Oral History Interview with Ida Rokita

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

MirjamPinkhof, nee Waterman, was born May 12, 1916 in Loodsdrecht, Holland. Her father, an idealistic socialist, left Amsterdam, where he worked in the diamond trade, to found an agricultural training center on a farm in Loodsdrecht in the 1920’s. Her mother once belonged to an agricultural commune named “Walden”. Mirjam attended the modernist school at Bilthoven, where one of her teachers was JoopWesterweel, who became a Christian rescuer of Jews. Mirjam started a private school on her parents’ farm in 1940. Until 1943, she worked with Jews and non-Jews in the resistance movement led by Westerweel, Joachim Simon (Schuschu) and Menachem Pinkhof whom she married in 1945. They sent youths from Zionist training centers across Europe to Palestine. (See Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 1648). In 1943, her parents were freed from Westerbork through her bribe of diamonds. In 1944, she was imprisoned at Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen. She describes the deprivation in the camps and on the evacuation train, where she was kept for two weeks in the spring of 1945. Russians liberated the train in June, 1945 at Troebity, near Leipzig. She was in Displaced persons camps in Luxembourg and Eindhoven. Her husband worked with Aliyah Bet and a Jewish Brigade group to send illegal immigrants to Palestine. The Pinkhof family obtained legal British certificates for entry and settled in Haifa in 1946.

Interviewee: PINKHOF, Mirjam Waterman Date: July 8, 1989