Oral History Interview with Alan Spiegel

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.

Mr. Perlman served in the 97th Infantry Division, United States Third Army during World War II. He entered Flossenbürg concentration camp in late April or early May 1945, shortly after the Medics. He describes the camp, crematoria, ovens with about 100 bodies waiting to be burned, and the condition of the survivors. The German guards had fled. He relates how profoundly seeing Flossenbürg affected him and the other Jewish men in his unit.

Mr. Perlman was redeployed to Japan after sailing to the United States from Le Havre, France.

A copy of a letter written by Samuel Perlman on May 8, 1945, that describes what he saw at Flossenbürg in much greater detail, is included as part of this transcript.

Ursula M. Heisman was born in Mewe, Germany (now Gniew, Poland). Ursula grew up in Berlin and was a teenager when Hitler came to power in 1933. Her father, Isidor Hirschfeld, was a physician who served as such in the German army in World War I. He received the Iron Cross. Ursula had two older brothers. Her parents were “free thinkers” and her upbringing was an assimilated upper middle class one, with little Jewish content.

While still in high school Ursula was employed as an actress and dancer in a theater company. Ursula describes the rise of Hitler and the consequences it had for her and her family. For example, she was fired from her job as a dancer and her father could no longer practice medicine. She tells how they were made to wear the yellow star and of how her father resisted wearing it. When Ursula witnessed Kristallnacht she decided that she must leave Germany. One of her brothers, a physician, had already gone to the United States. Ursula recounts the difficulties she encountered in leaving Germany. It was only to Cuba that she was able to emigrate, and she tells of arriving in Havana, with her other brother, in 1938. Ursula recounts how she got a job as a dance teacher and that she was invited to move in with her employers, who were not Jewish, who subsequently paid $1000 to the Cuban government to obtain visas for her parents. They arrived in Cuba on the ship after the St. Louis. Ursula describes life in Havana which she enjoyed very much.

In 1945 Ursula and her parents moved to the United States, joining one brother and leaving one in Cuba, who did join them at the end of the war. She tells of resuming her career as a dancer and eventually marrying and moving to Philadelphia where she decided to open a dance school. Eventually she had three schools and a ballet company called Ballet des Jeunes which engaged the top 25 students at her schools. The company danced throughout the United States and in Europe. Ursula closes her testimony recounting a trip to Berlin she and her husband took in 1969 or 1970.

Bertram Kornfeld, born in Vienna, Austria in 1925, immigrated to the United States in

1938. In February 1944, he joined the U.S. Army and served in the 423rd Battalion of the 106th Infantry Division. During the Battle of the Bulge, he and his crew were captured by German soldiers in Belgium, near Malmedy. They were forced to march with many other prisoners for several days to a railroad, where they were crowded into cattle cars. When the train reached Koblenz, the locked cars were left overnight in a railroad yard where RAF bombers narrowly missed them. They arrived at Stalag 4-B, located between Leipzig and Dresden, in December 1944.

Mr. Kornfeld describes the bitter cold, the callous disregard of sick and dying prisoners during the transport, lack of food and water for two weeks and a limited prison diet thereafter. At his liberation in April 1945, he had lost 50 pounds. Despite his deprivation, he claims that the Germans observed the Geneva Convention in regard to American and British prisoners, but brutally mistreated the Russians. He depicts the Russian liberators of his camp as drunken Cossacks who slaughtered the remaining Germans, but befriended the prisoners by baking bread for them.

When Mr. Kornfeld and some friends fled and met American soldiers in Leipzig, they were given rich food, which sickened them and required a brief hospitalization. He returned to the

United States and was discharged in December 1945.

Henry Skorr was born in Kalisz, Poland on October 11, 1921. He describes in detail Jewish life in Kalisz before WWII including the antisemitism that existed, his traditional upbringing and schooling, and the special relationship between parents and children. He discusses the atmosphere before and after German occupation; the arrest, detention and forced labor of Mr. Skorr and his brother; his realization that they must escape Poland.

He describes a mass execution in a Kalisz cemetery during which he and other boys were ordered to help in the burial and then his subsequent escape from the cemetery. He tells of traveling through Poland to Russian occupied territory of the Ukraine until he reached Kovel. He then decided to return to Kalisz to take family and friends through this escape route.

Mr. Skorr, now with his family, was resettled in Cherepovetz in deep Russia. He describes the train trip and his recruitment to work deep in the forest to cut down trees. Conditions, as he describes them, were terrible and he escaped back to Cherepovetz and found work as a sailor on a boat hauling lumber and barges. Throughout the testimony, Mr. Skorr comments on life in Russia and gives insights into Russian people and society and how the system worked.

He was mobilized to work on the fortification near Leningrad and describes the German breakthrough and his joining and organizing a guerrilla movement. He was wounded and evacuated to Wologda. Upon recovery he returned to Cherepovetz, where his family had stayed. There he found work in the Fire Department where he eventually rose to head the department.

Although offered an opportunity for mobilization to the Polish Army he refused because of fear of antisemitism in the ranks. He met his future wife at the end of the war and returned to Warsaw, Poland where they married. His description of life in postwar Poland tells of much antisemitism and attacks on the returning Jews from antisemitic bands. Eventually, he emigrated to Israel in 1950 and to the United States in 1958.

This interview was conducted on multiple dates in 1983: February 8 and 28, April 12, May 2, June 14 and 28, July 5 and 19.

Adele Wertheimer, nee Rozenel, the eldest of eight children, was born February 5, l922 in Bendzin(also Będzin),Poland to a religious family. Her parents were merchants. She gives a detailed description of pre-war Bendzin, Zionist organizations, her attendance at a Bet Yaakov school2 and her family. She describes the effect of the German invasion on their town, the rounding up of men, the curfew, the violence against women and having to wear a star. She mentions the rape of her aunt by German soldiers. She gives a detailed explanation about how the Jews were forced into the ghetto gradually and describes how they would hide from the Germans in different bunkers during round ups. She recalls when her mother and other siblings were taken away in a roundup, and she and her father and some other relatives hid in a bunker where they stayed for six weeks. They were caught and were forced to clean up the town.

Adele describes her deportation to Auschwitz in 1943, the separation from her father, her work in an ammunition factory and that she met an aunt and uncle in Auschwitz. She recalls the shared pair of shoes given to her by her aunt that she and a friend used on the death march to Ravensbrück which helped them stay alive. She describes her short stay in Ravensbrück and subsequent deportation on cattle trains to Malchoff in Germany. She shares the vignette of bribing someone with bread to get vegetables to feed a friend who had typhus and thus saved her life. She details their deportation to Taucha, a subcamp of Buchenwald/Dora-Mittelbau near Leipzig and how the Germans left all the prisoners in the open cattle cars during the Allied bombing raid to kill them. Her car miraculously survived and they were then marched on to Nossen near Freiberg. She describes walking out to a German home to get food and receiving a beating when she got back. Shortly after, she and her friend decided to escape the death march. She details their escape to a town where the Soviets were approaching and how they obtained food and clothes there and ended up going back toward Katowice with the Soviets. After the war Adele emigrated to Israel and later to the United States in 19583. She was the only survivor of her family.