Oral History Interview with Inge Karo

Charlotte Sonnenberg, nee Lichtendorf, was born in Bad Neuenahr, Germany January 22, 1910 into a middle class family. The Nazi boycott in 1932 and the Nurenberg Laws affected her life and her family adversely. Charlotte met and married her husband Doctor Herbert Alexander in Leipzig. On November 10, 1938 (Kristallnacht) Charlotte and her husband were driven out of their apartment and her husband was sent to Buchenwald. He was released because Charlotte obtained tickets to go to Shanghai. They sailed to Shanghai on the SS Conte Biancamano in March 1939.

On arrival in Shanghai they were taken to a camp in Hongkew. They found work at the American Presbyterian Mission in Tenghsien in a hospital run by the mission. Charlotte describes in great detail their pleasant life in the mission, their relationship with other Jews and the patients. On December 7, 1941 the Japanese took over the hospital. All the missionaries were either deported or sent to concentration camps. Her husband was put in charge of the hospital. Civilians were trapped once the war ended, the Japanese left, and fighting erupted between the Chinese National Army and the Communists.

Charlotte relates many riveting details about their escape to Hsuchowfu and the death of her husband. She continued alone to Tsingtao and worked as a teacher at an American Catholic Middle School. She left China in 1947 – on a troop transport – to Philadelphia. Later she met and married her husband Henry Sonnenberg there. She talks about her impression of and life in the United States as well as her love of China.

Judith Leifer, nee Loeb, was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in 1932. Her father was a textiles salesmen. She shares her childhood memories of life in pre-war Bratislava. She describes a large Jewish community, Zionist organizations, relations between Jews and Gentiles, her Orthodox upbringing and attending a Hebrew Zionist Kindergarten. When the Nazis came to power, her family, together with all Jews, moved into the Jewish ghetto. Her extended family found shelter in her great-uncle’s house. She describes life under Nazi occupation: no connection with the outside world, schools closings, children were unsupervised, and they lived in constant fear of being deported to concentration camps.

Judith’s father’s international business connections and her uncle’s position as head of the Jewish Community in Slovakia was the reason this family was able to survive. Judith gives a detailed account of the extremely perilous and complicated escape she and her family managed separately fromBratislava—with the help of Jewish friends—and the subsequent journey to Palestine.While waiting in Budapest for her parents and sibling to arrive, Judith was placed in a Budapest refugee camp. She describes her family’s flight from Budapest on the last transport to Turkeypermitted by Germans, arranged and financed by the Joint Distribution Committee. She details their arrival in Istanbul and assistance from the Jewish Agency. They entered Palestine on March 17, 1944with immigration certificates for Palestine secured by her uncle and moved in with cousins in Haifa.

Judith eventually moved to the U.S. and had two children1. Most of her extended family perished during the Holocaust. She tells a touching story about her grandmother, Emma Beck, who survived Theresienstadt and made a new life for herself.Judith talks at length about how refugees and displaced persons were helped by the Jewish and American Joint and H.I.A.S after the war.

Collateral Material available through the Gratz College Tuttleman Library include:

Judith’s grandmother’s memoir: journal written in German byEmma Benedict Beck (1876-1973), after her release from Theresienstadt during her later years in the U.S. Donated by granddaughter Judith Leifer.

Photocopy of handwritten memoir of Emma Beckfrom 1938-1945. First pages translated by Lotte Marcus into English. Donated by granddaughter Judith Leifer.

“Vordalung” original for Emma Beck from Theresienstadt, Original bank receipt from Theresienstadt, 17 June 1943. Donated by Judith Leifer, Annenberg Research Institute.

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

Sylvia Ebner, née Klein, was born September 10, 1929, in Bodrogkisfalud, Hungary. She describes her education, relations with non-Jews, and learning to cope with children who stoned her on her way to school. After the German invasion in March 1944, persecution and anti-Jewish measures increased. Sylvia and her family were taken to the Satoraljaujhely Ghetto with Jews from several other towns. Their house was looted as soon as they walked out. She describes several incidents of extreme brutality by Germans.

She describes the transport to Auschwitz in cattle cars and their dehumanization. Her parents managed to observe Shabbat and her father tried to prepare Sylvia to cope with what she had to face. Sylvia describes their arrival at Auschwitz May 1944, processing and selections by Dr. Mengele. Many, including her mother and other relatives, were loaded on trucks and gassed immediately.

Sylvia was marched to Birkenau. She describes the horrible conditions, the smell from the crematorium and how they tried to survive. She worked as a slave laborer in Brzézinka also known as “Canada”, sorting belongings taken from Jews. She risked her life to smuggle food to her cousin. The starving girls were offered food on fast days such as Tisha B’ Av but refused to eat because the food was not kosher.

Sylvia got Scarlet Fever and was hospitalized in a Revier (sick quarters) for six weeks. She survived seven selections by Dr. Mengele, saw him operate without any anesthesia, and a Christian woman kill her newborn baby to save him from Mengele’s experiments. Germans drained large amounts of blood from girls who survived typhus or scarlet fever to make serums. After Sylvia recovered, she worked as a slave laborer. First at heavy-duty unproductive work while living in the barracks, then in a factory in Oberhohen-Elbe, Sudeten, Germany. The German woman in charge risked her life to find food for the prisoners. She was liberated by Russian troops May 1, 1945, returned to Hungary, received aid from the Joint Distribution Committee (Joint); escaped from Hungary and immigrated to Canada.

Interviewee: EBNER, Sylvia Date: February 14, 2001

Anna Czerwinski, nee Estera Pomrok, was born in 1906 in Radom, Poland into a wealthy, kosher family. She attended public school and worked briefly in a Hashomer Hatzair farm in Lublin. In 19301 she married Lucien Finkielsztein, an assimilated Jew who changed his name to Czerwinski and served in the Polish Army. They lived in Warsaw for a time, but then prompted by her husband, she relocated to a small town, Opole Lubelskie, where it would be safer. Anna and their two children passed as Catholics, hiding in Opole Lubelskie with Polish friends whom she paid. Her daughter was sheltered in a convent until the nuns discovered her Jewish identity and abandoned the child. Many close encounters are related.

In 1944, the family fled to Falenica, where Russian soldiers helped them. Postwar, Anna regained her mother’s store in Lublin and her husband prospered in business in Reichenbach Niederschlesien. In 1950, continuing antisemitism prompted their departure from Europe. After two years in Israel and travel to France and Brazil, the Polish quota permitted their emigration to the United States in 1958.

Also see her 1979 interview in Polish, 1 tape.

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.