Overview
- Interview Summary
- Zev Harel (né Sarkas Herskovits), born in 1930 in Kis-Sikarlo, Transylvania, Hungary (possibly present day Cicârlău, Romania), describes how his grandfather was his hero; moving with his family to a nearby city when he was 10 years old; restrictions that were placed on Jews; spending the following four years working at forced manual labor; being sent with his family to a ghetto in 1944 and then to Auschwitz; remembering the stench of burning bodies; surviving the selection process by lying about his age; being sent to Mauthausen after a few days and then Ebensee; working in a quarry and also building an underground factory for military equipment; his daily routine in the camp and getting through each day; the liberation of Ebensee by American soldiers on May 5, 1945; suffering from Typhoid and collapsing in a ditch, but being picked up by an African-American soldier who drove him to a hospital in Linz, Austria; returning home and reuniting with his brother; going to a displaced persons camp in Germany; joining the Palestine Jewish Brigade and moving to Israel; fighting in the Israeli War of Independence; finishing his studies in Israel and the United States; getting married; earning his doctorate; and settling in Cleveland, OH.
- Interviewee
- Zev Harel
- Date
-
interview:
2005 April 12
- Credit Line
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Congregation Shaarey Tikvah, Beachwood, Ohio www.shaareytikvah.org
Physical Details
- Language
- English
- Extent
-
1 DVD : MPEG-4.
Rights & Restrictions
- Conditions on Access
- There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
- Conditions on Use
- Restrictions on use. Restrictions may exist. Contact the Museum for further information: reference@ushmm.org
Keywords & Subjects
- Topical Term
- Concentration camp inmates--Medical care--Austria. Concentration camp inmates--Selection process--Poland. Forced labor--Austria--Ebensee. Forced labor--Romania--Cicîrlău. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Romania--Personal narratives. Holocaust survivors--United States. Israel-Arab War, 1948-1949. Jewish children in the Holocaust--Romania. Jews--Legal status, laws, etc.--Hungary. Jews--Romania--Cicîrlău. Refugee camps--Germany. Refugees--Medical care--Austria--Linz. Typhoid fever. World War, 1939-1945--Concentration camps--Liberation. World War, 1939-1945--Conscript labor--Romania. Men--Personal narratives.
- Geographic Name
- Cicârlău (Romania) Cleveland (Ohio) Ebensee (Austria) Hungary. Linz (Austria) Transylvania (Romania)
- Personal Name
- Harel, Zev, 1930-
Administrative Notes
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- The interview was acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2014 from Louise K. Freilich, on behalf of Congregation Shaarey Tikvah, Beachwood, Ohio.
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 09:31:49
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn78755
Additional Resources
Supplementary Materials (2)
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Also in Remember The Children: Hadasah Zehman Video Collection of Face to Face Presentations
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Date: 2005-2007
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Oral history interview with Esther Frank
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Oral history interview with Roman Frayman
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Oral history interview with Arnold Friedman
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Oral history interview with Betty Gold
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Oral history interview with Harold Koppel
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Oral history interview with George Kronenberg
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Oral history interview with Sylvia Malcmacher
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Oral history interview with Hal Myers
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Oral history interview with Mimi Ormond
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Oral history interview with Helen Potash
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Oral history interview with Sarah Radzeli
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Sarah Schneider Radzeli, born in Czechoslovakia, describes being 10 years old when Germany occupied her hometown; moving with her family to her grandfather’s home, which was in unoccupied Czechoslovakia; how Hungarian forces occupied her grandfather’s town when she was 14 years old; being sent to the ghetto; being deported shortly after to Auschwitz-Birkenau; being selected for work with her sister while her mother was sent to the gas chambers; being stripped naked, shaved, and issued striped uniforms and wooden shoes; living in a children’s block; how her sister was taken to the crematorium because she was too weak to work; seeing inmates commit suicide by touching the electric fence surrounding the camp; joining a transport of Polish prisoners of war going to Czechoslovakia, where she worked at night in an ammunition factory; being liberated by Russian troops on May 15, 1945; deciding to stay in the Czech town to recuperate; going to Prague, Czech Republic a few weeks later; meeting her brother in Budapest, Hungary; traveling to Palestine in 1946 on a ship that was stopped by the British; being taken to a detention camp in Cyprus, where she got married; coming down with Tuberculosis and being sent to the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem; and immigrating to the United States in 1960.
Oral history interview with Hannah Rath
Oral History
Hannah Lenschitzki Rath, born in 1922 and raised in Halberstadt, Germany, describes the large Jewish community in her small town; her family and the death of her father when she was three years old; attending Jewish schools; how things began to change in 1933 with the rise of the Nazi Party; her brother’s immigration to the United States in 1938; how her family moved to Hanover, Germany in 1934; being forced to attend a Jewish school; Kristallnacht; being sent with her family to a ghetto in Riga, Latvia in 1941; how the ghetto prisoners were taken to Kaiserwald in 1943; being forced to shower and have her hair shaved; being separated from her mother; working in a cable factory outside the camp; how beatings were a daily occurrence and she and her friend watched out for one another; how occasionally an SS guard gave them extra bread; being moved by boat to Stutthof and improvising a Yom Kippur service; how in 1945 the Nazi guards deserted their posts; recovering in a Polish hospital; returning to her home town and finding that only 30 Jews of the 1,000 in the town had survived; how the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) helped her go to the United States in 1945; and meeting her future husband during the voyage.
Oral history interview with Judith Shamir
Oral History
Judith Weiss Shamir, born in Hungary, describes how before she was born in 1943 her father was forced to fight in the war; how her father was captured and placed in a prisoner of war camp; how her mother went into hiding with various Christian friends and realized she could not hide with a baby; how a resistance group helped her mother place her in the home of a non-Jewish woman; how Margit Polgar raised her as her own daughter in a village southeast of Budapest, Hungary; how Judith’s mother gave Margit a backpack with a secret compartment that held Judith’s papers concerning her true identity; how her mother and father survived the war and reunited in Oroshaza, Hungary; how they moved to Israel in 1948 and lost touch with Margit; moving to the United States in 1968; how her father located Margit in 1992 and she visited her; and how she now speaks to children groups about her experiences.
Oral history interview with Leo Silberman
Oral History
Leo Silberman, born in Poland in 1925, describes his family; how his father was a salesman; how he was 14 years old when the Nazis invaded; being forced to do physical labor for two years; secretly buying potatoes and bread from local farmers; being sent with his brother in 1941 to Płaszów, where they were forced to use Jewish tombstones to pave the camp streets; being transferred in 1943 to an ammunition factory in Skarzysko, Poland; how the skin of the prisoners had turned green because of exposure to the gun powder; volunteering to be a mechanic; being taken to Buchenwald; being marched to Weimar, Germany, where they cleared rubble; experiencing an air raid and stealing a pot roast when all the guards fled to bomb shelters; being marched with a group of men who were to be shot, falling behind, getting caught by a guard and punched, and being left behind; how he ran back to the barracks and blended in with the non-Jewish prisoners; being transported to Theresienstadt the next day; being liberated on May 10, 1945; deciding not to register with the Russian authorities because he did not want to return to Poland; joining a group being smuggled into Palestine by the Jewish Brigade; being caught by American soldiers and taken to a displaced persons camp in Germany where he met his future wife and attended a trade school; moving to Council Bluffs, IA in 1949; and settling in Cleveland, Ohio in 1951.
Oral history interview with Walter Wertheim
Oral History
Walter Wertheim, born in Mönchengladbach, Germany in 1925, describes his family, which had been in the same area for 300 years; being 13 years old at the time of Kristallnacht; being prevented from attending school; going to Cologne, Germany temporarily and returning home; how his father organized tutoring sessions for him; going to a Jewish high school in Cologne; being sent on a Kindertransport to England in May 1939; being in several foster families; not being able to attend school in England; how his father was able to leave Germany for the United States; going to New York, NY in June 1940; graduating at the age of 16; enlisting in the U.S. Army; becoming a lawyer after the war; and the friends and family he lost in the Holocaust.
Oral history interview with Alex Zelczer
Oral History
Alex Zelczer, born in 1927 in Vásárosnamény, Hungary, describes his parents and nine siblings; helping in the family’s bakery business; how life changed in 1939 when the Hungarian government started to copy the Nazi propaganda campaign; how the flour ration affected the bakery; how in 1943 the police forced his father to open the bakery on the Sabbath; how on the last day of Passover in 1944 one of his father’s non-Jewish customers offered to hide the Zelczer family on his farm, but they decided against it; being sent to the ghetto a few weeks later; being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau; being separated from his family and never seeing his parents again; being moved to Jaworzno, where he was assigned to build a power plant; going to the infirmary in January 1945 because he was too weak to walk; remaining in the camp when the other prisoners were evacuated and sent on a death march; being liberated by the Russians on January 26, 1945; walking home and being nursed back to health by a cousin; reopening the bakery with his four surviving siblings; not feeling comfortable in Vásárosnamény and going to a displaced persons camp in Germany; living in the camp until 1947; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.
