Oral History Interview with Agnes Adachi

Victor Cooper2 was born December 26, 1914 in Strzemieszyce, Poland, the youngest of four brothers. He was married and had a six-month old son when he was drafted into the Polish Army in 1939. His wife, son and all of his family perished during the war years.

Victor describes how he was captured by Germans in 1940and was segregated from non-Jewish POWs at Majdanek death camp in Lublin. He escaped with the help of a fellow Jewish prisoner, and fled back home where he was in Strzemieszyce Ghetto for a short time,subjected to forced labor and witnessed the liquidation of the ghetto and German atrocities. He was then deported to 10 labor and concentration camps, including Będzin, Markstadt, Gross Rosen, Flossenbürgand Buchenwald. He vividly describes his experiences, conditions, backbreaking cement work and digging tunnels and how he fought to stay alive. He details a month-long death march from Buchenwald to Dachau in April 1945, during which he escaped and was recaptured several times.

In May, 1945, he was found hiding in Bavarian woods by a Jewish doctor serving with the American 7th Army. He was taken, disoriented and ill, to a Catholic hospital in Straubing. After his recovery, he worked with an American lawyer, helping to regain possession of Jewish property in the area. In June 1949, he emigrated to the United States under the displaced persons quota. He held many jobs with the United Service for Young and New Americans and several trade unions. He remarried and fathered two children. His daughter became a lawyer and his son is a professor at Columbia University.

Former last name was Kupfer.

This was recorded at the 1985 American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia, Pa.

Diane Weinstock, nee Gottlieb, was born in Radom Poland in 1923 into a modern religious family. Her mother was a member of WIZO and Diane attended Zionist youth activities. She describes pre-war antisemitism, the German Occupation, the establishment of the Radom Ghetto in 1941 and her family’s living conditions there until 1942. She also details clandestine education and religious observances that happened in the ghetto.

She and her mother were able to obtain false papers and hide posing as non-Jews in Warsaw from November 1943 until October 1944. Diane describes how after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising she, her mother and several others hid out in a bunker in the demolished Warsaw Ghetto until January 1945. She gives a detailed description of how they managed to survive including being warned by a Jewish father and son that the Germans were scouting the area. They were liberated by the Soviets in January 1945. She returned to her hometown of Radom but encountered severe antisemitism. She then fled to Regensburg, Germany to reunite with a brother and an uncle who survived. Her father perished in the same camp three weeks before liberation. Diane worked as an interpreter for UNRRA, then married and emigrated to United States after the war.

Rebecca continues to tell her sister-in-law Maria of the activities of Maria's son Howard while he attends school in Philadelphia. She also recommends some books she is reading and the effects of the economic depression on some family and friends.

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

Sara Adler, nee Apel, was born in Radom, Poland in 1927. Her family was close-knit, religious, well-to-do and involved in community welfare. They had non-Jewish contacts through their lumber business, but Sara attended Jewish school and had primarily Jewish friends.The family fled Radom in 1939 under Ger‌man bombardment but returned and were put into the Radom Ghetto soon after. Through bribing Polish contacts, her father, her uncle and she were able to live and work in Szydlowiec (Kielce area), a munitions factory outside the ghetto. In late summer 1942, the ghetto was liquidated and the rest of her family was sent to Treblinka. Her father, her uncle and she continued working in the munitions factory until 1944.

With the Russian approach in July 1944 the Germans marched the prisoners 100 miles to Tomaszow under horrible conditions and from there shipped them to Auschwitz. She describes the cattle cars, arrival, selection, unsanitary conditions and Appells. She recounts how she was helped by a fellow inmate. She was sent to work in a string factory in Lichtewerden, Czechoslovakia in the Sudetenland. She describes some of the brutality and also kindnesses of some Germans and others. After the liberation by the Russians, Sara managed to return totally destitute to Radom. Though helped by some Polish locals upon her return, other former Polish friends refused to return the family’s belongings to her. She left with some friends for Stuttgart, Germany, and got married. She emigrated to the United States in January 1949.

Recorded at the 1985 American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia, PA.

Per Anger, a Swedish diplomat and honored as a Righteous Among the Nations by YadVashem, was assigned to the Swedish Legation in Budapest as Secretary for Trade in late 1942. He briefly refers to growing antisemitism in Hungary. He describes in detail the Legation’s response to Jewish pleas for help when Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944 as well as Raoul Wallenberg’s additional efforts upon his arrival in July 1944, a position resulting from negotiations between the American War Refugee Board, World Jewish Congress and American Embassy in Stockholm. He refers to the many ways in which Sweden was involved in helping Jews in Hungary, and explains why they did this. He discusses his last meeting with Wallenberg just before his disappearance on January 17, 1945 and the terrors of Russian occupation until his and the other diplomats’ return home in April 1945. He describes in detail his attempts to enlist Sweden’s help in finding Wallenberg and accounts of eye-witnesses who had had contact with Wallenberg in Soviet prisons. He suspects the Soviets suspected Wallenberg of being a spy because of his contacts with Iver Olsen of the War Refugee Board. Anger is the author of With Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest, NY: 1981.