Oral History Interview with Jack Weiss

Anna Roth, née Weber, was born in Stopnica, Poland on July 14, 1929 into a Hasidic family. She had five sisters and lived with her parents and extended family. Her father was a roofer. She describes her childhood before the German invasion in detail including relations with non-Jewish Poles and antisemitism.

She talks in great detail about the frightening German invasion and Occupation including men being taken from the streets, indiscriminate killings and restrictions on Jewish learning and how her mother procured Hebrew lessons for her. Anna—despite her very young age—her father and her two eldest sisters were taken to work in a munitions factory in Skarzysko for two years (1940-1942). She gives detailed descriptions of the conditions: the work, the food and the fear under which they lived. She and her sisters were able to keep contact with their father and even got themselves on the same transport when he was deported to several other labor camps: Czestochowa, another munition factory; Przedborz, where they were made to dig ditches, and Czestochowianka. Eventually they were separated when their father was sent to Buchenwald in 1944 and her two older sisters were sent to Ravensbrück.

Anna was deported to Bergen-Belsen which she described as far worse than any of the other camps and gives detailed descriptions of the conditions. She explains how the circumstances probably helped her to survive—when they ran out of striped uniforms, she was able to keep the heavy coat she was wearing during the cold winter months. She also shares a vignette about her extraordinary reunification with her sisters in Bergen-Belsen. Anna details her and her sisters’ deathmarch from Turkheim to Dachau and their liberation on the morning after their arrival on

May 6, 1945.

After the war they were sent to Feldafing Displaced Persons camp, and found their father in Lübeck, Germany, where they lived until 1947. Her mother and three younger sisters perished. In 1948 they went to Stuttgart, in the American zone, in order to emigrate to the United States. One sister went to Israel. Helped by HIAS, Anna, her father and a sister arrived in the United States in 1949.

Samuel Yassi1 was born in Ostrow, Poland on April 28, 1924. He was the oldest of five children in a modestly middle class family. Sam and his family fled to the town of Poprusch [phonetic] when the Germans occupied Poland. When that area came under Soviet occupation all refugees, including the Yassi family were loaded into box cars and relocated to Siberia -a journey of six weeks duration. The Yassi’s were deported even though they had passports.The family settled in an apartment in Siberia. Sam (15 years old) and his parents were put to work in the forest felling trees;the younger siblings were not. He describes his attempt to get an education instead of working, but after hisfather’s death at age 43 from pneumonia shortly after their arrival, Sam had to return to work in order to receive food rations for the family. He describes the difficult living conditions, bitter weather and restrictions under the Soviet government.

Eventually the family was allowed to move to the south, to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and Sam tells of this journey on the chaotic Russian trains. He describes the next several years as the family tries to survive: being placed on a cooperative farm where they picked tobacco, being moved once again to the White Mountainsto make room for Russian refugees, moving back to the Tashkent area where thefound work building a factory. The family stayed in this last area for about two years during which time Sam managed to get his younger siblings into a Polish Jewish home for children run by ORT, where they were schooled, clothed and fed. Sam details this period of time tells of the death of his mother and brother. Sam then went to the city of Fergana to seek work. He tells of being sent on a huge canal building project which was very hard labor. Leaving there, he went back to Tashkent without a job. He was caught "speculating" but through his ingenuity and luck was not sent to the coal mines, but ended up first learning to be a shoemaker and then to make salt and he became a salt maker.

Sam met his wife, Sylvia in 1946, after the war had ended and were married. They went back to Poland and eventually found his brother and sister. He relates that his brother and sister stayed in Poland and how he and his pregnant wife ultimately made their way to the United States, first being smuggled out of Poland to Austria and then over the Alps to Italy. In Italy they lived in a Displaced Person’s camp where they stayed for three years until they could arrange for the papers to get them to the United States arriving November 21, 1947.

Mr. Yassi indicates in his interview that his former name was SholomYashenofsky.