Holocaust Oral History Archive
Featuring over 900 interviews, the Holocaust Oral History Archive is among the first and largest collections of Holocaust testimony in the United States.
The Holocaust Oral History Archive of Gratz College is one of the earliest collections of Holocaust testimony in the United States and has grown to be one of the largest.
Professors Nora Levin and Josey Fisher established the archive in 1979, out of a commitment to document unique accounts of Holocaust experience in the Philadelphia area. At the time, individual narratives were not yet recognized by established historians as integral to Holocaust documentation. With no funding and no established model, the Holocaust Oral History Archive project began.
The interviews cover a broad range of experiences including passing as Christian, resisting the Nazis within the Vilna ghetto, surviving the war in Shanghai with their families and in England as part of the Kindertransport.
Since its founding, archive volunteers have expanded its collecting and outreach, including at the 1985 American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors held in Philadelphia. The Archive recruited hundreds of local additional volunteers who were dispatched to the meeting. Organizers used curtains to provide private interview space within the main hall, and copies of these audiotapes were later sent to the interviewees. It became clear that some had not yet told details of their experience to their families and these tapes provided a transition to more open communication. Two additional gatherings in 1991 and 1998, dubbed “Rickshaw Reunions”, were held in local hotels. Individuals who had found safety in Shanghai were interviewed in their rooms, sitting on beds and desk chairs, taking time from eager reunions with other “Shanghailanders”.
More recently, a group of dedicated volunteers have been working to transcribe and summarize interviews to prepare them for online publication and dissemination. In 2025, the Holocaust Oral History Archive became one of the inaugural collections of the Grayzel Digital Platform. Click here for more on the history of this archive.
Primary Resources
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Suzanne Gross
Suzanne Gross, nee Sarah Pertofsky, was born in Paris, France in 1931. Her parents were born in Belz (Russia) and emigrated to France around 1924. They had a beauty parlor in Paris which was closed by the Germans after the invasion of Paris. At that time Jews were rounded up systematically and families were forcibly separated. Non-native born Jews were rounded up before Jews who were considered French.
As a child, especially after she started school, Suzanne was made to feel she was not really French. Suzanne talks in detail about her experience when she had to wear her Yellow Star to school.
Her father went underground, worked at first on a farm, then joined the Jewish French partisans. He later worked in a steel factory because the French partisans did not want Jews. Her mother was hidden by neighbors for three months.
Sarah was sent to a farm in Normandy with 5 or 6 other children by the French Jewish Scouts (Eclaireurs Israelites de France) who had an underground network to hide Jewish children. She worked on various farms under harsh conditions. She was a hidden child in a convent school where she had to pretend she was Catholic.
She was reunited with her parents in Paris, who lived clandestinely on and off in their boarded up shop. The family received money from a resistance movement in the steel factory where her father worked. The concierge helped by selling items knitted by her mother. During this time Suzanne and her sister often warned Jews when a police round-up started. Many Jews were imprisoned at Drancy. She describes how families searched for arrested relatives from afar.
She gives a detailed account of her emotional responses to the childhood trauma she experienced and to surviving the Holocaust. The family emigrated to the USA in 1946.
Interviewee: GROSS, Suzanne Date: August 9, 1983
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Hans Hartenstein
Hans Hartenstein was born January 27, 1923 into a Jewish family in Vienna. He describes his father, owner of a printing business, as a decorated Austrian veteran of World War I who knew of the persecution of Jews in Germany but believed that he would not be affected by Nazi oppression. After the Anschluss, his father was arrested on April 13, 1938 and was detained in Dachau and Buchenwald for 13 months. When Hans was forced to leave his Gymnasium, he joined Hashomer Hatzair as an avid Zionist, preparing for emigration to Palestine in a hakhsharah camp near Vienna. He describes illegal shortwave broadcasts and crowded living conditions after his father’s business and the family apartment were confiscated. Unable to obtain a Palestinian emigration certificate, he left for England with help from the British Society of Friends in August 1939. His father had emigrated to England following his release from concentration camp in May 1939, also with help from British Quakers. Hans describes refugee life in England and their concern about his mother’s safety in Vienna. She emigrated to the U.S. in January 1940; Hans and his father joined her within that year. Brief mention is made of a cousin who survived in hiding with aid from a Dutch farmer.
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Sarah Elias
Sarah Elias, nee Perl, was born in 1921 in Czechoslovakia, in what is now VelkýBočkov, Ukraine. Her father, as well as the rest of the family, was very involved in the synagogue. Her father worked in a woodworking factory and her mother and the children tended the farm and animals. There were nine children in the family. Sarah went to a Czech school. She lovingly describes the traditional Jewish observances of the family. Sarah completed high school in 1939, just around the time that their area of Czechoslovakia was annexed by Hungary. She and a group of friends then went to Budapest where she got a job working in a Jewish sanatorium for three years. When the Germans took over the facility, she went to work in a Jewish hospital. Sarah tells how, eventually, she was taken by the Germans for hard labor. In the summer of 1944, Sarah and her sister were on a forced march to Germany from which they escaped. They were helped by two strangers andthen returned to Budapest. Through a friend they were able to obtain Hungarian birth certificates and Sarah relates how they were tutored by friends, including a priest, on how to behave like Christian girls and on what they needed to know to pass as Christians. They went to a farm in the countryside but in a short time they were informed upon and were taken into custody. Sarah describes how they convinced the authorities that they were not Jewish.
When the war ended in 1945, Sarah went back to working in a hospital, where she contracted typhus and was very ill. When she recovered, she and her sister returned to their home to find her father and one brother who had survived1. Although Gentiles had moved into their home, they left when the survivors returned. Sarahmet and married Victor Elias and had a child. Sarah relates that when the Communists took over Czechoslovakia, people would disappear. Although they were doing well financially, they decided to leave for Israel where they had two more children. Sarah describes the difficult conditions in Israel, but was able to get a nice place to live and she says that they were happy there. However her husband then developed kidney disease and they came to the United States, to Philadelphia. She eventually got a job in nursing and her husband, who was not well, opened a bakery.
This interview ends rather abruptly at that point.
See also the interview with herhusbandVictorElias.
Sarah’s brother, Josef Perl survived Plaszow, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Gross-Rosen, Bolkenhain (a subcamp of Gross-Rosen), Hirschberg and Buchenwald. His testimony can be found at the websitehttp://www.josefperl.com/josefs-story/. There is also an interesting article about him here http://45aid.org/064/.