Oral History Interview with Charlotte Bing

Zina Farber, nee Bass, one of six children, was born December 6, 1933 in Bialystok, Poland. Her father was a businessman. She shares her very early childhood memories of antisemitism (having been taught to always step off pavements when encountering Gentiles, at the risk of being beaten). She also recounts that the most vivid detail of her early life in Poland is her very warm family.

Having been separated from both parents very early in the war, her eldest brother took care of the family. In 1943, after confinement in Bialystok and PruzhanyGhettos, she and four brothers were sent to Auschwitz. She describes the round up of Jews in Pruzhany, the deportation in open cattle trucks, arrival, selection, and shaving. She describes the absolute miracle that she was not immediately gassed, being dragged out of her assigned truck and put instead with the group of women assigned to hard labor. She was 10 years old. She attributes this miracle to the fact that she was wearing her mother’s coat which made her look older than she was. She explains several times that it is too painful to recount the innumerable stories she could tell about her one and half year experience in Auschwitz. She is able to share descriptions of her constant hunger and fear. She describes fear of punishment – i. e. having her head pushed into a barrel of excrement– and relates the necessity of always wearing her soup bowl on a rope around her neck, even when sleeping. She also describes how the girls took care of each other, reddening cheeks before selections for example. She endured a two-week death march in mid-April 1945 to Ravensbrück and Neustadt-Gleiwitz (possibly Neustadt-Glewe).

Liberated by American soldiers, she travelled to Bialystok, where she was reunited with her father who had survived five years in Siberia. Mrs. Farber was separated several years earlier from her mother, who had been transported to Treblinka. After a failed attempt to emigrate to Palestine from the Landsberg displaced persons camp, Mrs. Farber left for the United States in 1949. Sponsored by an uncle in Philadelphia, she remained there, married and had two sons.

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

Deborah Teitelbaum, nee Berger, was born on December 21, 1922 in Vilna, Poland. Before the war her family was financially well off; her father was a businessman owning a newspaper agency and a Jewish theater. Deborah describes the growing antisemitism in 1937-8, Jews being shunned at university and anti-Jewish demonstrations in the streets, her father was beaten up by local thugs. She describes the German Occupation of Vilna, the growing fear and terrible conditions in the ghetto. She describes life in the Vilna Ghetto in detail and mentions the Vilna underground and the partisans.

In October 1943 she was sent to Kaiserwald concentration camp (in Riga, Latvia), she describes their arrival, being searched for valuables, Appells, the food and the barracks. She details her deportation to and conditions in several smaller labor camps: Dundanga and Kurbe. In 1944 she was marched to Stutthof (Poland). She describes the brutality of the Kapos in contrast with the other camps and also gives testimony about seeing people led to the ovens. Deborah describes her assignment for two months on a farm to cut sugar cane and the improvement in the conditions there and access to more food. When they returned to Stutthof, she succumbed to the typhoid epidemic. From Stutthof she and others were led on a death march (in winter) day and night for over a month towards the Baltic Sea. She describes the lice, starvation, typhoid, beatings, shootings and people being buried alive. She recounts the kindness of a young Ukrainian who got her shoes when she was about to be left behind and killed.

The very next day, March 9, 1945 they arrived at a small village, Chinow, and were liberated by the Russians. Of the thousands sent on the death march, only 84 survived. Deborah was liberated with her mother, aunt and cousin and several other women from her hometown. She spent two months recuperating in a hospital. After liberation they decided to seek complete freedom by fleeing from Russia. They lived six months in Lodz then went to Czechoslovakia and Germany. Deborah and her mother went to Feldafing Displaced Persons camp, where Deborah met her husband and gave birth to a son. In 1949, they emigrated to the United States. She and her mother found no other surviving relatives of their immediate family. One brother was killed in Ponary when the Germans entered Vilna (1941) and her other brother was assumed killed in either the Baltic Sea near Konigsburg or in Buchenwald; her father was killed in a camp in Estonia.

Chayale Ash-Fuhrman, nee Averbuch, was born in 1920 in Kishinev, Bessarabia, Romania. She describes life in Kishinev, her education in public school and private Jewish school. Her parents led a troupe of Yiddish actors which she joined until she turned professional at age 15. She gives a thorough and highly descriptive account of the Yiddish stage. She details Romanian government restrictions in the inter-war period and the effects of the Russian occupation of Bessarabia in 1940. The Moldavian Yiddish State Theatre, as it was then called, could function only under strict Communist guidelines.

In June 1941, the theatre group and other civilians were evacuated to Ukraine with Russian help. They were forced to stop in a kolkhoz (cooperative village) in Kharkov to help with the harvest. The refugees lived under primitive conditions and encountered antisemitism from the villagers. In November 1941 they followed the government to Kuybishev, then to Tashkent to pick cotton in another cooperative. She describes the difficulties of adapting to the Russian way of getting along; relations with the locals, and the onset of hatred for Jews. Her father died of dysentery in 1942. Using her training from professional school, she joined a sewing cooperative to get more bread. Chayale and the other Jews tried to practice their religion. Chayale later worked as a clerk in a steel mill in Begovat. She married a man who was working as a mechanic at the mill in 1943. In 1945, Chayale and her husband returned to Poland in an exchange program for Polish citizens. They settled in a Displaced Persons camp in Silesia because of the post-war violence against Jews by Poles. She worked as emigration secretary for PoaleiTzionand mentions various strategies Jewish refugees used to leave Russia.

In 1948 Chayale, her husband and her mother, walked to Vienna. Israelis met their group and placed them in a Displaced Persons camp in Linz, in the American zone, where Chayale gave birth to a daughter. UNRRA and the Joint Distribution Committee helped them go to Jaffa, Israel in August 1948 with false papers, on an Italian ship Campidoglio. She talks about early immigrant life in Israel under wartime conditions. In 1949 she founded the Haifa Yiddishe Operetten Theatre and later went to Tel Aviv. She also performed in London, and toured South Africa with an all-Israeli ensemble. She divorced in 1953. She married an actor from Romania in New York in 1959 and stayed in the United States. She discusses her feelings about the Holocaust and its effect on children of survivors.

Walter Silberstein, was born November 9, 1902 in Stargard, Germany, son of the only rabbi serving that area. He studied engineering and economics in Berlin and Leipzig and nearly completed his doctorate when his University of Leipzig professors were fired for their political views in 1933. After a brief business venture in Prague, he returned to Berlin in 1934, where he lived with his parents until July, 1939, when he left for Shanghai without a visa.

He describes in detail his voyage on a German luxury liner and the shock of arrival in the Hongkew district of Shanghai during a cholera epidemic. He notes the character of the native and newcomer Jewish communities and the political subdivisions of Shanghai. In 1940, his parents arrived, with Japanese visas, and his father served as rabbi to the refugee community. He gives an eyewitness account of their life after the December 1941 occupation by the Japanese, who did not persecute Jews, despite pressure from the Germans. He describes serving with other Jews, Russians and Chinese in the Pao Chia, as air-raid wardens and ghetto guards in summer, 1945. He notes a contented life between the American liberation on September 6, 1945 and the Communist takeover in 1949. In 1950, he left with his mother on a year’s odyssey until returning to Germany. They lived in Displaced Persons camps at Rhön and Föhrenwald; on October 29, 1951, they arrived in the United States.

L.I. born November 1923, lived in Bucharest, Romania before, during and after World War II. She relates her family history, her experiences growing up in Bucharest and her education at Catholic, public, and Medical schools. She cites several instances of discrimination against herself and other Jewish students.

She describes increasing antisemitism and restrictions against Jews, even those who converted, and their effect on the Jewish community and her own life. Her father lost his job. L.I. went to Onescu, a Jewish medical school staffed by Jewish teachers, and interned at Jewish hospitals. Both L.I. and her father worked at forced labor.

L.I. talks about conditions in the Jewish community, random killings of Jews, and brutality by the Iron Guard, but that many Jewish institutions continued to function. After the war, her family reclaimed their house which had been confiscated in December, 1941. She completed her medical education. Jewish students were allowed to attend schools but were not fully accepted. L.I. wasnot allowed to leaveRomania once she becameadoctor but she and her husband were able to leave as part of an exchange program in 1978 and came to the United States in 1979.

Nadia Frey, nee Tomaszek, a Catholic, was born October 8, 1916 and lived in Sambor, at that time in the Polish part of Ukraine. She decided to help Jews when the German Aktions began. She describes in great detail what she did, how she managed to do it, and why she decided to get involved when she was only 22 years old. She was arrested once. Nadia also witnessed atrocities committed by Russians and Germans against Jews and Ukrainians.

Nadia hid her future husband, Dolek, and his extended family in her small house, with no running water or electricity. At first, she housed his family only when it was dangerous in the ghetto, until it was safe to return. She explains how the families she hid managed to get in and out of the ghetto whenever they were in danger. After the ghetto was liquidated, she sheltered them continuously for one and a half years. At great risk and with her father’s help, she managed to get enough food and wood. Water for drinking and personal hygiene were a problem as were suspicious neighbors. Seven people lived in a hole below the house. Many times Nadia was afraid that the Jews she hid would be discovered, but was ready to die with Dolek, her future husband.

After the war, Nadia and Dolek went to Breslau (Wroclaw), Poland and were married in a civil ceremony. They had a Jewish wedding after they came to the United States in 1945 or ’46 from a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany. Her children were raised as Jews. She told them her story once they were old enough and explains their reaction. She also mentions how the Ukrainians’ feelings toward those who sheltered Jews changed from hatred to pride after the war.