Oral History Interview with Hans Braun

Dr. Leon Friedman was born February 17, 1902 in Warsaw, Poland. His parents owned a grocery store. He received his teacher’s diploma and Ph.D. from Warsaw University. He discusses pre-war antisemitism and his education. He joined HashomerHatzairand served in Palestine from 1922 to 1924 instead of serving in the Polish army. He describes life in Kibbutz Hashomer Hatzair. He returned to Poland where he taught for 14 years.

In 1939 he walked to Bialystock illegally with a group of Jews. He lived under Russian occupation until June 1940, when he was sent to the village of Mandacz in Komi, Siberia with his wife and daughter for refusing a Russian passport. He describes travel to, conditions in, and escape from Mandacz in detail. Dr. Friedman worked as the chief accountant in Murashi. He went to Sochi (Southern Russia) as part of a transfer of 3000 Jews, which he arranged. He describes life in Sochi whose population was predominantly Greek.

After the war, Dr. Friedman and his family returned to Warsaw and Lodz. They were smuggled into Berlin. He talks about conditions faced by refugees in the Russian zone. He mentions two brothers who experienced antisemitism after joining the Anders Army. In 1946 Dr. Friedman organized the escape of 9000 Jewish refugees from East Berlin to avoid transport to the Soviet Union. He describes an illegal border crossing from the French zone to the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp in the English zone, where he started a school for orphan’s preparing to go to Palestine on Aliyah Bet. He lived in Stuttgart, Germany for a few months where he founded a “Folk University” with help from the Jewish community.

Dr. Friedman and family arrived in Philadelphia March 3, 1947. He founded the Association of Jewish New Americans of Philadelphia. He talks about his life as a refugee, why he survived, the effects of hunger on human beings, and the treatment of Holocaust survivors.

Else Nowak, née Schroepel, was born June 25, 1902 in Köetschenbroda [or Kötzschenbroda], a suburb ofDresden, Germany. She was an only child in an observant Jewish family. They lived in Breslau, Hamburg and Berlin, where Else attended a lyceum briefly. Due to antisemitism and her illnesses, Else left school after one year. She finished her education with private schooling, home tutoring and millinery training.

In 1918, her family moved to Berlin where Else met and married Dr. Ludwig Blum in May 1926. They had two children and were divorced in 1928. In 1937 Else met Willie Nowak. They couldn’t marry until they left Germany and arrived in Shanghai in August, 1939.

The rest of her story is presented jointly in an interview with WillieNowak.

Jack Zaifman was born in Radom, Poland on March 2, l925 into an Orthodox Jewish family. His father was a merchant. He attended public school and chederuntil age l4. He describes the savagery of the German bombing and invasion of Radom in September l939. Escaping from a round-up of Jews, he bicycled to Wolanow and lived for a year with a Jewish family until that small town was liquidated. He was taken for slave labor at a nearby camp manned by Gestapo, Ukrainian and Lithuanian guards. He worked as a tailor for the German Army, witnessed a massacre of 350 Jews and had to dig trenches to bury the dead. When he was ill with typhoid fever, a righteous German soldier took him to the Rodomer Ghetto hospital.

In autumn of 1941, Jack was sent to Blizyn labor camp, near the German border, where he was betrayed by a Jewish Kapo and severely beaten by guards when he tried to help another prisoner. Among the 3,000 survivors (out of l0,000) of Blizyn, he was shipped to Auschwitz where he sorted clothing of the dead. He describes the train ride, selections and his bunk make being selected for an experiment by Mengele. Jack describes walking over to another Kommando one day which was deported to Dachau where he endured brutal labor, carrying cement and laying pipes. During a death march from Dachau, April l945, he was liberated by Americans and taken to a hospital at Wolfratshausen, weighing 70 pounds. At the Feldafing DP camp he met and married his wife; they came to the United States in April l949. He began speaking in high schools and colleges about his experience in l977.

Henrich Hofman was born July 20, 1922 in Lipecka Polyana, Czechoslovakia. He describes pre-war life,his education, being a member of Shomer Hatzair, and the good relationship his family had with the non-Jews in the area. His father was a carpenter.He describes the Hungarian Occupation, harassment of Jews starting in 1940, including confiscation of stores. He details the horrors in Passover 1941,when his whole town was deported in cattle cars to Rachof (Rachov). He describes the trip, selection, and an intervention by the Budapest Jewish community to prevent the evacuation of Jewish citizens of that area which saved his group. Henrich describes looking out the cattle car through slits at the condemned group and seeing the Germans throwing Jews into trucks as if they were pieces of wood. His part of the transport was then taken to a concentration camp in Rachof. His friend who survived from the other part of the transport told him months later that the Germans murdered the rest of the group in the Dnieper Riverin Kamenets-Podolski.

In October 1943 he details his deportation to and forced labor in Görgenyoroszfalù (Romania, occupied by Hungary) where he helped to build an airfield. In January1944 he volunteered to work elsewhere, was taken to Rákoshegy near Budapest where he worked building German barracks from March through July 1944. He describes the much improved conditions,lots of food, ability to leave on Shabbat to go to Jews in the community before they liquidated the area. Henrich ended up working for a German officer as personal tailor, and describes some kindnesses from some Germans. A German co-worker hid him and a friend in an attic to avoid deportation. He describes how the work of his hands helped him to survive on many occasions.

He was liberated on November 15, 1944 by the Soviet frontline and worked as an interpreter for the Soviet army for 11 months. He was reunited with his sisters in Chust (Khust) in1945, went to Budapest, met and married his wife in October and moved to the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia from 1945–49. They emigrated to Israel in July 1949 and eventually to the United States in 1959.

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

Alfred Waldner was born August 20, 1913 in Cieszyn1, Poland into a religious Jewish family. He briefly describes pre-war life, education, joining his family in their restaurant business and in philanthropic work. He never experienced antisemitism until the German occupation on September 1, 1939. Their home and restaurant were taken and given to local Volksdeutsche. Alfred was forced to work for the Germans, cleaning streets and military barracks. In 1941, in Tarnopol, and in 1942, in Janówska, he wasa driver for Sturmführers. He describes witnessing atrocities. He also shares some incidents when he was able to help people to escape. He describes a narrow escape after being slated for death. In July, 1943, he was sent to Birkenau to work in Buna Monowitz in the IG Farben chemical plant where he describes a selection, sleeping on floors and being near starvation. He recalls that a gentile Polish neighbor from his hometown used to leave him food scraps from his rations.

Alfred survived a forced march in December 1943 to Gleiwitz and then sent to Dora-Nordhausen where he worked in an underground factory producing V-1 and V-2 rockets, together with Russian POWs and Poles. He describes rampant illness, near starvation and abominable conditions. He also describes Russian POWs being hung daily for sabotaging the equipment. Alfred was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where he describes the horrific conditions as the Germans tried to kill off as many Jews as possible. He gives a detailed description of contamination, typhus and dysentery and how they realized that this might be the end to the war. He was liberated in April 1945 by the British Army and then spentseveral months recuperating in a hospital in Celle. In Prague, he met and married a widow with a six-year-old son. Jailed for smuggling American dollars on the black market, he was freed by a sympathetic judge.

He emigrated to the United States in 1946 and worked as a farmer in New Jersey. He moved to Newark in the 1950s, where he acquired a high school diploma and an engineering degree. He became manager of the third largest toy factory in the United States. After retiring to Miami Beach, FL, he organized a small synagogue and helped needy Jews, commiting his life to the practice of Judaism.

See also interview with his sister, Elsa Turtletaub.