Oral History Interview with Deborah Teitelbaum

Original File
Transcript
English
About this item

Title

Oral History Interview with Deborah Teitelbaum

Date

October 15, 1983

Contributor

Interviewee:
Deborah Teitelbaum
Interviewer:
Rochelle Chasan

Summary

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.

Save to library
Format
Genre
Key places
Part of
More details
Publisher:
Gratz College
Number of Tapes:
3
Language:
English
Identifier:
HOHAGC00524
Rights
Copyright date:
2017
Cite this item
Oral History Interview with Deborah Teitelbaum. 1983. InterviewInterview by Rochelle Chasan. Audio. Oral History Interview With Deborah Teitelbaum. Holocaust Oral History Archive. Gratz College. https://grayzel.gratz.edu/hoha/oral-history-interview-deborah-teitelbaum.

Review all citations for accuracy.
Do you have a question or correction for this item?

More Sources Like This

Holocaust Testimony
of
Kurt Simon
Oral History Interview with Kurt Simon

Kurt Simon was born in Ludenscheid, Germany on April 19, 1922. His father was a cavalry officer in the German army during World War I. Mr. Simon talks about his early childhood. He mentions subtle and not so subtle changes in Germany after Hitler came to power and the impact of the Nuremberg Laws which he discusses briefly. After the earliest attack on Jewish stores on April 1, 1933, his father resigned from his executive position at the Tietzdeparment store and moved his family to Cologne. Kurt was thrown out of his school in 1936 because he was Jewish.

His Jewish grandmother made it possible for the family to leave Germany in June or July 1939. He explains the paperwork and documents needed. The Simons arrived in the United States on October 3, 1940 after a stopover in London, where they had to prove they were not enemy aliens. They settled in Philadelphia with help from the Jewish Family Service.


Holocaust Testimony
of
Genia Klapholz
Oral History Interview with Genia Klapholz

GeniaKlapholz, nee Flachs2, was born in 1912 in Wisnicz, near Krakow, Poland to a religious family. After the town was ghettoized, she witnessed her baby niece kicked to death by a German soldier. Genia and a younger sister escaped and paid a woman in a neighboring village who hid them for eight days. They had to return to Wisnicz and were then transported to the Bochnia Ghetto, where they worked in a uniform factory for one year, enduring terrible conditions. They moved next to the Szebnie transit camp, where they saw Jews from Tarnow burned alive. Genia reads aloud her Yiddish poem, “In Memory of My Sister, Serl, of Camp Szebnie.” (Included with the transcript are Yiddish transliteration and English translation of this poem. Also included are the Yiddish transliteration and English translation of another poem, “The Death March from Auschwitz.”)

Genia worked for three months as a cleaning woman in a factory at Szebnie before deportation to Auschwitz in 1942, which she describes in detail. She discusses the brutal treatment during her two years in Birkenau. She worked in the ammunition factory from which four youngwomen smuggled gunpowder for the attempted explosion of the crematoria and she witnessed their hanging. She describes in detail a delousing procedure, when she had to stand in the snow, naked, for hours. She also tells of her foot operation, performed without anesthesia. Forced to leave Auschwitz on a death march in January, 1945, she managed to escape with two other women and they found shelter with a Polish woman and her family in Silesia. This family was recognized as one of the “Righteous among the Nations” by YadVashem in 1991. Documentation from YadVashem accompanies the transcript.

Genia was liberated by the Russians, March 28, 1945, and returned to Krakow in search of her family. She was in Displaced Persons camps in Einring, Regensburg and Landsburg, where she met and married her cousin, Henry Klapholz. With their baby son, they immigrated in 1948 to the United States, where they bought a farm in Vineland, New Jersey. In 1955, they moved to Philadelphia.