, Leon and Esperanza; living in the Christian neighborhood, where the better off people lived, and was separated from the Jewish neighborhood by the Dragor River; her grandparents living in the Jewish section of town and visiting them often; being sent to a preschool ran by French nuns at age four; her father’s textile store; life changing once the war began; her father’s strategy to avoid losing their home because they were Jewish; her family preparing to leave their home and sending their belongings into a ship called Apatria (possibly the Patria, which sank in 1940); not making it to the ship in time; being ordered to move to the Jewish section of town; her father warning other Jews to leave as her family left town; going to Ohrid, Macedonia; her family being saved by partisans and taken to Albania; being shot at by Germans as they escaped with the partisans; adopting new identities and getting false papers; passing as Christian refugees from Italy; arriving in Podradetz (Pogradec), Albania and their encounters with Italian authorities; some of her relatives failing the interrogation and being sent back to Monastir; arriving in Tirana, Albania; and staying in the best hotel; receiving help from one of her family’s Albanese clients; renting a home from the Stermasi family who knew they were Jews; the effects of the war on her mother and aunt; the Royal Air Force bombing Tirana by mistake; attending school; finding new living quarters; deciding to leave Tirana because they believed they were under surveillance by the Germans; going to the mountains in Brar, Albania, where they stayed for two months; her mother hurting her back and the family returning to Tirana; her father’s help to the partisans; her father searching for relatives in Monastir; her family going to Bari, Italy; going to Rome, Italy then Milan; surviving economically because they had sewn gold coins into their vestments; staying in Italy for four years; her family’s immigration to Chile; going to Uruguay; and acclimating to a new country, which her parents were never able to do.

Oral history interview with Margot Pels

Oral History

Margot Pels, born in Berlin, Germany in 1931, describes her mother, who was very religious but not Orthodox; her father; leaving Germany when she was 7 years old and only remembering the daily routines of life in Germany; going to Chile in 1939 because her father wanted to escape the antisemitism; how they waited for visas in Austria; attending school in Chile; how her husband, Manfred, survived Auschwitz; and how her husband never told his story to his children.

Oral history interview with José Peteri

Oral History

José Peteri, born in Budapest, Hungary on March 31, 1942, describes his biological father, Joseph Zinger, who died as a Hungarian soldier on the Russian front; living with his mother in various homes because their apartment had been bombed; being taken with his mother and aunt during a roundup and being separated from his mother; how his mother escaped with the help of a man on the street; how his mother found him in a ghetto; how his mother’s cousin, who was in the resistance and wore an SS uniform, got her false papers; how a significant number of his family did not survive; not fitting in with the communist regime in Hungary; how his mother married Gaspar Schlesinger in 1946; escaping Hungary in 1957; going to Vienna, Austria; being helped by a police officer in Vienna; immigrating to Chile; going to Argentina when he was 19 years old and returning to Chile; and his life in Chile.

Oral history interview with Marita Pietsch Beck

Oral History

Marita Pietsch Beck, born in Budapest, Hungary on January 9, 1936, describes her family; how her mother converted to Catholicism; being raised Catholic and not knowing she was Jewish until 1944; the German occupation of Hungary; her mother explaining to her the concept of war; how gentiles could not work for Jews and thus losing her governess; being relatively unaware of the war before 1944; the death of her father when she was two years old; her Jewish stepfather; her education; bombings in Budapest in 1944; her antisemitic paternal grandparents; going to live with a paternal uncle on a farm in Hungary near the Soviet border; going back to live with her mother; the deportations to Auschwitz; how her stepfather hid with a gentile family; how on January 12, 1945 Hungarian Nazis checked the documents of all the tenants in her building and accused her of being a Jew; how she was saved from execution by a bombing and a woman who hid her; and how her grandfather survived the war.

Oral history interview with Eva Rogazinsky Sommer

Oral History

Eva Rogazinsky Sommer, born in Magdeburg, Germany (Saxony) on January 23, 1928, describes being an only child; her family living in a three story building on a main street; attending a public school near her home until she turned 10 years old; after Kristallnacht being expelled from school at age of 11 because she was Jewish; her father being sent to Buchenwald; antisemitism; being the only Jewish student in her class; the burning of the synagogue during Kristallnacht; her grandfather’s men’s underwear factory; the fate of her extended family; her mother purchasing tickets to Shanghai, China; her father being released from Buchenwald after a few weeks; her father’s service during WWI; arriving in Shanghai; encountering the exiled Russian Jews who had fled Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution; the vestments of the refugees; receiving help from the Russian Jews; the camps built for refugees; the conditions, including the food and bathroom facilities; not being able to afford school; Sir Horace Kadoorie setting up a school for refugee children; attending his school for two and a half years; having to work to bring in money; her father working odd jobs and her mother cleaning homes; working when she was 15 years old at a Chinese office that had a Jewish partner from Wroclaw, Poland; learning Chinese; learning English in the Kadoorie School; losing her job after the Japanese closed every business where people of English citizenship worked; buying a used book and teaching herself shorthand; ghettoization; the difficulty of getting permits to exist the ghetto; the lack of food; how the youth interacted among themselves but the adults were very isolated; her neighbors from India and Lahore, Pakistan and taking care of their children; the American Army arriving from Burma and working for them as an interpreter; the good-natured antics of American Marines; assisting in the war crime trials after the war by taking shorthand notes; working in a steamship company; leaving Shanghai and going to San Francisco, CA for two months; her family getting a parcel of land in Chile; experiencing an earthquake; arriving in Chile in 1947; working as a secretary then becoming in charge of exportation; taking an apartment independently; trying to integrate with other Jewish refugees but being viewed as suspect because she had been in Shanghai; her experience with the Zionist movement; meeting her Italian husband and marrying in 1955; working as a tri-lingual secretary in the UN until her marriage; her two children; and her message to never lose hope and work hard.

Oral history interview with Marianne Rosenbaum

Oral History

Marianne Rosenbaum, born in Stettin, Germany (Szczecin, Poland), describes her family, who were not very religious; celebrating Chanukah and Passover; her brother, Gerardo; her attorney father; how her parents had a group of friends who met in the tennis club, where only Jews were members; her father participating in a regatta club; being 6 or 7 years old when the war began; attending a public school for a very short time, before she was expelled for being Jewish; being sent for a short time to a Jewish school from which she doesn’t have any memories; being aware of the war after Kristallnacht when the Jewish men were sent to a concentration camp; her father avoiding the deportation and going to Berlin, Germany; her mother begging her father to leave Germany but he was recalcitrant because of his profession; her mother separating from her father; being sent to live with her maternal grandmother near Koln (Cologne, Germany) and her brother, Gerardo, at the age of 10, being sent on a Kindertransport to England; the fates of her paternal family members; crossing the border to Belgium by walking holding the mother’s hand and guided by a man; arriving in Andorra, Spain, where her mother’s boyfriend (later her husband) was waiting for them; attending school in Belgium, studying in Flemish; her mother’s attempts to get visas; going to Genoa, Italy and boarding the Horacio to Chile and arriving in 1939; receiving help from the Joint; her father going to Chile years later, working in the restitution from Germany to victims of the war; marrying a man who had been in the same ship as her; being thankful to all the Jewish organizations that helped her; and how all 10 of her grandchildren converted to Judaism.

Oral history interview with Hugo Rothfeld

Oral History

Hugo Rothfeld, born on June 11, 1918 in Borautz, Rumania, describes his parents, Jacobo Rothfeld and Cecilia Marcus; his three siblings and being the second of the children; his family moving in 1939 to Chernivtsi, Ukraine, where one of his uncles lived; his family all immigrating to Chile in 1939; the large Jewish population in Chernivtsi; having a rich Jewish life; speaking German more than Rumanian; the Jewish council; attending a Yiddish school and the Orthodox Lyceum; never experiencing antisemitism; his father’s decision for the family to emigrate; going through Hamburg, Germany to take a ship to Panama; traveling on the Cordillera; continuing to Valparaiso, Chile on the Santa Barbara; life in Chile; participating in sports and their Jewish life; participating at the YMCA; and becoming a Mason in 1949.

Oral history interview with Katalin Sahn

Oral History

Katalin Sahn, born December 25, 1939 in Hungary, describes her family; being relocated by her mother in March of 1944 to a farm in southern Hungary while her sister went to the north; her mother visiting her then retrieving her sister and her once the Russians arrived; her father being taken to a forced labor camp and his death; the fates of other family members; sharing a residence with another family while the communists were in power; the antisemitism when the war started; her sister’s immigration to Israel then Chile; and her family after the war.

Oral history interview with Salomón Sarfatis

Oral History

Salomón Sarfatis, born November 6, 1944 in Kastoria, Greece, describes his family; the absence of anti-Semitism before the war; his father joining the partisans in 1942 and moving to Florina, Greece; the marriage of his parents in September 1942; the deportations of his relatives to concentration camps; his memories of the beginning of the civil war; the immigration of his family to Chile in 1951; the emigration of his extended family from Greece; and his life after the war.

Oral history interview with Grete Schmitz

Oral History

Grete Schmitz, born September 25, 1921 in Bonn, Germany, describes her family; studying humanities; her memories of the beginning of Nazism; moving to Essen, Germany; her experience trying to get visas so her family and she could emigrate; the journey out of Germany and arriving in Valparaiso, Chile November 13, 1939; working in Chile; her marriage to a Hungarian refugee; her life in Chile; and the fate of her extended family.

Oral history interview with Ilse Schnell

Oral History

Ilse Schnell, born June 1, 1909 in Stargard, Germany (present day Stargard Szczeciński, Poland), describes her childhood; moving to Stettin, Germany (present day Szczecin, Poland) at age 18 to study ballet, singing, and piano; her marriage in 1929; the rise of Hitler; her husband being sent to a concentration camp; getting her husband freed; immigrating to Chile; her family emigrating from Germany; and her life in Chile.

Oral history interview with Verónica Schwarz

Oral History

Verónica Schwarz, born August 31, 1929 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her family; the absence of antisemitism before the war; her childhood; her father’s participation in the occupation of Prague, Czech Republic and his decision afterwards to get his family out of Hungary; leaving for Chile via Italy in 1939; the fate of her extended family in Hungary; her life in Chile, including her education, getting married, divorced, and remarried; and her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Oral history interview with Gunter Seelmann

Oral History

Gunter Seelmann, born in 1931 in Aachen, Germany, describes his family; attending a Jewish school for a year; moving with his family to Holland in 1939 after Kristallnacht; his memories of the beginning of Nazi-Germany; his father being taken to Buchenwald concentration camp and his return; his parents’ friendship with the family of Anne Frank and a letter they received from the Frank family; unsuccessfully trying to get visas to the United States; getting visas to Chile and arriving in Valparaiso, Chile December 3, 1939; the worry they felt for relatives in Europe; going to Concepción, Chile; his education; his extended family; his wife; his life in Chile after the war; and his experience returning to Germany years after the war.

Oral history interview with Ury Sharony

Oral History

Ury Sharony describes growing up in Chernovtsy, Romania (present day Chernivtsi, Ukraine); his family; Jewish life in his town; his experiences with the antisemitic laws; his father’s decision to have the family emigrate and the difficulties of obtaining visas; the journey to Santiago, Chile; acclimating to life in Chile; meeting his future wife; and his children.

Oral history interview with Elfriede Simon

Oral History

Elfriede Simon, born in 1929 in Berlin, Germany, describes her father; her memories of her father being sent to Buchenwald in 1938; her mother’s efforts to get visas out of Germany; the journey to Chile with her parents; her father’s occupations in Chile; the birth of her brother; her marriage; receiving reparations from Germany; and her family in Israel.

Oral history interview with Ludwick Simonsohn

Oral History

Luis Simonsohn, born in Magdeburg, Germany on November 29, 1925, describes his family’s factory of ready-made clothes, which was started by his great grandfather, Benno Basch; his family’s financial situation changing in 1929 during the Great Depression and the family’s factory having to be closed; having to share an apartment with his maternal grandparents in 1934; attending a public school; his younger brother, Werner, being sent to a Catholic school to be protected after the advent of Nazism; not being allowed to attend gymnasium because he was Jewish; attending a school that was not conducive to a university career for three years; his father attempting to get visas for he and his brother to England in 1939; having his Bar Mitzvah; witnessing Kristallnacht and the destruction in the city, including his parents’ store; his mother taking he and his brother to England separately; being matriculated in a school in Kent, near Canterbury, and staying there nine months; he and his brother attending a boarding school for children of middle class families owned by Seagram, near Hastings, where they stayed for a year; having normal correspondence with their parents until the war began in earnest; being transferred to a school in Brighton and living in private homes (no longer being subsidized by the Liberal Synagogue but by the government); being evacuated with the other students and transferred 40 km outside London; delivering newspapers to make pocket money; being sent at the age of 14 to work in a farm in the north, isolated from everyone; staying in England until 1944; his parents going to Chile in July 1939 after being turned away from Cuba and interned in Panama; and going to Chile with Werner in November 1944.

Oral history interview with Werner Simonsohn

Oral History

Werner Simonsohn, born May 21, 1927 in Magdeburg, Germany, describes his family; how the Jewish laws in 1933 and 1937 affected him; his mother being interviewed by the Gestapo; his father being taken to a concentration camp in 1938 and his return; immigrating to England with his parents in 1939; how at age 14 he went to an assigned family in Cuba where he studied agriculture; reuniting with his parents in Chile; his studies and work in Chile; and his marriage and children.

Oral history interview with Gil Sinay

Oral History

Gil Sinay, born Jul 26, 1910 in Rosario, Argentina, describes moving to Chile at age four; his Lithuanian parents; becoming a lawyer; being the president of the Israelites Youth in the late 1930s; helping refugees from Europe with several organizations, including the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; and Chile’s reluctance to enter into the war.

Oral history interview with Fred Spiegel

Oral History

Fred Spiegel, born in 1932 in Dinslaken, Germany, describes his father’s death in 1933; antisemitism in his town; going to Jewish school; his memories of Kristallnacht; being sent to Holland in the Netherlands to live with relatives; his mother’s immigration to England; going into hiding when Holland was invaded in 1940; being taken to Westerbork in 1943; being transferred to Vught; his memories of the transports East; and being liberated by the Americans when he was 13 years old.

Oral history interview with Jorge Stark

Oral History

Jorge Stark, born October 24, 1933 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his family; his memories of finding out about the invasion of Poland in 1939; his father being sent to a labor camp in 1942; his memories of the German occupation in 1944; his mother and sister being taken away; getting a visa to Sweden; reuniting with his brother and mother in Sweden; the arrival of the Russians; the return of his father, who had been in a Russian camp; going with a Zionist group in 1949 to Palestine; immigrating to Chile with his family in 1951; his marriages and children; and writing a book about his life.

Oral history interview with Hanns Stein

Oral History

Hanns Stein, born in Prague, Czech Republic on November 17, 1926, describes living in a small town called Nýrsko in the western border between Czechoslovakia and Bavaria; how German was spoken more than Czech in Nýrsko; his family attending synagogue on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur; taking Judaism classes in school; his father’s shirtwaist factory; attending a German school then a Czech school; attending the gymnasium that in Klatovy, Czech Republic; joining the Maccabi Hatzair; the Sudeten crisis in 1938; his fathering being mobilized as a reserves officer in the Czech Army; his family staying in Klatovy; the German occupation; his family’s desire to leave the country; getting visas for Chile; going to Prague to say goodbye to relatives; his father and uncle sending all the machinery for their factory to Chile; crossing Germany and being stopped at the border with Holland and being sent back into Germany; being harassed by Nazi youth; being treated kindly by some German SS officers; being detained at the border train station; getting visas for England, where they stayed for a year; the committee for Czech refugees in England; living in city near Liverpool in a large house where 7 families resided; the beginning of the war; the fate of his extended family and the survival of only his aunt and cousin, who later went to Israel; being invited by the Institute of Cultural Relations between Chile and Germany to give a concert of Schumann’s lieder with lyrics by Heine and refusing at first before his cousin convinced him to accept; his family arriving in Chile; joining the youth movement Hashomer Hatzair; playing soccer in England and wanting to introduce it to Chile, where it was already a popular sport; his schooling; deciding to work instead of completing his education; being employed as a cutter in his father’s factory; organizing a strike in the factory and being fired by his father; taking singing lessons; getting married; applying for a music scholarship in the Musical Conservatory in Prague and attending for two years; becoming a music professor in Chile in 1969; being fired in 1973 for having joined the Communist party; his feelings that Nazism and the Military Junta in Chile were not that different; going to Berlin, Germany, where he was offered a position at the highly esteemed Superior Academy of Music; being in Berlin for seven years; his children; resigning from the Communist party an returning to Chile; giving a concert at the Goethe Institut; the return of democracy to Chile; and the importance of art, especially while maintaining human dignity.

Oral history interview with Manfred Stein

Oral History

Manfred Stein, born February 12, 1932 in the Bukovina region of Romania, describes being in the Storojinet ghetto and being liberated by the Russian Army; receiving help from the Joint to get to Bolivia with his mother; the journey out of Europe and seeing the destruction of the war; getting falsified passports; the death of his mother in 1950; his life in Chile; and his children.

Oral history interview with Klara Sternbach

Oral History

Klara Sternbach, born October 31, 1924 in Mukačevo, Czechoslovakia (present day Mukacheve, Ukraine), describes her family and their religious practices; moving to a Jewish ghetto; being sent to Auschwitz; her memories of working in an arms factory; going to Prague, Czech Republic after being liberated; getting married; immigrating to Chile; her life in Chile; and her children and grandchildren.

Oral history interview with Rubén Szadman

Oral History

Rubén Szadman, born January 1, 1926 in Szydłowiec, Poland, describes his town; his family; being taken to a work camp; working for three years in an ammunitions factory; being sent to Birkenau in 1943 then transferred to Auschwitz; going to work in a factory; marching to Buchenwald in 1944; being liberated by the United States Army April 11, 1945; being helped by the Joint; living in a castle with a group outside of Paris, France; completing school; immigrating to Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1947; getting married; going to Chile for work and staying; his children and grandchildren; and his reluctance to tell his story to his family.

Oral history interview with Juan Szirtes

Oral History

Juan Szirtes, born July 19, 1938 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his family; being told he was Catholic until after the war when he found out his family was actually Jewish; hiding in a secret room in an apartment from 1944 to 1945 with his parents; his memories of the bombings during the war; being liberated by the Russian Army; emigrating from Hungary; going to Chile in 1952; his father’s factory in Chile; studying at Alliance française; and his life now.

Oral history interview with Georges Tempel

Oral History

Georges Tempel, born in July 1938 in Paris, France, describes his Hungarian parents and their movements through southern France during the war; how he was hidden with Maria Holop (a protestant) and her family; how his parents were taken to Auschwitz; going to live with his aunt and uncle in Toulouse, France after the war; his memories of May 8, 1945; returning to his parents’ apartment in Paris; becoming a chemical engineer and working in Europe and South America; and visiting with Maria Holop in 2006 when she was recognized as “Righteous among the Nations”.

Oral history interview with Paulina Tider

Oral History

Paulina Tider, born January 17, 1923 in Zaborów, Poland, describes her parents; going to the Jewish ghetto in Brzesko, Poland; pretending to be an Aryan and going to work in Germany as a domestic employee; immigrating to Chile, where she had family; meeting her husband; and writing a book about her life.

Oral history interview with Carolina van Rhijn

Oral History

Carolina van Rhijn, born in 1926 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, describes the absence of antisemitism when she was growing up; her memories of the German invasion in 1940; the conditions during the German occupation; being ordered to go to a work camp in July 1942; her escape from Amsterdam with five other people and hiding throughout Belgium from 1942 to 1945; living with a woman and her son for a few months; going to Verviers, Belgium where they had false documents and lived in the attic of a family’s home; her memories of being found by German soldiers in the attic, but not being detained; hiding in Pepinster, Belgium for a year; listening illegally to the BBC on the radio; being liberated by the American troops; being caught in a combat area during a German counter-offensive in Verviers, Belgium; the fate of her parents in Auschwitz; and her life after the war.

Oral history interview with Etienne Verlet

Oral History

Etienne Verlet (né Sammi Tennenbaum), born in 1938, describes being born to a family from Kishineff, Romania (present day Chișinău, Moldova) that moved to Paris, France in the 1930s; how he was put in the home of María Edwards in 1940; how his sister and mother were detained in 1942; his memories of playing as a child; being adopted by a family and his memories of the family; meeting his biological sister again at age seven; his antisemitic adopted father; getting in contact with the family of María Edward; and his religious views.

Oral history interview with Tibor Veszpremi

Oral History

Tibor Veszpremi, born December 17, 1923 in Tata, Hungary, describes his family; the death of his father; his mother remarrying when he was seven years old; his studies in several different schools; the absence of antisemitism in his town; the religious observations of his family; and his family’s health history.

Oral history interview with Ana María Wahrenberg

Oral History

Ana María Wahrenberg, born January 6, 1930 in Berlin, Germany, describes her parents and their religious practices; attending Jewish school; her memories of Kristallnacht and the detainment of her father; conditions during this time; the return of her father; the loss of her father’s business and their home; obtaining visas to Haiti; the voyage to the Panama Canal and getting visas to Chile; life in Chile; moving back to Germany for 13 years; and returning to Chile.

Oral history interview with Hannerose Weiss

Oral History

Hannerose Weiss (née De Keller), born in Breslau, Germany (Wroclaw, Poland) on December 12, 1929, describes how her father died when she was two years old; attending a kindergarten and a Jewish school; her mother’s slight depression; how her family’s friends were all Jewish but she had some non-Jewish school friends; how one of her non-Jewish friends stayed with them after Kristallnacht even though it was not allowed; her uncle’s plan to immigrate to Bolivia; having to sell things that they could not take with them; her mother’s marriage in May 1939; intending to leave for Cuba, but remaining in Antwerp, Belgium for 10 days after a fire started on their ship; seeing her grandfather in Antwerp; not being able to go to Cuba; how her maternal grandmother had relatives who helped family members leave Germany and paid for the passage of she and her mother from Genoa, Italy to Valparaiso, Chile; the journey to Chile; celebrating her 10th birthday in Chile; her life in Chile; and her message to young people.

Oral history interview with Ewald Wetzstein

Oral History

Ewald Wetzstein, born November 14, 1922 in Treis (Treis-Karden), Germany, describes his home town and how there were 10 Jewish families; his family; living 30 meters from their synagogue; attending school and learning Hebrew; going to school in Frankfurt, Germany to learn a profession; preparing to emigrate in 1937 when he was 15 years old; being beaten once by other boys; seeing the synagogue burn during Kristallnacht; hiding in the home of a non-Jewish friend; the deportation of his father and uncle to Buchenwald and their return five weeks later; getting visas for Chile; bribing a bureaucrat to change the list of items they could bring; journeying on a cargo ship to Chile; learning mechanics; visiting Germany recently ; his life and family in Chile; donating a torah from Germany to his synagogue; and his advice to younger generations.

Oral history interview with Gerda Wolff

Oral History

Gerda Wolff, born December 26, 1919 in Breslau, Germany (present day Wroclaw, Poland), describes her family; her experiences at school; her parents’ stores; her memories of Kristallnacht and the detainment of her father; getting a passport; obtaining visas for Uruguay as a tourist; her marriage before she left; leaving for South America and her memories of the numerous false visas possessed by fellow passengers; getting visas to Chile; arriving in Valparaiso, Chile; her life in Chile; not hearing from her parents after the war began; and her children.

Oral history interview with Walter Wolff

Oral History

Walter Wolff, born October 22, 1913 in Poland, describes moving to a small city in Germany with his parents; his schooling and being denied university education; working at his parents’ store; training as a mechanic; the increase in the persecution of Jews; his memories of Kristallnacht; his memories of being marched to Buchenwald with his father; conditions in the concentration camp; receiving temporary leave; going to Amsterdam, the Netherlands with his family and their life there; getting a visa to Chile and his parents’ decision not to leave; the fate of his parents; his life in Chile; and his current religious views.

Oral history interview with Wolf Yudelevicz

Oral History

Wolf Yudelevicz (née Benjamin Yudelevicz), born in 1927 in Baranów, Poland, describes his family and childhood; his Bar Mitzvah; his memories of going to Vilnius, Lithuania to continue his studies at a yeshiva and being shot at by a soldier; going to Kaunas, Lithuania to study at a yeshiva for a year; his memories of encounters with Russian troops; living in a ghetto (Slobodka); being sent to Dachau; life in the concentration camp and treatment of the Russian prisoners; his life after the war, living in Kaunas and Italy; immigrating to Chile; and his lack of knowledge concerning the fate of his family.

Oral history interview with Martín Zanberk

Oral History

Martin Zanberg (né Zanberk), born in Berlin, Germany on October 31, 1924, describes his Polish father and Hungarian mother; moving to downtown Berlin into a Jewish neighborhood after some violent street events in 1932; being heckled and beaten by Hitler youth; going to Chile alone in 1938 and living with his uncle; his journey on a Norwegian cargo ship; how his father was sent to a concentration camp and was released; his parents’ arrival in Chile at the beginning of 1940; Kristallnacht; getting reparations from Germany years later; and his life in Chile.

Learn About The Holocaust

My Saved Research

Oral history interview with Alice Himmel

Overview

Physical Details

Rights & Restrictions

Keywords & Subjects

Administrative Notes

Additional Resources

Download & Licensing

In-Person Research

Contact Us

Also in Voces de la Shoá oral history collection

Learn About the Holocaust

Further Your Research

About the Museum's Collections

Plan a Research Visit

Ask a Research Question