Oral History Interview with Betty Grebenschikoff

Herbert Finder was born in Vienna on April 22, 1929 of a Polish father who was an Austrian citizen and a German mother. He mentions antisemitic acts experienced in school. He describes the Anschluss and his family’s flight to Breda, Belgium and Antwerp, where Herbert attended a Jewish school. They received American visas in April, 1940 but lack of funds and the German invasion trapped them. His father was sent to a camp near Toulouse, France. Herbert, his mother and his uncle fled to Southern France. Herbert lived with a Jewish farmer, who took in many refugees, for two years. His father joined them after his release, and they lived on a farm in Duvernay. His mother returned to Antwerp to salvage their visas, but was deported in September 1942. After the war, they learned she had been killed.

Herbert and his father remained on the farm until arrested as foreigners in August 1942 by French police. They were sent to a camp in Viviers, then to Drancy. On September 4, 1942 they were shipped east on the 28th convoy to work at Oberschlesienosten, near Katowice. Though underage, Herbert remained with his father at the labor camp of Tarnoviche (TarnoskyGura), which he describes. Internal affairs of the camp were run by Polish Jews who reported to the Germans.

In the spring of 1943, Herbert and other inmates were sent to Sosnowiec to work in Katowicz. In November 1943 they were shipped to Birkenau where they were tattooed, suffered brutal conditions and saw crematoria. They moved to Auschwitz for one night and then to the Warsaw Ghetto to clear rubble, until July 1944. He describes the ghetto, where non-Jewish German prisoners were in charge. Prisoners traded for food with Poles and a typhus epidemic killed many. He worked in a burial detail that burned corpses of victims shot in Paviak. In July 1944, as Russians approached, prisoners began a three-day forced march to Lodz, then went to Dachau in sealed cattle cars without food or water. While his father was recuperating from an injury, Herbert was sent to Allach, a camp where Jews and non-Jews built an underground factory. His father joined him after three weeks. In April 1945 prisoners were put on flat cars. After two days, German guards disappeared and prisoners were liberated by Americans on April 30th. In May 1945, Herbert and his father went to Antwerp via Stuttgart and France. He describes their survival strategies and faith in God. They came to the United States in December 1946, lived in New York City until 1950, and then settled in Vineland, NJ.

Ernest Kaufman was born in Drove, Germany, a small town with about 25 Jews. His father served in the German army during World War I and was a butcher and also a shochet. They had no problems with gentile neighbors but Ernest could not complete his education or his apprenticeship because he was Jewish. During Kristallnacht a local police man refused to arrest his father, but Ernest was arrested and transported to Buchenwald. He describes the terrible conditions and brutality in Buchenwald. The prisoners arrested during Kristallnacht did not have to work, but were forced to watch other prisoners being tortured and killed. Ernest explains how he managed to get an affidavit that enabled him to be released from Buchenwald after four weeks. He got a visa for the United States on April 20, 1939 and arrived in New York two weeks later. Ernest describes his unsuccessful attempts to get his parents out of Germany and into Cuba. His parents did not survive. Ernest describes how he lived and supported himself in New York and later in Philadelphia.

After Pearl Harbor, Ernest enlisted in the U.S. Army, became a naturalized citizen and eventually an officer. He served in England and Germany in 1943 and relates many of his experiences as an intelligence officer on an interrogation team. He discovered that Christian neighbors in Drove smuggled food into a house where local Jews were assembled before they were deported. In July 1945, he was wounded and sent to England General Hospital in Atlantic City. After he recovered, he was assigned to the European Command Intelligence Center in charge of the document section. He describes his intensive but futile search to discover what happened to his parents. After two more years in the service, he bought a poultry farm in Egypt, N.J. where he and his wife Minna lived for 30 years.

Alexandra Gorko, nee Paley, was born in Kiev, Russia in 1916. In this follow-up interview she briefly describes conditions in Bergen-Belsen: clothing, food, and her work in an ammunition factory. She reflects on the issue of resistance and her decision to disobey Mengele’s order to inject pregnant women with a gasoline-type substance. She also acknowledges that she refused to cooperate in the act of throwing babies from the windows of the Lodz Ghetto hospital where she was a supervisor and nurse. She refers to her brother’s involvement with a group of 12 men who built a secret radio and dissem‌in‌ated BBC news March 1940 until January 1942 when they were exposed and sent to Chelmno for gassing. In referring to her knowledge of what was transpiring under the Nazis, she discusses the de‌cep‌tion perpetrated by the Nazis as well as the inability of people to believe the reports that circulated even when clothes resembling those of friends and relatives were delivered to the ghetto.

For additional information on Mrs. Gorko's experiences, see the original interview by Eileen Steinberg on August 19, 1985. See also the interview with her husband Anatole Gorko.

Frederick A. Walters was a Jewish soldier who served in the 474th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army. He knew about the existence of concentration camps from the Stars and Stripes and Armed Forces Radio Network but did not think he would ever witness them. He entered Buchenwald in April 1945 and describes his shock seeing the corpses and the appalling conditions of approximately 150 surviving prisoners. The regiment was not responsible for the care of the survivors but gave them army rations until food and medical care arrived. He recalls a man giving prisoners money who he believes may have been Edward R. Morrow. He describes the shock of his regiment in witnessing the realities of the camp and states that they had refused to believe published and broadcasted reports.

No official or unofficial meetings were held to discuss reactions and no regimental history documents the experience. Weimar townspeople denied knowledge of camp activities. Later shipped to Norway to deal with surrender of German army units, Mr. Walters found that German soldiers denied knowledge of the camps and did not believe his eyewitness testimony. He found the same disbelief in the U.S. upon his return and states appreciation for this opportunity to bear witness for the first time since the war.

Tess Etkowicz, nee Erman, was born in Lublin, Poland on September 19, 1924, the youngest of 6 childrenfrom a well-to-do family. The family lived in Lodz, Poland from in 1927-28. Before the war her father was a sales representative in textiles. She describes pre-war Poland including her education, synagogue life, and antisemitism and her fright (at 15) at the German invasion (1939) when she worried about family members in Warsaw. She witnessed cruelty by German soldiers and describes how Polish teens came to their apartment and took artwork and her piano.

Her family then fled to Warsaw (where they rented an apartment) until the area became part of the ghetto. Both she and one sister passed as Polish (since they were blond and spoke fluent Polish) and were thus able to smuggle extra food into the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942, Tess and her sister fled the ghetto, and hid in the county. Tess soon decided to go back and smuggle her parents out.

She describes conditions in the Lublin Ghetto: deportation of men, illness, and describes the horrible conditions in the hospital which she witnessed when she contracted typhus. She describes in detail how she smuggled her parents out of the ghetto passing as Poles (wearing shawls, scarfs and caps) and on a train to the small village where she had stayed before. She shares two encounters of aid from non-Jewish Poles.

Tess describes their brazen travels, hiding in the woods, and hiding with sympathetic farmers. Finally, her parents tired of their travels fled to Radomsko with a group of other elderly people, and were later deported to Treblinka. One sister and her four year old daughter were also deported from the Lublin Ghetto to Treblinka. Tess had gone to Warsaw and was passing as a Aryan. She volunteered in a hospital during the Polish uprising against the Nazis in Warsaw. She was sent to a farm because of her injuries and was liberated by the Russians.

After the war she reunited with a sister and a brother in Lodz by chance encounters. They went by train to Paris to meet up with another brother. Tess, two sisters and two brothers survived the war. Tess met her husband, Phil, in Paris. He had been a soldier in the French Fighting Army (FFA) with DeGaulle. They were married in Paris and emigrated to the United States on January 13, 1950.

Herbert Broh was born in Berlin, Germany in 1930. He shares his childhood memories of his life in Germany and his family’s journey to Shanghai. Herbert relates several experiences of abusive antisemitism by his friends and his teacher, as well as his impressions of Kristallnacht.

His family left Germany for Shanghai in April of 1939 to join family members already living on Seward Road in the Hongkew section of Shanghai, under Japanese occupation. Herbert was enrolled in the Kadoorie School and later a cheder. He talks about his Jewish education at the cheder and the Yeshiva Katana in great detail, as well as the effect of his growing orthodoxy on his life and his family. He describes his family’s living conditions and life in Shanghai and states he was very happy there. He was only dimly aware that other refugees had a more difficult existence. His father worked for a Chinese factory managed by Japanese; his mother worked as a cook at the Komor Kindergarten.

After Pearl Harbor, his family was evacuated to the Kadoorie School. He mentions interaction between Japanese and refugees. He vividly describes the events during and after the Japanese capitulation and the arrival of Chinese Nationalist and later American troops. He witnessed the departure of the entire Mirrer Yeshiva to Canada in 1946. Herbert and his family went to the United States in 1947. He describes his life in the United States and his feelings about his years in Shanghai. He is now a Cantor in Sun City, California.

Interviewee: BROH, Herbert Date: October 15, 1999