Oral History Interview with Ida Rudley

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.

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.

Vera Otelsberg, nee Neuman, a Warsaw Ghetto survivor, was born to a wealthy family in l924 in Bielitz (Bielsko-Biala), Poland. Her father was an industrialist who owned several factories and a mill. Her mother died when she was a young child and she was brought up by a nanny. The family was not religious, attended synagogue only on High Holidays. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she escaped to Warsaw with her older sister, her husband and child and nanny. Her sister with family were able to buy visas to South America and left in l940 while Vera stayed in the Warsaw with her nanny and brother-in-law’s parents.

Vera explains how they were forced into the ghetto and gives a detailed description about how she was able to get money through a relative on the Aryan side of Warsaw and describes the scarcity of food, illness, forced labor and dangers of living in the Warsaw Ghetto including a time when they had to hide from German soldiers in an attic. She describes the long hours working at the Toebbens Factory, sometimes days at a time, without being allowed home. She describes several instances of help from Poles and Germans.Mr. Wagenfeld brought money into the ghetto to Vera when her relative could not get in and also arranged to help her escape from the ghetto in the summer of 1942. A non-Jewish acquaintance of hers got her an Arbeitskarte, a work card, testifying that she worked in his office.She describes in detail living on the outside on false papers, working as a maid in a German household and later, in a village, listening to the radio illegally and translating the reports into Polish for an underground paper. She also describes how her friend Steffi was assisted by a German soldier to escape the ghetto and how family friends secured false papers for her, as well as other evidence regarding the workings of procuring false papers and how one lived as a non-Jew on the outside of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Vera describes life in Sochaczew before and during the retreat of the Germans and the killing of German soldiers by the advancing Russians. When Bielitz was liberated, she returned home with help from Russian Jewish officers. Her father had perished in Lemberg, her nanny in a death camp.Eventually Vera married, had a daughter and in l957 moved to Monte Video, Uruguay.

Diane Weinstock, nee Gottlieb, was born in Radom Poland in 1923 into a modern religious family. Her mother was a member of WIZO and Diane attended Zionist youth activities. She describes pre-war antisemitism, the German Occupation, the establishment of the Radom Ghetto in 1941 and her family’s living conditions there until 1942. She also details clandestine education and religious observances that happened in the ghetto.

She and her mother were able to obtain false papers and hide posing as non-Jews in Warsaw from November 1943 until October 1944. Diane describes how after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising she, her mother and several others hid out in a bunker in the demolished Warsaw Ghetto until January 1945. She gives a detailed description of how they managed to survive including being warned by a Jewish father and son that the Germans were scouting the area. They were liberated by the Soviets in January 1945. She returned to her hometown of Radom but encountered severe antisemitism. She then fled to Regensburg, Germany to reunite with a brother and an uncle who survived. Her father perished in the same camp three weeks before liberation. Diane worked as an interpreter for UNRRA, then married and emigrated to United States after the war.

Armand Mednick, named “Avrum” by his Yiddish-speaking parents, was born in 1933 into a close, extended family in Brussels, Belgium. He grew up as a stranger in a non-Jewish neighborhood, often taunted by anti-Semites influenced by the fascist Rex Party. At age six, he was hospitalized with tuberculosis until May 1940, when his father, an active political leftist, fled with his family to France. His father was drafted into the French Army, deserted and placed his son, renamed “Armand”, in a sanitarium at Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne Mountains. Armand’s father, mother and baby sister hid nearby in Volvic, where they passed as Christians. When Armand recovered, he joined his family and attended Catholic school. At home, there was some Jewish observance and Armand recalls walking for seven miles with his father to attend a clandestine seder.

Armand’s father joined the French resistance in 1944 and the family returned to Brussels in 1945, where Armand was the first Bar Mitzvah celebrant after the war. The Mednick family moved to Philadelphia in 1947. Buchenwald death lists confirmed that most of their extended family of 55 relatives had been killed. Armand became a potter and teacher and produced a series of clay reliefs with symbolic Holocaust images, in an attempt to exorcise his painful childhood memories.

See also interview with his father, Bernard S. Mednicki.

Interviewee: MEDNICK, Armand Date: June 15, 1983

Lili Altschuler was born September 30, 1928 in Lodz, Poland to a well-to-do, non-observant Jewish family. Before the war she was educated in a private Jewish school. Lili describes the change in atmosphere in 1937-38, the prohibition against kosher slaughter and the Polish Jewish citizens being expelled from Germany and forced to return to Poland (‘38).

In 1939, just before the Lodz Ghetto was formed, Lili and her parents fled to relatives in a suburb of Kielce, called Opatow. She describes the hardships and restrictions that ensued and describes and encounter with Volksdeutsche in which she was injured. Her father, fearing the reality of the deathcamps, bought their way into the slave labor camp Skarazysko Kamienna, run by HASAG. They worked in a munitions factory. She describes the scant daily rations, the lack of medical treatment, and the cruelty of Ukrainian guards and also Jewish Kapos’ cruel behavior. She also describes some resistance in the camps: the formation of small singing and reading groups.

In the summer of 1944, she and her parents were deported to a munitions factory in Czestochowa. She describes slightly better conditions there. On January 16, 1945 the Germans attempted to deport everyone to a location farther away from the Soviets. After the men were sent off in trains, the Germans fled, leaving the women on the train platform. They were liberated by the Soviets that night. She and her mother stayed for a time in Czestochowa, then returned to Opatow, then Lodz to look for surviving family members.

Her grandparents perished in the Lodz Ghetto. Her father was sent to Buchenwald and later liberated by the Americans in May 1945. They were reunited in Lodz and later went to Stuttgart, Germany through Czechoslovakia with the help of the Zionist group, Brihah1 and UNRRA. They came to the United States via a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart in 1948.