Oral History Interview with Chayale Ash-Fuhrman

Elias Malek was born May 5, 1941 in Moisei2, Romania, one of six children. His father was a sofer.3 Elias underwent experimentation as a twin in Auschwitz. His earliest memory is being tattooed at Auschwitz when he was three years old. In this interview he describes what has been told to him by his older twin siblings (13 years old at the time) and also his memory fragments of their escape from Auschwitz and post-war experiences. He was told by his siblings that when Auschwitz was evacuated in 1945, someone helped the four of them hide to avoid being killed. Then a German officer helped them escape from a forced march by putting them at the back of the line and telling them to hide in a ditch and escape. Elias shares his memory of searching for food after the camp was deserted. Russian soldiers found them, fed and clothed them and took them to Russia for several months. When they returned to their home town, they found no relatives.

After the war Elias and his siblings stayed in a displaced persons camp in Cluj and then in several orphanages from 1948 to 1954. At Sâncrai, they went to school and worked on a farm. In 1955, a rabbi arranged for Elias to attend a cheder and a yeshiva in Arad. In 1963, he studied at a yeshiva in Belgium until he emigrated to the United States that year. In Brooklyn, a rabbi obtained a job for him with a construction company. He has married and had children, but never told them about his wartime experience.

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.

Per Anger, a Swedish diplomat and honored as a Righteous Among the Nations by YadVashem, was assigned to the Swedish Legation in Budapest as Secretary for Trade in late 1942. He briefly refers to growing antisemitism in Hungary. He describes in detail the Legation’s response to Jewish pleas for help when Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944 as well as Raoul Wallenberg’s additional efforts upon his arrival in July 1944, a position resulting from negotiations between the American War Refugee Board, World Jewish Congress and American Embassy in Stockholm. He refers to the many ways in which Sweden was involved in helping Jews in Hungary, and explains why they did this. He discusses his last meeting with Wallenberg just before his disappearance on January 17, 1945 and the terrors of Russian occupation until his and the other diplomats’ return home in April 1945. He describes in detail his attempts to enlist Sweden’s help in finding Wallenberg and accounts of eye-witnesses who had had contact with Wallenberg in Soviet prisons. He suspects the Soviets suspected Wallenberg of being a spy because of his contacts with Iver Olsen of the War Refugee Board. Anger is the author of With Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest, NY: 1981.

RachelaFrydmanwas born on November 26, 1914 in Zloczew, Poland (near Lodz). She came from a large observant Zionist family. Her father was a wood merchant. Rachela belonged to Shomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth movement. One of her brothers was able to get to Palestine in 1928. Before 1930 Rachela had experienced antisemitism in the form of two pogroms and a robbery.

In the 1930s the family moved to Piotrkow, Poland, a mill town. By 1933 the Polish Jews who lived in Germany had been forced back into Poland. Rachela details how the PiotrkowGhetto was created and describes conditions there, overcrowding, starvation, laborbatallions.She describes treatment by the S.S. and many shootings. Rachela and her sister taught Jewish history and culture from their apartment until 1941. Rachela married while in the ghetto. Her husband was sent out for forced labor and did not return. Rachela recounts being terrorized by Ukrainian guards in the ghetto, witnessing murders and contracting typhus. Her mother and one sister died in the typhus epidemic. She was nursed by nuns in a hospital and one offered to hide her in their convent.

From 1942 - 1944 Rachela was in Skarzysko-Kamienna, a forced labor camp which was an ammunition factory. She describes her beatings by guards. In 1944, Rachela and many inmates were sent to Buchenwald’s sub-camp, Leipzig-Schoenfeld, in cattle cars. There Rachela along with 600 inmates lived in one large room.Rachela recounts their attempts to observe Jewish holidays by lighting candles with wicks made from stolen rope and saving crumbs for symbolizing matza.

In April 1945 they were marched toward Dresden. They were liberated at the River Elbe by the Soviet army. By then Rachela could no longer walk. She was hospitalized and later sent to a displaced person’s camp. There she met and married her second husband and gave birth to a daughter. They came to the United States on April 19, 1951. Rachela states that she’s alive because she willed herself to see the defeat of the Germans.

Liza Kessler, nee Rak, was born in the Ukrainian town of Vinnitsa, located on the Polish border between Kiev and Odessa. A center of Jewish learning, it boasted 15 Jewish schools. Liza graduated from a Jewish high school, married and had two children. Liza describes how in July, 1941, after a German bombing raid, Polish Jews fled into her town. She heard reports from them that the Jews were herded into the synagogue and burned. Liza with her two children, and sisters-in-law and their children fled with the ‘echelons’ (transports which carried machinery). They boarded a barge for Central Asia. In November, 1941 they arrived in Georgia. They stayed on a kolkhoz (collective farm) until the Germans came. They then fled further East to Uzbekistan, finally landing in Bukhara where they stayed until the end of the war. Liza describes harsh conditions: food rationing and bitter cold. Liza’s sisters and parents were murdered in mass killings.

After World War II Liza went back to Poland with her second husband, a Jewish Polish national. Because it was too much like Russia, they left and were smuggled into the American zone in Austria via Czechoslovakia. Liza and her family stayed in Austria for five years. They were aided by the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration). Finally, in 1950, through an aunt in Philadelphia they received papers and were able to enter the United States as part of the quota.

Interviewee: KESSLER, Liza Date: January 18, 1983

Saul Horn was born in Lódz, Poland in 1913. Saul briefly describes the thriving pre-war Lodz Jewish community. Saul recounts the effects of the German occupation on his family, losing the family business and fleeing to the Glowno Ghetto in December 1939, which was outside the German Reich at the time. He describes the difficult conditions in the ghetto, working outside the ghetto and trying to buy extra food. He describes their deportation to the Warsaw Ghetto when Germany took over that area in 1941. Saul describes working as a slave laborer in the Warsaw Ghetto, at Okecie airfield, and the gruesome effect of starvation, especially on children, as well as on people in general. He explains how he escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto to Opatów and later rescued 10 women, using bribery. After six months in Opatów they were captured by the SS and sent to Skarzysko labor camp. He details the horrible living conditions and brutal treatment by Ukrainian guards. His wife died of typhoid in 1942.

Saul details his deportation to Buchenwald by cattle train in 1944. Of the 2000 Jews on this transport only 200 survived. He describes the brutal conditions, especially the hunger, and how he became the head of the small hospital - staffed by Jewish doctors - that had no supplies. Saul witnessed several atrocities committed by Germans.

Buchenwald was liberated by the Russians in May, 1945. He mentions what occurred after liberation and his search for relatives in Lódz. He was reunited with three of his wife’s sisters and later married one of them. In 1945 he established a manufacturing business in Poland.

He explains how they were smuggled out of Poland to the Schlupfing Displaced Persons camp in Germany, helped by the Haganah, in 1946. He went to Landsberg Displaced Persons camp in 1948. Saul, his wife and two year old daughter, arrived in the United States in June 1949. He lived in Patterson N.J. and briefly talks about his life there and how he taught himself to speak English.