Oral History Interview with Elizabeth Bleiman

Arnold J. Miller served in the 245th Combat Engineers of the United States 3rd Army in Austria. He went to Ebensee concentration camp, on his own, one day after it was liberated. A Jewish physician, who had served as a camp doctor, showed him the camp and told him about the brutal treatment of the prisoners. Mr. Miller vividly describes what he saw: prisoners who looked like walking skeletons, mass graves, and crematoria. Once the survivors realized he was Jewish, they told him their experiences. Later, he briefly stopped at a work camp for women and relates the testimony of a Russian soldier who had seen atrocities in Dachau and Auschwitz.

Mr. Miller mentions his experiences while stationed in the Army of Occupation in Bavaria in 1945. Because he spoke their language, he had several interesting encounters with German citizens.

Dora Freilich, nee Golubowitz, was born December 25, 1926 in Pruzany, Poland, near Bialystok. She describes pre-war life: schooling, relations with non-Jewish Poles, Jewish community life and youth groups. She talks in great detail about the Russian occupation 1939-41, including expropriation of her family’s business. After the German invasion, her family had to move into the Pruzany Ghetto in June 1941. She describes living conditions, cultural activities, labor units, Judenrat, and contact with Jewish partisans in the ghetto. A non-Jewish ex-employee of her father hid her baby sister but later the family asked him to return the child.

Dora describes the evacuation of the ghetto in January 1943, and her family’s transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She witnessed Mengele’s sadistic games with prisoners and was aware of medical experiments, which she describes in great detail. She details sadistic behavior by guards, including shooting her sister for sport. Conditions at Birkernau: slave labor, types of prisoners, orchestra, death process, and relations among inmates are described. She explains how older girls tried to help the younger ones and the coping strategies they used to survive.

She describes the sabotage of a crematorium in October 1944 and the public hanging of four girls held responsible. She describes the escape, capture and execution of Mala Zimetbaum.

In January 1945 she experienced the final days of the camp and described the death march to and conditions in Ravensbrück. After three months she went to Malchow. Dora and 11 girls escaped into the forest. They were liberated by Russian soldiers May 1945. She describes treatment by Russians, which ranged from kindness to brutality.

The girls returned to Pruzany after a three month journey where Dora experienced both antisemitism and help from non-Jews. They went on to Lodz. Their attempt to go to Palestine with Aliyah Bet failed. Dora and her friend, Bess, married two brothers. In 1946 they went to Feldafing, a Displaced Persons camp. She emigrated to the United States in March, 1949. Dora talks about survivor’s guilt and how the Holocaust and the loss of her family still affects both her and her daughter. Her husband, Bernard, and her friend Bess were also interviewed by the Holocaust Oral History Archive staff.

Individual was a Captain in the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) of the United States Army during World War II. He entered Dachau Concentration Camp in April 1945, a few days after liberation, to interrogate Nazis who stayed behind because they wanted to be questioned by Americans not Russians. He was taken on a tour of Dachau and describes what he saw and heard, including accounts of atrocities inflicted on the prisoners, and what he learned during the interrogation, in gruesome detail. He mentions how the experience of seeing Dachau affected him and the other men in his unit.

He reported to his commanding officer in Munich. He was assigned to a Displaced Persons camp at Coburg, Germany. He describes poor conditions at the camp, nightly searches, the treatment of survivors, and briefly mentions a riot at the camp in 1946. He explains why he feels that the displaced persons could have been treated more humanely and how these experiences affect him still.

Sara Adler, nee Apel, was born in Radom, Poland in 1927. Her family was close-knit, religious, well-to-do and involved in community welfare. They had non-Jewish contacts through their lumber business, but Sara attended Jewish school and had primarily Jewish friends.The family fled Radom in 1939 under Ger‌man bombardment but returned and were put into the Radom Ghetto soon after. Through bribing Polish contacts, her father, her uncle and she were able to live and work in Szydlowiec (Kielce area), a munitions factory outside the ghetto. In late summer 1942, the ghetto was liquidated and the rest of her family was sent to Treblinka. Her father, her uncle and she continued working in the munitions factory until 1944.

With the Russian approach in July 1944 the Germans marched the prisoners 100 miles to Tomaszow under horrible conditions and from there shipped them to Auschwitz. She describes the cattle cars, arrival, selection, unsanitary conditions and Appells. She recounts how she was helped by a fellow inmate. She was sent to work in a string factory in Lichtewerden, Czechoslovakia in the Sudetenland. She describes some of the brutality and also kindnesses of some Germans and others. After the liberation by the Russians, Sara managed to return totally destitute to Radom. Though helped by some Polish locals upon her return, other former Polish friends refused to return the family’s belongings to her. She left with some friends for Stuttgart, Germany, and got married. She emigrated to the United States in January 1949.

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

Herbert Lindemeyer was born in Minden, Germany in 1922. His father owned a pharmacy. He describes antisemitism after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933 and briefly mentions the boycott of Jew‌ish stores in April 1933 and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. He describes his parents’ discussions of whether to emigrate. After Kristallnacht, his father was incarcerated in Buchenwald for a month and his pharmacy confiscated by the Nazis.

Herbert emigrated to England in August 1939 through the help of a British Quaker woman. He describes in detail his internment, with thousands of German and Austrian refugees—in June 1940 on the Isle of Man. In December 1941 he was allowed to leave when he obtained a defense job in Manchester, England. There in January 1944 he married a woman who had traveled to England on the Kindertransport. In October 1945 he joined the American Army for an assignment in Germany as an interpreter and mail censor. One assignment was the tracking of Werner Von Braun. Later he returned to Minden where the new owner of his father’s pharmacy had kept papers which helped Herbert obtain restitution. He emigrated to the United States in 1948.

Hanna Seckel1, nee Dubová, born July 22, 1925 in Kolin Czechoslovakia, grew up in Prague in a middle-class, secular family. Her father was a doctor. Hanna describes her early childhood education, getting involved in a Zionist Youth Movement, and the German occupation of Sudetenland including school closings and restrictions imposed on Jews.

In October 1939, when she was 14 years old, she was sent to Denmark as part of a transport of children from HashomerHatzair sponsored by the Danish League of Peace and Freedom. Hanna describes her life and work in Denmark in great detail. She worked at two farms under harsh conditions. One was near Gørløse,the other near Næstved where she had contact with other children from the transport.Through letters from her family she learned about worsening conditions of Jews in Prague. In 1942 her parents wrote that they would be deported to Auschwitz and she attempted suicide. She briefly mentions the Danish underground.

Hanna recalls working as a chambermaid at a Danish boarding school in exchange for her tuition there and also for a family in Næstved after she quit school in 1943. She details her feelings of being an outsider and her financial difficulties. She discusses the fates of some of the other refugee children—some reached Palestine, some were caught, some were sent back to their original countries by Denmark and sent to concentration camps. She also describes her rescue by the Danish underground and the harrowing journey to Sweden hidden in a fishingboat. The Chief Rabbi of Copenhagen, Rabbi Melchior, was part of the group. She details the warm reception by the Swedes and aid from the Red Cross.

Hanna describes her life in Sweden working as a maid for room and board at two different nursing schools inNorrköpingand Södertälje, losing touch with her former friends, receiving ng her nursing certificate and working in an insane asylum.

Hanna returned to Denmark in 1945 because she heard that she was entitled to Danish citizenship which was not true. In Copenhagen she worked in a restitution office for Danish Jews. She returned to Prague in 1946 and lived with relatives whileearning a degree from Charles University, then returned to Denmark on a Nansen Pass in 1947. After a lengthy illness, she went to Sweden and worked in a factory owned by the Nobel family, as a translator. In 1950, she emigrated to the United States under the Czech quota.