Oral History Interview with Genia Golombek

Zina Farber, nee Bass, one of six children, was born December 6, 1933 in Bialystok, Poland. Her father was a businessman. She shares her very early childhood memories of antisemitism (having been taught to always step off pavements when encountering Gentiles, at the risk of being beaten). She also recounts that the most vivid detail of her early life in Poland is her very warm family.

Having been separated from both parents very early in the war, her eldest brother took care of the family. In 1943, after confinement in Bialystok and PruzhanyGhettos, she and four brothers were sent to Auschwitz. She describes the round up of Jews in Pruzhany, the deportation in open cattle trucks, arrival, selection, and shaving. She describes the absolute miracle that she was not immediately gassed, being dragged out of her assigned truck and put instead with the group of women assigned to hard labor. She was 10 years old. She attributes this miracle to the fact that she was wearing her mother’s coat which made her look older than she was. She explains several times that it is too painful to recount the innumerable stories she could tell about her one and half year experience in Auschwitz. She is able to share descriptions of her constant hunger and fear. She describes fear of punishment – i. e. having her head pushed into a barrel of excrement– and relates the necessity of always wearing her soup bowl on a rope around her neck, even when sleeping. She also describes how the girls took care of each other, reddening cheeks before selections for example. She endured a two-week death march in mid-April 1945 to Ravensbrück and Neustadt-Gleiwitz (possibly Neustadt-Glewe).

Liberated by American soldiers, she travelled to Bialystok, where she was reunited with her father who had survived five years in Siberia. Mrs. Farber was separated several years earlier from her mother, who had been transported to Treblinka. After a failed attempt to emigrate to Palestine from the Landsberg displaced persons camp, Mrs. Farber left for the United States in 1949. Sponsored by an uncle in Philadelphia, she remained there, married and had two sons.

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

Max Roisman was born July 25, 1913 in Warsaw, Poland. In 1939, before the German invasion of Poland, he and his wife left Warsaw to go to Russia. Stopped at the border, he remained in Slawatycze and worked with a local tailor for German SS border guards. Warned by an SS officer, who had made a deathbed promise to his Jewish grandfather never to kill a Jew, Max and his wife hid in a nearby town, then went to Wohyn posing as a Gentile. Using a sewing machine smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto, he worked as a tailor with a non-Jewish partner until he was ordered to work for the Germans as a tailor in Suchowola, an open labor camp.

On May 3, 1943, the camp was liquidated and workers were evacuated to Majdanek. Max, with his wife and her brother, signed up to go to Auschwitz unaware of the nature of the camp. He was sent to Buna to work as a slave laborer for I.G. Farben Industry, then on a forced march to Gleiwitz where they borded a train to Oranienburg (a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen) to work in a brick factory. Later he worked as a tailor for the commandant of the camp, Major Heydrich and was put in charge of four other tailors. He obtained food and clothing for other inmates and himself by trading stolen supplies. In April 1945, Max was wounded during an air raid. He received excellent medical care due to the intervention of the camp commandant. He hid when the camp was evacuated and the German military ran away. The remaining survivors organized to get food and water until the Russians liberated the camp. He describes conditions at Oranienburg, help from the Russians, and how he traveled East, across the border and was separated from his wife. He was sheltered by a Polish family who had hidden him once before and was reunited with his wife.

They lived in his wife’s hometown, moved to Reichenbach where he opened a shop, then briefly in Israel. He returned to Austria, worked as a tailor for USEC, and later emigrated to the United States with his wife and children in January 1956.

Interview: ROISMAN, Max Date: April 22, 1985

Samuel Flor1 was born in Czernowitz, Romania. He talks about experiencing antisemitism, his education, and his career as a composer, musician, and a professor at the university in Czernowitz.

He describes life in Czernowitz first under Russian and then under German occupation. He explains why it was impossible to leave and how he and his wife, Gertrude tried to escape in June, 1941, but failed. He was part of a brutal roundup of Jewish men, and had to bury Jewish men who were machine-gunned to death by Germans near the River Prut. After being tormented by the Germans, the survivors, including Samuel Flor, returned home.

In October, 1941 all Jews had to move into a ghetto until they were deported to the Ukraine under terrible conditions, including periodic whippings by both German and Romanian soldiers. He describes a particularly cruel incident involving Jews from Mogilev, a forced circular death march, and several atrocities committed by Ukrainian peasants. Mr. Flor worked as a slave laborer in a stone quarry in Ladesti on the Bugac and in Tulchin in a hospital.

He relates a chilling vignette in which Sonderführer Fritz von Rohde explains why killing Jews is a service to humanity.

As the Germans retreated Mr. and Mrs. Flor and about 66 other people hid in a hole they had dug previously for more than three days, until March 15, 1944. He describes how the 300 Jewish survivors tried to cope once the Russian army came, and his return to Czernowitz. His apartment had been nationalized so Mr. and Mrs. Flor joined the Czech army. He explains how they got out of Prague, emigrated to Barranquilla, Colombia, (South America) and then to the United States where Mr. Flor continued his musical career.

Dr. Gertrude Hallo, nee Rubensohn, was a personal friend of Franz Rosenzweig. She talks about her and her husband’s association and personal relationship with Franz Rosenzweig, starting in 1910 through his final illness, when she learned to take dictation from Franz Rosenzweig who could only move part of one little finger. She explains why Franz Rosenzweig decided not to convert to Christianity but to devote his life to personal Jewish learning, and to improving Jewish education for children and adults. He strove to combine orthodox practice with liberal thought. She explains why one should focus on the man and his life, not on his philosophical system and his theological teachings.

Dr. Hallo talks about Rosenzweig’s life, work, major accomplishments, publications, and some of the well-known persons who studied with him. She describes how he was able to live and to teach after he was stricken with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. Franz Rosenzweig kept up an enormous correspondence, continued to write, publish and to translate Hebrew books into German until his death on December 9, 1929.

Dr. Hallo uses the historical background in Germany, the Jewish youth movement, Zionism, and the beginning of the racist Teutonic movement to explain why young Jews had to fight for their Jewish identity in Germany in the 1920s. She briefly talks about the Freikorps, the Kapp Putsch, and the economic, social, and political situation in Germany leading up to the rise of Hitler.

She reflects on Jewish participation in German art and culture and her own early experiences of antisemitism. Her husband died shortly before Hitler came to power, and she talks about her memories of the time just before and after Hitler’s rise to power and the basis of Hitler’s charisma and success.

See also her 1978 interview.

Note: the Collateral Material fileavailable through the Gratz College Tuttleman Library includes:

English translation (done in Nov. 1985) by Dr. Hallo of an article by her husband Dr. Rudolf Hallo “The Pasalter” dedicated to Franz Rosenzweig.

Saul Horn was born in Lódz, Poland in 1913. Saul briefly describes the thriving pre-war Lodz Jewish community. Saul recounts the effects of the German occupation on his family, losing the family business and fleeing to the Glowno Ghetto in December 1939, which was outside the German Reich at the time. He describes the difficult conditions in the ghetto, working outside the ghetto and trying to buy extra food. He describes their deportation to the Warsaw Ghetto when Germany took over that area in 1941. Saul describes working as a slave laborer in the Warsaw Ghetto, at Okecie airfield, and the gruesome effect of starvation, especially on children, as well as on people in general. He explains how he escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto to Opatów and later rescued 10 women, using bribery. After six months in Opatów they were captured by the SS and sent to Skarzysko labor camp. He details the horrible living conditions and brutal treatment by Ukrainian guards. His wife died of typhoid in 1942.

Saul details his deportation to Buchenwald by cattle train in 1944. Of the 2000 Jews on this transport only 200 survived. He describes the brutal conditions, especially the hunger, and how he became the head of the small hospital - staffed by Jewish doctors - that had no supplies. Saul witnessed several atrocities committed by Germans.

Buchenwald was liberated by the Russians in May, 1945. He mentions what occurred after liberation and his search for relatives in Lódz. He was reunited with three of his wife’s sisters and later married one of them. In 1945 he established a manufacturing business in Poland.

He explains how they were smuggled out of Poland to the Schlupfing Displaced Persons camp in Germany, helped by the Haganah, in 1946. He went to Landsberg Displaced Persons camp in 1948. Saul, his wife and two year old daughter, arrived in the United States in June 1949. He lived in Patterson N.J. and briefly talks about his life there and how he taught himself to speak English.

Liza Kessler, nee Rak, was born in the Ukrainian town of Vinnitsa, located on the Polish border between Kiev and Odessa. A center of Jewish learning, it boasted 15 Jewish schools. Liza graduated from a Jewish high school, married and had two children. Liza describes how in July, 1941, after a German bombing raid, Polish Jews fled into her town. She heard reports from them that the Jews were herded into the synagogue and burned. Liza with her two children, and sisters-in-law and their children fled with the ‘echelons’ (transports which carried machinery). They boarded a barge for Central Asia. In November, 1941 they arrived in Georgia. They stayed on a kolkhoz (collective farm) until the Germans came. They then fled further East to Uzbekistan, finally landing in Bukhara where they stayed until the end of the war. Liza describes harsh conditions: food rationing and bitter cold. Liza’s sisters and parents were murdered in mass killings.

After World War II Liza went back to Poland with her second husband, a Jewish Polish national. Because it was too much like Russia, they left and were smuggled into the American zone in Austria via Czechoslovakia. Liza and her family stayed in Austria for five years. They were aided by the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration). Finally, in 1950, through an aunt in Philadelphia they received papers and were able to enter the United States as part of the quota.

Interviewee: KESSLER, Liza Date: January 18, 1983