Oral History Interview with Hyman Blady

Debora Neudorfer, nee Flachs, was born in Bucharest, Romania, December 31, 1914 to a middle class family. Her father was a business man in industrial chemicals. Debora briefly describes pre-war Bucharest, Christian-Jewish relations and her education at a Protestant Girls’ Schoolwhich was comprised of nearly 99% Jewish girls. Her father’s business was diminished due to the war and Debora and her sister sold items they knitted at home. Debora describes that all Jews in Bucharest with a certain amount of education were forced to complete one year of labor. Debora walked to a private house to complete her assignment ofoffice work while she lived at home.

Debora describes their life under the rule of Antonescu and how it did not change very much and gives details about some family members and their experiences with forced labor. She also explains how people thought things would improve under Russian rule, but states that it got worse. She alludes to Russian soldiers’ rape of women when they came in in August of 1944.

In October 1944 Debora fled to Palestine with her future husband whom she had met a few months earlier. He was a Polish Jew who had escaped a labor camp and had false papers. When they met, they were unable to get married so they fled with a group of Polish and Romanian young people. A Jewish organization sent them across the Black Sea by boat on which she and her husband were married.A train took them through Turkey to the Atlit detention camp in Palestine, where British officers interrogated all refugees regarding their wartime experience. They lived in Palestine for about two and a half years until they went back to Poland to search for her husband’s family. Her husband’s brother was the only sibling of six who survived the war. They returned to Israel in 1950 and emigrated to the United States in 1957. Her mother, father, sister, and brother-in-law, and several cousins and extended family membersall survived the war.

Daniel Levey, born April 24, 1925 in Sarajevo, was one of eight children in an impoverished Sephardic family who spoke Ladino at home. His father was a tailor and served in WWI under the Ottoman Empire. Daniel shares his childhood memories of their poverty and pre-war life. They lived in a Muslimneighborhood, where Daniel was assaulted by street gangs. His family attended the Sarajevo Synagogue, in a community of 15,000 Jews, who were forced into a ghetto after the German invasion in 1941. They had to wear an armband with the letter “Z” for Židov, the Croatian word for Jew. He did forced labor briefly in a military work crew, having been assigned to a skilled labor brigade because of his electrician experience. He evaded Nazi registration and stopped wearing his star.

After he escaped from a roundup, he passed as a Muslim with an assumed name of Gerald Levvage [phonetic] and a false ID. He joined partisans fighting Germans and Russian Cossacks near Mostar, which was occupied by Italians. In 1942, he was captured and imprisoned at BokaKotorska. He describes humane treatment by the Italians. He got himself a job on kitchen duty and helped other prisoners by bringing them food. After Italy surrendered in 1943, the prison became a hospital where Daniel worked as a cook until he emigrated to Canada and then to the United States in 1948. He credits the Italians for saving him and other Jews from the brutal Croatian prison guards at Rab concentration camp. All of the Levey family, except for Daniel and one brother, who settled in Israel, perished in German camps.

Dr. Paul G. Eglick served in the 508th Parachute Infantry of the 82nd Airborne, U.S. Third Army as a medical officer. Around May 7, 1945 he was ordered to go to Ludwiglust, Mecklenburg, Germany, not knowing he would enter the Wöbbelein concentration camp. He vividly describes piles of victims who had starved to death, the condition of survivors, and the attempt to save them. His unit took care to treat the starving survivors properly and evacuated them, helped by several other medical units. Dr. Eglick explains how deeply entering this camp affected him and the other American soldiers. Local Germans were ordered to bury the dead. He gives his opinion about United States policy concerning the extermination camps and why the United States could have done more to stop the killing. He tells about an encounter with a couple in a mixed marriage who survived in Berlin with the help of non-Jewish neighbors.

Baroness Elizabeth Kemény-Fuchs, the Austrian-born young wife of the Hungarian Foreign Minister Gábor Kemény, was shocked by the October 1944 persecutions of Jews under the Arrow Cross government. She thus, when approached by Wallenberg, was ready to help him, mainly by persuading her husband to help issue protective passports for Jews and also prevailing upon the German Ambassador Veesenmayer to issue needed visas, all at considerable risk to herself. She outlines how the stress of this, of the official duties, and of a difficult pregnancy caused her to go for a brief visit to her mother in South Tyrol, and how because of the baby’s birth and the Soviet siege of Budapest she never could return there.

She critiques a film made about Wallenberg and her role, describing his actual activities, his special qualities, and his one misjudgment, being that of the Soviets’ motivations. She mentions aid to Jews by Weiss diplomats and by Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio. She asserts that her own involvement was solely humanitarian and that she neither is of Jewish descent nor ever was Wallenberg’s mistress. She insists that her husband was not a Nazi, that indeed he helped save many Jews, and that the unjust idea of collective guilt led to his arrest, condemnation, and execution. She describes her own post-war struggles.

She feels more could have been done, especially by Swedes, to free Wallenberg, doubted that he was still alive, asserts that he should remain “a very bright example” in an ever more selfish world.

Albert (Abraham) Ferleger was born in Chmielnik, Poland, June 15, 1919. He was one of six children from a very Orthodox family and had a public school as well as a yeshiva education. He describes the customs of the Jewish Kehillahin histown, relates the Polish antisemitism before the war and describes what occurred after the Germans took over the town. He describes the influx of populations from several different towns being forced into their ghetto and describes atrocities (people being killed on the spot and burying them) and deportations. Albert was sent tozwangsarbeit, forced labor, where he shoveled snow and worked in the ghetto community kitchen.

Albert fled from the Germans and was hidden by a Polish farmer for two years: he was buried in a hole, naked, under the farmers stable, along with another Jewish man. They subsisted on bread and potatoes. He details their horrid conditions.

With the Russian victory and the help of the Briha1 (underground Zionist organization helping Jews get to Palestine) he became the leader of a group of Jews that was smuggled across the Polish and Czechoslovakian borders to Germany pretending to be Greek and later as German Jews.

He met his wife (who was liberated from Theresienstadt) through the Briha, as well. They were sent to Munich and then to a displaced persons camp in Regensdorf, Germany for seven months. With the help of HIAS and President Truman’s aid to refugees they went to relatives in Philadelphia. He relates in great detail how he was able to survive during and after the war, how his experiences challenged his religious beliefs and his bitterness that not more was not done to help the Jews.

Victor Cooper2 was born December 26, 1914 in Strzemieszyce, Poland, the youngest of four brothers. He was married and had a six-month old son when he was drafted into the Polish Army in 1939. His wife, son and all of his family perished during the war years.

Victor describes how he was captured by Germans in 1940and was segregated from non-Jewish POWs at Majdanek death camp in Lublin. He escaped with the help of a fellow Jewish prisoner, and fled back home where he was in Strzemieszyce Ghetto for a short time,subjected to forced labor and witnessed the liquidation of the ghetto and German atrocities. He was then deported to 10 labor and concentration camps, including Będzin, Markstadt, Gross Rosen, Flossenbürgand Buchenwald. He vividly describes his experiences, conditions, backbreaking cement work and digging tunnels and how he fought to stay alive. He details a month-long death march from Buchenwald to Dachau in April 1945, during which he escaped and was recaptured several times.

In May, 1945, he was found hiding in Bavarian woods by a Jewish doctor serving with the American 7th Army. He was taken, disoriented and ill, to a Catholic hospital in Straubing. After his recovery, he worked with an American lawyer, helping to regain possession of Jewish property in the area. In June 1949, he emigrated to the United States under the displaced persons quota. He held many jobs with the United Service for Young and New Americans and several trade unions. He remarried and fathered two children. His daughter became a lawyer and his son is a professor at Columbia University.

Former last name was Kupfer.

This was recorded at the 1985 American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia, Pa.