Oral History Interview with Anna Roth

Harry Methner was born in Germany on July 21, 1922 into an observant Jewish family who had moved from the Polish Corridor to Berlin in 1901 or 1902. His father was a cook and later a kosher butcher and sausage manufacturer. Harry shares his childhood memories of his schooling, andchanges that took place in Germany during the Nazi rise to power. He shares sequence of events that led his family to seek options for emigration, including being warned by a non-Jewish acquaintance. Harry describes the damage done to the family store duringKristallnacht.

Harry and his family left Germany with their property and assets frozen on December 26, 1938 on a German luxury liner. He explains how his family got to Shanghai in April 1939 after an attempt to go to Cuba and a 90 day stopover in Singapore where his father worked as a kosher butcher for an Australian farmer. He briefly mentions that Jews on board ship received help from Dutch, English, American and local Jews.

Harry describes living conditions in Shanghai, tropical diseases, as well as life during the war in great detail. His family had almost no contact with the Russian, French, English or Sephardic Jewish communities. He worked with his father selling strictly kosher food and as a photographer’s assistant documenting Hongkew Ghetto inhabitants for the Japanese. He also worked with a so-called “Sanitary Group” that helped Jews who were wounded when the ghetto was bombed by American planes on July 23, 1945. He belonged to a Zionist youth group, BritNoarTzion (HanoarHatzioni), led by Rabbi Teichner. Once he was in the United States, Harry and his friends started a youth group with the same name as they had in Shanghai for Jewish immigrants from middle Europe, which was very successful. He relates how his life changed once the American forces arrived, especially after the Japanese surrender. After the war ended, Harry worked for the American Army.

Harry left for the United States on October 17, 1947 and moved to Rochester, N.Y. He got a job at Eastman Kodak on October 31, 1947 with the help of the Jewish Family Service. He married a Holocaust survivor. Harry managed to get his parents to attend his wedding in New York while they were in Ellis Island on a transport ship bringing Jews from Shanghai to Italy. He was able to bring them to America two years later. The entire family, including his children, moved to Denver, Colorado. Once Harry found out about the concentration camps and the relatives he lost, he realized that there was a place much worse than the Shanghai he once hated.

Recorded at the Rickshaw Reunion - a meeting in October 1999 at the Holiday Inn in Philadelphia of refugees who found refuge in Shanghai during World War II.

Anatole Gorko was born in Lodz, Poland on June 28, 1907 of well-to-do Zionists. He worked in his father’s spinning factory until 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. He fought in the Polish Army for three weeks. After being in the Reserves, he was taken to a prisoner of war camp for a few weeks. He found himself with his family in the center of the Lodz Ghetto in January 1940 and describes the life there. He worked as head cashier for the ghetto stores until August 1944.

He and his family including his wife and child were finally deported to Auschwitz, in cattle cars, where, in the presence of Mengele, only he and his brother-in-law were selected for work and the rest of the family perished. He describes the train ride, arrival, selection, and shaving. He remained there for one month, then pretended to be a mechanic and was selected for a camp in Sudeten where after two weeks of training he worked on V2 rockets. Here he managed to sabotage, and persuade other workers, including German mechanics, to sabotage the work. He worked there from September 1944 until May 1945 when the Russians liberated the area. He made his way back to Lodz where he remarried, became head of the textile production for Communist Poland, but decided to leave. He smuggled himself and his wife to Munich, and waited from 1946 to 1948 to obtain necessary papers to resettle in the United States. He describes in some detail his adjustment to the United States.