Oral History Interview with Diane G. Weinstock

Anne Dore Russell, née Weidemann, a non-Jew, was born in Brandenburg, Germany in 1926. She went to school from 1933 to 1945 in Brandenburg. Her father told her about experiences of Germans opposed to Hitler. She knew that her uncle was sent to Sachsenhausen and heard about a Jehovah’s Witness who was imprisoned and later killed for his beliefs. A neighbor who had been a Nazi sympathizer, had a mental breakdown after executing Jews as a soldier on the Eastern Front.

She speaks briefly about Kristallnacht and life in Branderburg under the Nazis. Her father, a civil servant, lost his position in 1933 because he was a Social Democrat and belonged to the Socialist Party (SPD). He told Anne Dore why he opposed the Nazi regime. He avoided using the “Heil Hitler” salute and secretly listened to the BBC (British Broadcasting Company). She learned to be careful in public because of her father’s beliefs. The local police took her father into protective custody in July 1944 during a roundup of men suspected of involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

She mentions the behavior of local Nazis near the end of the war, after which she went to Humbold University in East Berlin and then the Free University in West Berlin.

Mina Lustiger, nee Bochner, was born July 30, 1929 in Bielitz, Poland. Her father was in the scrap metal business. She shares childhood memories including frightening antisemitic attacks. She describes the commotion and uncertainty after the German invasion, first sent with her siblings to her grandfather in Kęty, to avoid the Germans but then having to return home. After finally reunited with her parents in Bielsko she witnessed Jews being harassed and her family experienced the plunder of their silver by Germans. The whole family then fled toKęty because it was a smaller citywhere they hoped to avoid harassment. When her mother was jailed in Kęty for trying to send a package of food and her father was sent to a labor camp, the four girls were left alone. Mina describes the Kęty Ghetto and her subsequent deportation to the Neudorf Ghetto in 1941.They were warned1 not to be in the area during a selection and fled, posing as Aryans, to their uncle in Chrzanów. She describes the harrowing journey, travelling alone as a 12 year old, and then being joined by her sisters. Subsequently, they found out that some of the family had survived the selection and were then in Wadowice and the sisters again made a dangerous journey to join family. Mina describes the gated Wadowice Ghetto and how they had to sneak in with a labor brigade. Soon after, she and her sisters were deported to Sucha labor camp where they did hard labor regulating water near railways. She describes being sent to a distribution center at Sosnowiec and again being deported with her sisters to forced labor, this time in a spinning factory in Freiberg, Germany in 1943. She speaks about slightly better treatment there, but still long working hours and the scarcity of food. They were deported to Röhrsdorflabor camp and describes harsh working conditions, with little food and much suffering from disease. She mentions fasting on Yom Kippur.

In 1945, as Russian forces approached, they were sent on a death march to the Sudeten in Czechoslovakia, walking for several days, without food and sleeping in the snow. At Kratzau concentration camp, they joined inmates from many other countries. They finally were incarcerated at Gross Rosen, where she experienced the most brutal conditions. She describes beatings, many deaths from typhus and exhausting work in freezing weather.

On May 8, 1945, she was liberated by the Russian Army and then re-united with her family in Bielitz. In 1946, she went to England with a group of 100 other children and attended an ORT school. In 1951, she married Samuel Lustiger and they emigrated to the United States in 1952. They have a family of three children.

Mina does not indicate whether these were Jews or Gentiles who warned them.

Suzanne Gross, nee Sarah Pertofsky, was born in Paris, France in 1931. Her parents were born in Belz (Russia) and emigrated to France around 1924. They had a beauty parlor in Paris which was closed by the Germans after the invasion of Paris. At that time Jews were rounded up systematically and families were forcibly separated. Non-native born Jews were rounded up before Jews who were considered French.

As a child, especially after she started school, Suzanne was made to feel she was not really French. Suzanne talks in detail about her experience when she had to wear her Yellow Star to school.

Her father went underground, worked at first on a farm, then joined the Jewish French partisans. He later worked in a steel factory be‌cause the French partisans did not want Jews. Her mother was hidden by neighbors for three months.

Sarah was sent to a farm in Normandy with 5 or 6 other children by the French Jewish Scouts (Eclaireurs Israelites de France) who had an underground network to hide Jewish children. She worked on various farms under harsh conditions. She was a hidden child in a convent school where she had to pretend she was Catholic.

She was reunited with her parents in Paris, who lived clandestinely on and off in their boarded up shop. The family received money from a resistance movement in the steel factory where her father worked. The concierge helped by selling items knitted by her mother. During this time Suzanne and her sister often warned Jews when a police round-up started. Many Jews were imprisoned at Drancy. She describes how families searched for arrested relatives from afar.

She gives a detailed account of her emotional responses to the childhood trauma she experienced and to surviving the Holocaust. The family emigrated to the USA in 1946.

Interviewee: GROSS, Suzanne Date: August 9, 1983

Ellen Tarlow, née Meinberg, was born in 1927 in Gütersloh, Westphalia, Germany, where her family had lived since the 17th century. Her father, Paul Meinberg, an importer of cattle, was dec‌orated with the Iron Cross in WWI. She describes her early childhood in public school and then a Lyceum for girls. She first felt antisemitism at age of eight and was expelled from school in 1938. She studied Hebrew and Bible once a week. She details Nazi atrocities during and after Crystal Night (Kristallnacht): social ostra‌cism, burning of their home and synagogue, her father’s deportation to and flight from Buchenwald. Remaining family found shelter in a local cloister then fled to Bielefeld. She describes subsequent life in a Judenhaus in Gütersloh, including attempts to educate the children there. HIAS helped the family many times; there was also aid from several Germans in Gütersloh. She briefly mentions a failed attempt to emigrate to Haiti. After many disappointments and a difficult experience at the American Consulate in Stuttgart, the family left Germany for the United States, via Lisbon, Portugal, on the SS Mouzinho, in August 1941. She describes the journey from Berlin to Lisbon in a sealed train, and her stay in Lisbon in a group home run by HIAS. She describes how refugees organized to cope with primitive conditions on the ship, her arrival and processing in Staten Island, NY, and her life in New York in a group home for refugees sponsored by HIAS. She reflects at length on the family’s adjustment in the United States and the survivor’s guilt she feels. She talks about her return to Germany, by invitation, in 1985, accompanied by her husband and daughter.

Kurt Kupferberg was born September 1907 in Berlin, Germany to an observant, middle-class family from Galicia. After World War I, their citizenship was changed to Polish, resulting in their being part of the mass deportation to Zbąszyń, Poland, in 1938. A Nazi policeman had warned them to leave. Kurt describes his return to Germany in 1939, as well as his deportation and experiences in Sachsenhausen in 1939, Dachau in 1940, and Buchenwald in 1941. He details the selections of Dr. Mengele and medical experiments performed on him in Buchenwald, describing his suffering from typhus following an injection of the microorganism under his skin.

As Allied Forces approached Buchenwald, non-Jewish political prisoners sheltered Jews from the S.S. He was liberated by General Patton’s unit July 11, 1945. He married a survivor in Berlin in 1946 and emigrated with his wife and baby to the United States in 1947.

Also see testimony of his wife, Hardy W. Kupferberg.