Oral History Interview with Dora Langsam

Werner Glass, born in 1927, the youngest child of a Berlin pediatrician, emigrated to Shanghai in 1933 with his family and governess. His father, a founder of the Shanghai Doctors Association, practiced medicine in the family’s apartment in the International Settlement. A comfortable life, with many Chinese servants, is described. Werner attended German and English schools, technical college and a French-Jewish university. A vignette relates student resistance to Japanese occupation.

In 1938, his father’s passport was not renewed and the family became stateless. An influx of German refugees, including his grandparents, led to the formation of the JüdischeGemeinde; he details refugee support by the “Joint” and the Sephardic community. He describes his religious education, his Bar Mitzvah in 1940, and his activity in a Jewish Boy Scout troop.

After Pearl Harbor, enemy nationals were interned in a Japanese POW camp, and a ghetto was established in Hongkew for all post-1937 refugees, both Jews and non-Jews. The Glass family, as stateless immigrants who arrived in 1933, were unaffected. In 1942, they were dispossessed by a Japanese officer and moved into one room in a hotel occupied by Chinese and Russian prostitutes. Difficult living conditions, Japanese rules of conduct and penalties for infractions are depicted.

Werner emigrated to the United States in 1947, sponsored by his sister Helga who married an American-Jewish soldier. He completed graduate studies in Chemical Engineering at Syracuse University, married and fathered several sons.

Simon Aufschauer was born on February 15, 1915 in Żółkiew, near Lvov (Lemberg) Galicia, Poland. His father died when he was 4 and at age 13 he was apprenticed to a furrier. He described the antisemitism of the Polish and Ukrainian schoolchildren of Lvov when he was growing up. Simon belonged to Betar, a Jewish youth movement, and he and his brother worked to help their widowed mother.

Simon was drafted into the Polish army in 1937 and he fought briefly against the German Army when they invaded Poland in 1939. He was captured and then escaped from a detention camp by putting on civilian clothes. In Lvov, now under the Soviets, Simon, worked as a furrier until being drafted into the Soviet Army with his brother, on June 21, 1941. When his brother was killed by the German Army Simon fled and returned to his mother in Lvov. After the German invasion of Lvov she was sent to Belzec, where she perished. Simon describes the murder of 2,000 Jews from the ghetto in Lemberg in April 1942. Since Simon was a strong worker, he was sent to several slave labor camps: in December 1941 to Janowska, Lemberg; in 1943 to Plaszow, Krakow; in 1944 to Gross Rosen; and finally on May8, 1945, he was liberated by the Soviets from Reichenbach. He described the horrific conditions in these slave labor camps: 12 to 18 hour days of slave labor, sickness, brutalities, crematoria (in Gross Rosen), and digging out dead bodies and burning them in order to erase evidence of the murders (in Plaszow, Krakow,1943). He also described attempts of the Jews to pray and fast for Yom Kippur at these places.

Simon met his wife in a Displaced Persons camp (May 1945) and they were marriedAugust 12, 1945. They were able to come to the United States soon after. He attributed his ability to survive to his experience as a furrier and to his youthful strength. Throughout his testimony is the pervasive recounting of Polish and Ukrainian antisemitism, even after the war.

See also the oral history of Hasia Aufschauer, Mr. Aufschauer’s wife, who was also interviewed for the Gratz College Holocaust Oral History Archive.

Mina Kalter, née Basseches, was born in 1921 in Przeworsk, Poland, into a religious family. Her father was a traveling merchant and her mother in retail fabrics. Both parents were active in Zionist organizations and charitable endeavors and on good terms with Christian neighbors, until 1939. She describes the extensive work of the Kehillah in helping those in need. She provides extensive detail of life after the German invasion of Poland in 1939: bombing and desecration of the synagogue, forced labor, confiscation of Jewish property, ghettoization of all Jews, the lack of any help by former Christian friends, ghetto conditions. She describes smuggling her small brother to the home of a loyal former family housekeeper and later her escape from a work detail in March 1941. She then crossed the River San to Soviet-controlled Poland where she was helped by a Russian Jewish family prior to being resettled in a small town near L’vov. She describes in detail life under Soviet rule in Poland. She was exiled to Siberia because she refused to accept Soviet citizenship. She describes her transport to and life in a labor camp for four years, until May 1945. She also relates her clandestine trip outside the Siberian camp to obtain potatoes for planting.

In March 1945, as a Polish citizen, she received by mail permission to return to Poland. Recently married, she describes working her way across Siberia toward Poland with her husband in June 1945, where she experienced antisemitism. Through the Joint Distribution Committee in Szczecin, she learned of the survival of her two brothers and joined them in a displaced persons camp in Berlin in August 1945. She describes in detail the living conditions with her new born baby. There is a brief mention of her stay at another camp near Landsberg in 1948. She and her family immigrated to the United States in 1950. She describes her adjustment in the U.S., her children’s awareness of their parents’ background, and their commitment to Judaism. She concludes with the hope that her testimony will remind future generations of the horrors of the Hitler years.

Anna Sultanik, née Tiger, was born May 20, 1929 in Krakow, Poland as the older of two children of Dr. Tiger and Sara Meth Tiger. Her pre-war memories include her family’s sheltering of German-Jewish refugees en-route to America. She describes the sudden changes in her secure, upper-middle class life with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 including her father’s escape, confiscation of the family’s possessions, forced sharing of the family’s apartment with five other families when the Krakow ghetto was established, involuntary participation in medical experiments. In March 1940, she begins to work in Plaszow work camp connected to the Krakow Ghetto after mother volunteers to join her 6-year-old brother in transport from the ghetto. She describes work in detail and mentions Amon Goeth, camp commander, later tried and executed as a war criminal. She details her narrow escapes from death after being forced to dig her own grave, being hidden from camp hospital evacuation by her parents’ friends. She describes her work as tailor’s apprentice until Plaszow was evacuated in 1944.

She describes march to Auschwitz and her one-week stay there followed by prolonged cattle-car trip to Bergen-Belsen. Many details are included about her one-year stay in Bergen-Belsen until liberation by British on April 15, 1945. She tells of immediate tragic aftermath of liberation from misguided overfeeding of prisoners. She mentions her two-year stay in Displaced Persons Camp in Frankfurt-am-Main including efforts to find her father. Following her marriage in 1948, she was able to emigrate to U.S. with sponsorship of a family who had received pre-war shelter from her family. She details her eventual reunion with her father shortly before his death in Israel in 1967.

Alan Spiegel was born August 11, 1903 in Orahovicza, Yugoslavia into a wealthy Zionist family. He details his family history in Hungary including his grandfather being a Second Adjutant during the Hungarian Revolution. Mr. Spiegel studied medicine at Budapest University. He discusses the difficulty for Jewish students to be admitted due tonumerus clausus policy and that he was dismissed in 1920, three months before graduation by a prejudiced faculty. An ardent Zionist, he then worked for the Jewish National Fund while employed in a family business.

In 1932, he married Elizabeth Boschan, in Cluj, Romania, where they lived until 1939. In Budapest, he had to serve as a slave laborer under the Hungarians. Mr. Spiegel gives testimony about working with Rezsö Kastner and Joel Brand to exchangethe release of over 1,000 Jews to Switzerland for money in 1944 and how he found out from one of the more humane German officers that their transport was destined for Auschwitz even though they paid. He details how he arranged to bribe other SS to have the transport sent to Bergen-Belsen instead. Two months later, a smaller group of 350 was sent to Switzerland of which he and his family were a part. He discusses how Kastner was condemned in Palestine for his actions. Mr. Spiegel also shares a vignette about how he secured the release of hundreds of Jewish boys and how small meaningful occurrences helped him have the strength to continue his work. He also relates memories about theVizhnitzerRebbe.

In 1947, Spiegel emigrated from Switzerland to the United States with his wife and daughter.

Frieda Appel, née Gottesman or Feldstein, was born into an Orthodox family August 18, 1929 in Kliachanovo, Czechoslovakia, near Munkács. Her father was a cattle dealer. Although, Frieda and her brother were offered shelter by the sheriff, a close friend of her father’s, her father decided to keep the family together. They were sent to the Munkács Ghetto for four weeks until transported to Auschwitz in May 1944. She refers to several interactions with Mengele, upon entering the camp and at a selection at the showers. After six weeks, she was sent to Gelsenkirchen and Essen labor camps. She was transported to Bergen-Belsen and describes the conditions there. She refers to several kindnesses shown to her by camp personnel in the different camps. She was liberated in Bergen-Belsen April 15, 1945. The Red Cross took her and her sister to Prague through Pilsen, and then to Munkács. In May 1946, she went to a DP camp in Germany where she married at age 16. They emigrated to the United States September 27, 1949, where Jewish Family Service helped them.

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