Oral History Interview with Andrzej W. Jurkiewicz

Bernard Freilich was born April 17, 1924, in Drohobycz, Poland. He attended public school, Tarbut School and heder. His family had a shoe store. Pre-war, he experienced antisemitism from his very early childhood. He describes worsening conditions for Jews under both German and Russian occupations: pogroms (some started by Ukrainians), Aktions, liquidation of the Jewish quarter, establishment of the Drohobycz Ghetto, and the role of the Judenrat. Bernard narrowly escaped death in the ghetto when over 200 Jews were killed. He gives vivid accounts of atrocities, slave labor, and incidents of retribution. His entire family, except one brother, perished and he explains how and where they were killed. He describes Jewish slave labor in Boryslaw, deportations from the ghetto to Belzec, and executions of Jews in the Bronica forest.

Several vignettes describe his father’s interactions with the Gestapo and other Germans while working as their official boot maker. Later, after enduring forced labor under horrible conditions, Bernard worked with his father making boots.

When about 800 Jews managed to escape into the Bronica forest, Bernard joined a group of boys who hid in a bunker. He explains how he managed to survive for three and a half months and then to escape once the Germans discovered the bunker in May 1944.

Bernard describes the transport to, arrival at and processing at the Plaszow concentration camp on June 22, 1944. He witnessed brutal treatment and killing of the prisoners before and during this transport. He and his father worked as shoemakers for the Wehrmacht. Inmates were executed 24 hours a day. Bernard talks about the reaction of Jewish prisoners when 12,000 non-Jewish Poles arrived at the camp.

Bernard’s testimony includes graphic descriptions of the horrible conditions at Mauthausen, gruesome atrocities and torture, including a father’s futile attempt to save his son’s life. He worked as a slave laborer at Gusen II building tunnels for Messerschmitt and Steyrwerke under conditions that guaranteed a life span of four to six weeks. He explains the complicated series of events that enabled him and his brother to work as shoemakers. Because he was hospitalized for a groin infection, he saw various terrible ways in which prisoners and patients were killed in January 1945. He describes worsening conditions at Gusen as the Allied forces approached on April 22, 1945. He survived a death march to Mauthausen and then Gunskirchen, where the prisoners received Red Cross packages for the first time. He relates the chaotic conditions after the guards fled, and how he saved a friend’s life.

Bernard describes his post-liberation experiences vividly and in great detail. These include encounters with American soldiers, sick and dying survivors in hospitals, Germans who had used slave laborers, and living in an apartment they confiscated from an SS member, with 10 other survivors. The American Military Police moved Bernard and his brother to a Displaced Person Camp.

In June 1945, Bernard and his brother tried to return to Drohobycz. They were conscripted into the Russian army as mine sweepers with 22 other Jews, but managed to work as shoemakers for the Russian General Staff in Vienna, Austria instead. Before Bernard could execute a plan he had devised to escape, his unit was marched back to Poland. He got himself transferred into the Polish army, searched for his father in Lodz, where he met and married his wife. After living in Schlachtensee and then later Feldafing Displaced Persons Camps, they emigrated to the United States in March 1949.

Anna Roth, née Weber, was born in Stopnica, Poland on July 14, 1929 into a Hasidic family. She had five sisters and lived with her parents and extended family. Her father was a roofer. She describes her childhood before the German invasion in detail including relations with non-Jewish Poles and antisemitism.

She talks in great detail about the frightening German invasion and Occupation including men being taken from the streets, indiscriminate killings and restrictions on Jewish learning and how her mother procured Hebrew lessons for her. Anna—despite her very young age—her father and her two eldest sisters were taken to work in a munitions factory in Skarzysko for two years (1940-1942). She gives detailed descriptions of the conditions: the work, the food and the fear under which they lived. She and her sisters were able to keep contact with their father and even got themselves on the same transport when he was deported to several other labor camps: Czestochowa, another munition factory; Przedborz, where they were made to dig ditches, and Czestochowianka. Eventually they were separated when their father was sent to Buchenwald in 1944 and her two older sisters were sent to Ravensbrück.

Anna was deported to Bergen-Belsen which she described as far worse than any of the other camps and gives detailed descriptions of the conditions. She explains how the circumstances probably helped her to survive—when they ran out of striped uniforms, she was able to keep the heavy coat she was wearing during the cold winter months. She also shares a vignette about her extraordinary reunification with her sisters in Bergen-Belsen. Anna details her and her sisters’ deathmarch from Turkheim to Dachau and their liberation on the morning after their arrival on

May 6, 1945.

After the war they were sent to Feldafing Displaced Persons camp, and found their father in Lübeck, Germany, where they lived until 1947. Her mother and three younger sisters perished. In 1948 they went to Stuttgart, in the American zone, in order to emigrate to the United States. One sister went to Israel. Helped by HIAS, Anna, her father and a sister arrived in the United States in 1949.

Susan Faulkner, nee Neulaender, was born April 27, 1921 in Berlin. Her father was a banker and she grew up in an assimilated Jewish family. During the first year of the Nazi regime, she enjoyed Jewish religious instruction in her public school and was very favorably influenced by the ordained female rabbi, Regina Jonas. After 1933, she experienced antisemitism and traumatic discrimination at school. She describes the brief relaxation of anti-Jewish measures in Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games. After attending a private Jewish school for a year, she had a brief, unhappy experience in a Zionist agricultural school in Silesia in 1936 and then worked for relatives in Gleiwitz in Silesia, where she felt more protected in a traditional Jewish community than she had felt in Berlin. Upon her return to Berlin, she worked in Alltrue emigration processing agency. During Kristallnacht, on November 9, 1938, she witnessed destruction of Jewish property, burning of the Fasanenstrasse synagogue as onlookers cheered and the beating of an elderly Jewish man. Her father fled to Belgium, was later caught in Marseilles and died in Auschwitz.

Susan managed to travel with her mother and sister to Guatemala in 1938 on a German ship. She describes in detail their 4th class passage and how they were treated with disdain by the crew. Two years later, she reached the United States. In 1942, she married an Austrian refugee who converted to Protestantism and was divorced, following the adoption of two children. In 1958, she began college studies leading to a Ph.D. in English, with restitution money from Germany. She became a teacher and expresses her need to bear witness to the Holocaust. She discusses her psychological problems of survivor guilt and painful attempts to identify as a Jew, including compulsive writing of pro-Jewish and pro-Israel letters to editors.

Gertrude Jacobs, nee Bergman, was born into an observant Jewish family in Voelkersler, Southern Bavaria, Germany in January 1924. Her father and grandfather were decorated war veterans. There were 12 Jewish families living in her village and Gertrude describes this area of Germany as particularly antisemitic both before and after 1933, when Hitler came to power. She describes how Jewish life in general and her family’s life were affected by anti-Jewish decrees, and relates two attacks on her while in school. Most of the village people shunned them, a few helped them secretly.

Gertrude gives second hand accounts of Kristallnacht, of her grandmother’s liberation from Theresienstadt concentration camp, and her grandmother’s return to and post-war life in Germany. Gertrude came to the United States in 1938, where she also experienced antisemitism.

Gertrude expresses her feelings about Germans, restitution, German Jews, and how growing up in Nazi Germany affects her to this day. She explains her philosophy of living as a Jew and a survivor and the special obligations this entails.

Margaret Beer, nee Weiss, was born January 9, 1911 in Sighet, Hungary. She details the swift transfer of all the Jews of Sighet in the first month of the German invasion, describing howS.S. troops moved into many Jewish homes, including hers during the German occupation, and how Hungarian authorities identified prominent Jews whomthe S.S. forced to form a Jewish Council. The Germans then confiscated Jewish businesses and personal property. Once ghettoized, the Jews were helped by non-Jewish Hungarians who smuggled food into the ghetto. She describes the evacuation of all Jewish patients from the local hospital, the formation of a Jewish police force, the evacuation of the Jews from the ghetto and the transports to Auschwitz.

She describes in great detail life in Auschwitz including the initial selection, showers, barracks, Appells, work conditions, food allotment, wash barracks, and her selection by Mengele. In July 1944 she was transported to Gelsenkirchen, Germany to work in the Krupp armament industry. She describes the working conditions and Allied bombings. In September 1944 she was transferred to Sömmerda in Thuringia, Germany to work in another ammunition factory. As the Allies drew close in April 1945, the camp was evacuated; Margaret escaped during the death march and eventually found housing in a German village until liberation at the end of April 1945. She describes help from Russian POW’s and later American liberators. Her skills as a dressmaker helped sustain her until May 1946 when she could join her brother who had been living in Philadelphia.

Roger Bryan, formerly Rudolf Britzmann, was born in Germany, June 14, 1921. His father, a physician and a decorated German army veteran, was arrested on trumped up charges in the mid 1930s. He died in Moabit prison under suspicious circumstances. Roger briefly mentions his school years, a few antisemitic experiences, and how his family coped after his father’s death. He discusses his struggle to get out of Germany, and how he managed to emigrate to London, England with help from both Jews and non-Jews in 1939 just before World War II started.

He worked in London until he was classified as an enemy alien, incarcerated, and deported to Adelaide, Australia on the HMT Dunera. He describes terrible conditions on board, mistreatment by British during the trip, the journey to a detention camp in Hay, New South Wales, and how Australians treated the detainees. He talks about his jobs in the camp, and the many activities and programs started by the prisoners.

He joined and served in the Pioneer Corps (a non-combatant unit of the British army) to get out of the internment camp. He later served in the GHQ Second Echelon Prisoner of war section of the British army in London and in camps for German prisoners of war in Louvain, Belgium, and the former Neuengamme concentration camp. He was transferred to Nuremberg to work as an interpreter/translator during the War crime trials.

After he left the service, he lived in Glasgow, Scotland with his wife, whom he married in 1943. He started a family and a photography business. He came to the United States in 1953.