Oral History Interview with Henry Froehlich

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.

Piera Solender, née DelloStrologo, was born in Livorno, Italy, a town with a large Jewish population. As a child she experienced little if any antisemitism. During the war, she relocated to Milan, where with the help of a Mother Superior from Livorno, she worked as a tutor to a gentile family. In 1942, along with her mother and sister, she moved to Rimini and then Senigallia, where she spent over a year in hiding. Her father and other siblings fled to Switzerland.

By 1943, the German army were throughout Italy. In Senigallia, the women were befriended by Luigi Corleoni. They attempted to pass as Christians, only to later learn the townspeople knew the truth. Piera and her sister ran a local school. In October or November 1943, along with approximately 200 others, Christians and Jews, Piera hid in a tunnel for a month, hiding from Polish troops. Villagers brought water to those in hiding.

After the war, she returned to Milan where she learned her family members who had fled to Switzerland survived. She met her husband, a Polish Jew who survived five different concentration camps. They emigrated to the United States (year unknown).

Sam Don (formerly Zalman Domb) was born on January 15, 1927 in Ostrykół, a Polish village. He describes pre-war life: schooling, farming and family history, antisemitism exhibited from non-Jewish children, religious life. His family and the six other Jewish families in the town were farmers. Sam describes the German occupation in 1939, restrictions put on Jews, and forced labor in forests. He describes their deportation to the Makow Ghetto and describes Polish townspeople looting Jewish homes.

Sam was caught smuggling food for the Polish underground and imprisoned in Plotsk for nearly a year. In December, 1942 he was sent to Birkenau /Auschwitz and was there until early autumn 1943. Sam details his many experiences in Auschwitz including the hierarchy and relationship of Kapos, Stubenältesters and Blockführers, the Sonderkommando and daily routines. Sam was saved when a Jewish guard exchanged him for a dead body, when he was designated as a Muselmann. He worked in an excavation kommando distributing tools, but through his connections with the Jewish guard—who had saved him—smuggled lots of goods back and forth from “Canada” (the group sorting clothes from the bodies of dead Jews) to bribe Kapos and Blockführers. He describes his brother’s electrocution on a fence in Auschwitz in 1943 during one of these smuggling operations and also shares a gruesome story about Christmas Day in Auschwitz and how the Germans shot and tortured inmates for fun. He explains why the Polish townspeople had to have known what was happening because of their proximity to the camp; the chimneys, flames, smoke and the smell. He describes an attempted escape of three Jews from Auschwitz and the Polish civilians returning them to the Germans. He also describes one instance of kindness from a German guard who threw him a piece of bread.

Sam was later sent as a political prisoner to the coal mine, Jaworzno. In January 1944 he witnessed the massacre of hundreds of Jews there. He describes a forced march to Jawiszowice in spring of 1944 and describes the elderly or infirm being shot before the march started. He describes three months of hard labor and another forced marched to Ohrdruf where he describes improved conditions. Sam was later sent to several slave labor camps in East Germany, then to Buchenwald and later to Terezin (Theresienstadt), Czechoslovakia, where he was liberated by the Russians on May 8, 1945.

Sam met his wife in 1946 in the German displaced persons camp, Heidenheim. They came to the United States in June, 1949 and were married in a synagogue in Philadelphia on October 23, 1949. The rest of Sam’s family perished in Majdanek, Chekonoff (slave labor camp) and Auschwitz.

In 1988, Sam added to his testimony with another interview, describing a return trip to Poland with his son and daughter.

See also Sam Don’s 1988 interivew in which he discusses his experiences on his trip back to Poland, and his wife, Shirley Don’s interview.

Bernard S. Mednicki was born in 1910 in Brussels, Belgium, the youngest of four children in an orthodox Russian Jewish family from Kishinev. His father served in the Russian army until the 1903 pogrom, when he deserted and moved his family to the West. Bernard attended a cheder and public school in Brussels, where he experienced some antisemitism. He was apprenticed to an orthopedic technician, became a Belgian citizen in 1928 and was married in 1931. In 1933, he became active in the anti-fascist Socialist Party and anti-fascist resistance. He describes the German invasion on May 12, 1940.

Assuming Christian identities, his wife and children fled to Paris and he travelled through southern France until they were reunited in Riom. He details extensively the travails of fellow refugees, his work with the French resistance during 1941-1942 in Clermont-Ferrand, and sabotage activity with the Maquis in the mountains near Volvic. He relates smuggling goods and other survival techniques to obtain food for resistance families. He travelled with his wife and children to Paris, aided by American soldiers, remaining until 1946, when he returned to Brussels. He found his sister’s three children, who were hidden during the war in a convent and a monastery. He arrived in the United States with his wife and children in 1947. His Memoirs: Never be afraid: A Jew in the Maquis, were published posthumously in 1997.

See also interviews with his son, Armand Mednick and with his nephew Charles L. Rojer.

Interviewee: MEDNICKI, Bernard S. Dates: April 27 & 30, 1982

Charlotte Bing was born in 1918 in Bielsko (Bielitz), Poland, a textile town near the German border. Charlotte describes her town and explains that most of the 8,000 Jews were financially well off. She details her schooling at a Jewish school for four years and then at a German high school. She discusses pre-war antisemitism and also the good relations between the rabbi and the Catholic priest, but that the priest would not step in to say anything about his parishioners hurting Jews unless the rabbi requested it of him.

Charlotte recounts that in 1938 Polish Jews living in Germany—who were deported back to Poland—were helped by the Jews of Bielsko. She vividly recalls the blatant antisemitism exhibited by Polish citizens when Germans took over the city and the anti-Jewish measures that began. The SS rounded up all of the Jewish men. Jews were ordered to give up their money and gold. Jewish children could not go to school and Jewish stores were not permitted to operate. Her family fled to Wadowice thinking that the Germans would not come further into Poland, but were again forced to flee after six weeks. Charlotte describes the escape of her family and her fiancée to Krakow. After a year in Krakow, the entire Jewish community was deported to the Plaszow Ghetto. Charlotte describes in detail the creation of the ghetto, conditions, forced labor, scarcity of food, and the clandestine education of children. She describes how work at menial jobs was organized by Germans, assisted by selected members of the Jewish community.

At the end of 1942 Charlotte and her husband were transferred to the Majdanek concentration camp Charlotte describes their arrival (in sealed cars, no food/water, toilet). She witnessed atrocities (including the killing of a baby) upon their arrival. She details her work as translator and laying rail lines and an injury that never healed, as well as conditions in the camp. She also details frequent visits by Adolph Eichmann.

The Soviet army liberated the camp in July – August 1944 and the first Jewish community in Europe was formed nearby. Food and clothing came from the Russians and from Jews living in Palestine. Charlotte describes the immense difficulty faced by people who came to reclaim children taken in by Polish families and children searching for their parents. She details post-war threats by Poles (liberated Polish political prisoners known as ACOFTA), who targeted her husband. She describes their flight through Krakow and Czechoslovakia to Germany and recounts their very difficult time getting visas to emigrate to the United States. In October of 1945 they secured menial work on a U.S. Military transport plane as a means of coming to the United States, where they joined family in New York.

Ernest Kaufman was born in Drove, Germany, a small town with about 25 Jews. His father served in the German army during World War I and was a butcher and also a shochet. They had no problems with gentile neighbors but Ernest could not complete his education or his apprenticeship because he was Jewish. During Kristallnacht a local police man refused to arrest his father, but Ernest was arrested and transported to Buchenwald. He describes the terrible conditions and brutality in Buchenwald. The prisoners arrested during Kristallnacht did not have to work, but were forced to watch other prisoners being tortured and killed. Ernest explains how he managed to get an affidavit that enabled him to be released from Buchenwald after four weeks. He got a visa for the United States on April 20, 1939 and arrived in New York two weeks later. Ernest describes his unsuccessful attempts to get his parents out of Germany and into Cuba. His parents did not survive. Ernest describes how he lived and supported himself in New York and later in Philadelphia.

After Pearl Harbor, Ernest enlisted in the U.S. Army, became a naturalized citizen and eventually an officer. He served in England and Germany in 1943 and relates many of his experiences as an intelligence officer on an interrogation team. He discovered that Christian neighbors in Drove smuggled food into a house where local Jews were assembled before they were deported. In July 1945, he was wounded and sent to England General Hospital in Atlantic City. After he recovered, he was assigned to the European Command Intelligence Center in charge of the document section. He describes his intensive but futile search to discover what happened to his parents. After two more years in the service, he bought a poultry farm in Egypt, N.J. where he and his wife Minna lived for 30 years.