Oral History Interview with Ephraim Glaser

Fanny Schwartz was born on December 16, 1911 in Stavna, Czechoslovakia. She was brought up by a very observant father who was a shochet (ritual slaughterer) who tutored his children in their Jewish subjects. He was also a leader in the local kehillah. There were nine children in the family; only Fanny, two of her sisters and two brothers survived. Her brothers came to the United States in 1939.

Fanny was living in Berecin1 with her husband and young son before the war started. They lost their store in 1938 when the Hungarians occupied Czechoslovakia. Fanny describes the Hungarians as very antisemitic. Fanny’s husband was taken to a work camp but was able to return and the family was able to remain in Berecin for a time. By early 1940 men were taken daily to work camps, but in 1944, right after Passover, the Hungarians took the Jews from Berecin, via the Ungvar Ghetto, on transports to Auschwitz. Fanny describes in great detail the horrific conditions of the transport: Hungarian police overseers marching them to the cattle trains, hysterical mothers and children, no food or water.

She describes in detail her arrival at Auschwitz, separation of families, selections by Mengele, delousing and head shaving, atrocities and cruelty toward the prisoners. Fanny and the healthier women were sent to Birkenau, Camp C. She details surviving several selections by Mengele. From October 1944 until January 1945 Fannyand her sister were sent to a women’s work camp Schlesiersee, a sub-camp of Gross Rosen, in Poland.

Fanny discusses her religious faith and how it helped her to survive and gives examples of religious observance: trying to light holiday candles and observing Tisha B’Av. Fanny details the death march in January 1945 during which time she injured her leg. Her health deteriorated and she and her sister escaped from the march and spent four nights hiding in a box. She managed to get to a hospital for foreign refugees and was very ill, with back injuriesas well as tuberculosis. Fanny was liberated from a Red Cross hospital in Pirna, Germany by Russian soldiers on May 8, 1945.

In Germany,Fanny suffered for 10 years inmany hospitalizations. She was in a hospital in Heidenau (near Dresden) for two years. In 1947, Fanny was in the DP camp, Schlachtensee, in Berlin, and later in hospitals in Munich and Gauting for TB, where the Germans paid her medical bills. Finally, in 1955, after procuring papers, she joined her relatives in the United States.

Alex Krasheninnikow was born in Kiev, USSR in 1934. He knew that his father, a scientist, and his mother, an artist, were Jews but he had no religious education. He recalls a happy childhood with his parents in a large collective apartment shared with four Soviet families.

After the German invasion in 1941, his family was hidden in the attic of Vassily and Ina Baranovski in Darnitsa, near Kiev. Gold jewelry was exchanged for food and shelter until November 1943 when their hideout was discovered and their protectors were shot. Alex and his parents were sent by freight car to Brätz concentration camp near Schwiebus. Watchtbandguards beat them with clubs and separated men from women. Food shortages, cold barracks and arduous road building are mentioned, and the daily gymnastic regime of forced running for hours is detailed.

The Russian Army liberated the camp in January 1945 and the reunited Krasheninnikow family returned to Kiev. In July 1950, they moved to Munich illegally. In December 1950, they emigrated to Philadelphia, where Alex became a court interpreter. He refers to accounts in Russian publications that number the Babi Yar killings during 1941 – 1943 with various figures, from 30,000 to 100,000.

This document is a program for an event titled 'A Conversation with Elie Wiesel' held at Chapman University on April 9, 2014. The program welcomes Orange High School and includes a detailed biography of Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, highlighting his experiences during the Holocaust, his literary work (especially 'Night'), and his extensive activism for peace and human rights globally. It mentions his numerous awards and his involvement with The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity and Boston University. The program lists participants in the event, including Professor Jan Osborn, Principal Ernie Gonzalez, and President James L. Doti, and features several quotes attributed to Elie Wiesel. The document serves as an informational booklet for attendees of the event.

Moshe Moskowitz was born in 1922 in Lespitz-Baya, Romania to a merchant family that was traditional but not deeply religious. He studied in a Jewish school, then in a vocational school. He planned to go to Palestine, joined a Zionist youth group and worked in an agricultural community. After the German occupation, Jews were transferred from the villages to the large cities, and many were sent to forced labor camps. His Zionist youth group became active in the resistance. Moshe took on Aryan identity, as did others who had contact with Zionist emissaries in Constantinople and Switzerland. Emissaries from England and the U.S. often attended the resistance meetings. The diplomatic courier who carried letters from the resistance betrayed them, and those who were arrested were sent to camps in Transnistria.

Moshe and his group smuggled children out of camps, gave them false identities, and set up cultural activities until they could be processed to go to Palestine on illegal immigration on ships. In 1944, British-trained parachutists from Palestine landed in Romania and Moshe’s Zionist group was among those who gave them identity papers, living quarters and maps to help them reach Bucharest. They also helped German, American and English prisoners-of- war in Brasov with money, clothing and medicine. After liberation, they rushed to the American and British zones to take Jewish prisoners out of the range of German bombings. Moshe was in charge of the funds through the Landsmanshuteyfor such operations. Groups who were involved in saving children maintained connections in Israel. Moshe emigrated to Israel post-war.

Manya Perel, nee Frydman, was born 1924 in Radom, Poland, youngest of 10 children in a traditional Jewish family. Her father had a bakery. She describes her education and Jewish life in Radom, Polish antisemitism, Przytyk pogrom in 1936, and continues with post-September 1939 German invasion. She mentions persecutions, deportation of younger males to Belzec labor camp, 1941, establishment of ghetto in Radom, collaboration of Volksdeutsche and Ukrainians in brutalities, and some help by Jew‌ish police.

She details the August 1942 “resettlement” of Radom Jews to Treblinka gas chambers, with younger, able-bodied persons retained for forced labor in factories near Radom. She describes her efforts to hide her five-year-old niece in the barracks of a Majdanek sub-camp.

She was transferred to Majdanek, then to Plaszow and to Auschwitz. She describes conditions in these camps and the even harsher conditions in Gundelsdorf, Oberfranken, Germany, where slave laborers were taken as Russian Army approached. She experienced near starvation early 1945 during flight with guards to Camps Ravensbrück and Rechlin. She nearly died of typhus after liberation. After she recov‌ered she made her way back to Radom to search for family and found continued antisemitism there. She remembers German promise of safe exit to Radom Jews with foreign passports in exchange for prisoners of war and how they were executed instead.

She went to Stuttgart with the help of UNRRA and the Joint Distribution Committee. After three years of rehabilitation, she emigrated to Montreal, Canada in 1948 and moved to Philadelphia in 1958.

Hardy W. Kupferberg, nee Wiersh, was born on September 15, 1922 in Berlin, Germany to a religious family. Her mother died when she was three years old. Her father remarried when she was seven. Her father, a decorated WWI veteran, owned a lamp factory and was active in synagogue and community life.Hardy’s relationships with non-Jews was positive until 1931 when she experienced antisemitism both in school and during several hospitalizations. She describes increasing antisemitism with the Nuremberg laws --the Aryanization of her father’s business, Jews forbidden from public parksand required to bring their pets to be killed.No longer permitted in the public school, she describes the positive atmosphere ofher Jewish school. She was taught by Rabbiner Doctor Regina Jonas, whom she loved and who is known to be the first woman rabbi. She relates that the school included Mischlingerwho very often sided with the anti-Semites.

Hardydetails the horrors and emotional toll of Kristallnacht. She saw a group of Hitler Youth throwing stones through the broken windows of the burnt synagogue. She shares a story that she buried inside for 30 years -- when one of the stones rolled near her in her hiding place, she picked it up and threw it at one of the boys. It hit his head and he fell. In the commotion she left the scene and walked home.

The morning of Kristallnacht, the family apartment was ransacked. In 1939 she and her parents were compelled to do forced labor. For a small salary, she worked outdoors in a tree nursery under horrible conditions and described that the girls’ arms would bleed daily. She was granted a transfer to a plane factory making cables. In 1941 Hardy witnessed the shooting of her little cousins during a deportation. She also saw zoo personnel desecrating the synagogue by bringing elephants from the Berlin zoo into it. Hardy describes the deportation of her grandmother to Riga. They never heard from her again.

In February 1943, Hardy’s parents were taken from their place of work by Viennese Gestapo who arrested 10,000 Berlin Jews. Because they were taken from work, they did not have their knapsacks, in which they had packed some necessities including poison. When Hardy went to Gestapo headquarters with the knapsacks to find her parents,an official pointed

out a window toward a group of vans from which dead bodies were being pulled and told her that was where her parents were. She learned later that they were murdered in Auschwitz.

Hardy went into hiding for a year and a half, helped by several non-Jews. Some asked to be paid and a friend of her father’s provided money. Hardy was caught by a Jewish woman and deported to Ravensbrück in March 1944. She details some experiences, including witnessing an atrocity against a child and her job clearing the dead from the barracks in the morning. At Hardy’s request, the focus of this oral history is mainly the years in Berlin and not on her concentration camp experience as she felt that her camp experience was not unique to her.

She was liberated by the Soviets and repatriated to Berlin, where she met her husband Kurt Kupferberg in March 1946. They arrived in the United States August 20, 1947.1

See also her second 1983 interview and also her husband’s 1981 interview.