Oral History Interview with Elsa Kissel

Tess Etkowicz, nee Erman, was born in Lublin, Poland on September 19, 1924, the youngest of 6 childrenfrom a well-to-do family. The family lived in Lodz, Poland from in 1927-28. Before the war her father was a sales representative in textiles. She describes pre-war Poland including her education, synagogue life, and antisemitism and her fright (at 15) at the German invasion (1939) when she worried about family members in Warsaw. She witnessed cruelty by German soldiers and describes how Polish teens came to their apartment and took artwork and her piano.

Her family then fled to Warsaw (where they rented an apartment) until the area became part of the ghetto. Both she and one sister passed as Polish (since they were blond and spoke fluent Polish) and were thus able to smuggle extra food into the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942, Tess and her sister fled the ghetto, and hid in the county. Tess soon decided to go back and smuggle her parents out.

She describes conditions in the Lublin Ghetto: deportation of men, illness, and describes the horrible conditions in the hospital which she witnessed when she contracted typhus. She describes in detail how she smuggled her parents out of the ghetto passing as Poles (wearing shawls, scarfs and caps) and on a train to the small village where she had stayed before. She shares two encounters of aid from non-Jewish Poles.

Tess describes their brazen travels, hiding in the woods, and hiding with sympathetic farmers. Finally, her parents tired of their travels fled to Radomsko with a group of other elderly people, and were later deported to Treblinka. One sister and her four year old daughter were also deported from the Lublin Ghetto to Treblinka. Tess had gone to Warsaw and was passing as a Aryan. She volunteered in a hospital during the Polish uprising against the Nazis in Warsaw. She was sent to a farm because of her injuries and was liberated by the Russians.

After the war she reunited with a sister and a brother in Lodz by chance encounters. They went by train to Paris to meet up with another brother. Tess, two sisters and two brothers survived the war. Tess met her husband, Phil, in Paris. He had been a soldier in the French Fighting Army (FFA) with DeGaulle. They were married in Paris and emigrated to the United States on January 13, 1950.

Bertram Kornfeld, born in Vienna, Austria in 1925, immigrated to the United States in

1938. In February 1944, he joined the U.S. Army and served in the 423rd Battalion of the 106th Infantry Division. During the Battle of the Bulge, he and his crew were captured by German soldiers in Belgium, near Malmedy. They were forced to march with many other prisoners for several days to a railroad, where they were crowded into cattle cars. When the train reached Koblenz, the locked cars were left overnight in a railroad yard where RAF bombers narrowly missed them. They arrived at Stalag 4-B, located between Leipzig and Dresden, in December 1944.

Mr. Kornfeld describes the bitter cold, the callous disregard of sick and dying prisoners during the transport, lack of food and water for two weeks and a limited prison diet thereafter. At his liberation in April 1945, he had lost 50 pounds. Despite his deprivation, he claims that the Germans observed the Geneva Convention in regard to American and British prisoners, but brutally mistreated the Russians. He depicts the Russian liberators of his camp as drunken Cossacks who slaughtered the remaining Germans, but befriended the prisoners by baking bread for them.

When Mr. Kornfeld and some friends fled and met American soldiers in Leipzig, they were given rich food, which sickened them and required a brief hospitalization. He returned to the

United States and was discharged in December 1945.

Steffi Schwarcz, néeBirnbaum, was born March 17, 1928 in Berlin, Germany. She was sent to England on March 15, 1939as part of the Kindertransport, with her younger sister and 11 other children. This group was sponsored by Dr. Schlesinger, an English Jew. She briefly mentions her early life, Kristallnacht, and thegeneral atmosphere in Berlin.

Steffi describes leaving her parents and the journey to England. The children were put up in a hostel in Shepherd's Hill, Highgate. In September 1939, thechildren were evacuated and dispersed. Steffi and her sister were sent to the home of a young Christian couple in Cuffley, Middlesex. She contrasts the respectful attitude of the foster parents with the pressure to convert put on the Jewish children by the headmistress of the KingsleyBoarding School in Cornwall, run by the Church of England, where the sisters were sent in January 1940, by the Jewish Refugee Committee. A local woman intervened on behalf of Jewish children in boarding schools. She enabled them to remain Jewish, observe the Jewish holidays in her home, and to get a Jewish education. Steffi mentions that Jewish girls older than 16 were sent to the Isle of Man as enemy aliens. Steffi discusses in detail the long-term emotional effects of the Nazi era and the stay in English boarding schools on herself and her sister. She now lives in Israel with her husband and daughter.

Erica Van Adelsberg, nee Herz, was born in Munich in 1928 to an assimilated, liberal Jewish family. She left Germany with her parents and younger brother in 1932 to live in Aerdenhoudt, Holland, near Haarlem. They lived comfortably and Erica recalls the decency of the Dutch people. In 1940, after the German occupation, her family was designated as being stateless; they were forced to move and conditions worsened. They were sent to Westerbork internment camp in 1942. Erica continued her education and was trained as a laboratory technician at age 14. She became part of a Zionist youth group, which heightened her Jewish identity, in contrast to her parents assimilated orientation. She describes life in the camp, including her friend’s wedding as well as the weekly transports to Auschwitz.

On February 15, 1944 her family, including grandparents who had joined them, was sent to Bergen-Belsen. She describes the camp routine, her work in a plastic pipe factory and the cruelty of the Polish Kapos. She was sick with para-typhoid for several weeks, with no medication. In April, 1945 the family was transported by train, with about 600 others, all of whom assumed they were going to Auschwitz. After two harrowing weeks, including bombings by Allied planes, the train was liberated by two Russian soldiers on horseback in Trebitz, near Leipzig, in Saxony. The Russians set up a hospital and cared for the survivors, many of whom succumbed to typhoid fever.

Six weeks later, Americans took her family back to Holland, where her brother became the first to celebrate a Bar Mitzvah after the war. Erica came to the United States in 1946 and was the first European student admitted to a Quaker school after World War II. Collateral material to this interview includes copies of two small books of poetry written by Erica, in German and in Dutch, when she was in Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen.

Interviewee: VAN ADELSBERG, Erica Date: December 8, 1981

HasiaAufschauer, nee Chaya Sara Honikman, was born in Lodz, Poland on January 7, 1923. She had 5 siblings and lived in a new area of Lodz called Chojny, which had about 200,250 Jews before the war. Her father was a kosher butcher. Her home served as the orthodox synagogue for the local butchers and was called, The Katsuvish Synagogue. Hasia went to a public, predominately Catholic school, and most of her friends were Catholic. Hasia belonged to Betar, a Zionist youth group.

After the German invasion, her family fled to Czestochowa to her father’s relatives and she went to a small village, Myszkow, and became the family provider, working as a black market smuggler near the German border. She bought chickens from Polish farmers, sold them to Jews and sent food to her family in Czestochowa through the Polish Red Cross.

In 1941 the Germans took one brother to Markstadt, a labor camp of Gross-Rosen run by Krupp. Hasia was caught and deported from Sosnowice to a women’s slave labor camp in, Parshnitz, near Prague, in Sudetengau, a German southern province of Czechoslovakia. The women worked in a flax factory, Hasse, making linen. Hasia was helped by a Czech-German foreman who was later honored by YadVashem. Hasia describes in detail the horrors and worsening conditions after the SS took over in 1942, as well as the sufferings and brutality in the mass evacuation from the camp in the final stages of the war. They survived because they remained at the factory and were liberated by the Russians on May 8, 1945. One of Hasia’s brothers survived, but her parents and younger siblings perished in Auschwitz, and an older brother was killed by Polish partisans. She describes her painful return to her parents’ home in Chojny after the war.

Hasia stayed in Raichanbach1, Germany where she met her future husband. She describes how they lived in Weiden, Germany after the war. A daughter was born in 1946 in Germany. In 1949 they came to the United States where a son was born in 1953.

Myra Davis, nee Miki Heller, was born July 12, 1936 in Kovno, Lithuania, the only child in an affluent Jewish family. Her parents were Franz and Fanny Heller. After the Russian invasion in 1940, her family was forced to move from their large home to much smaller quarters. In 1940, they immigrated to Japan with transit visas and visas for Curacao, which were not used. Instead, they went to Shanghai, in 1941, after a year in Kobe, Japan, where Myra attended a French Catholic school.

In the French quarter of Shanghai, they lived comfortably until the Japanese occupation forced them into the Hongkew Ghetto. Her father, despondent about their impoverishment, committed suicide. When the war ended, her mother worked for the American Army and met a Jewish colonel, David Bare (phonetic), whom she married in 1947. The family lived in Beijing, China, Linz, Austria and South Carolina, United States. Myra became a translator for the American government, married Arnold Davis and they live with their two children in Boca Raton, Florida.

Recorded at the Rickshaw Reunion - a meeting in October 1999 at the Holiday Inn in Philadelphia of refugees who found refuge in Shanghai during World War II.