Oral History Interview with Jerry Jacobs

Sara Adler, nee Apel, was born in Radom, Poland in 1927. Her family was close-knit, religious, well-to-do and involved in community welfare. They had non-Jewish contacts through their lumber business, but Sara attended Jewish school and had primarily Jewish friends.The family fled Radom in 1939 under Ger‌man bombardment but returned and were put into the Radom Ghetto soon after. Through bribing Polish contacts, her father, her uncle and she were able to live and work in Szydlowiec (Kielce area), a munitions factory outside the ghetto. In late summer 1942, the ghetto was liquidated and the rest of her family was sent to Treblinka. Her father, her uncle and she continued working in the munitions factory until 1944.

With the Russian approach in July 1944 the Germans marched the prisoners 100 miles to Tomaszow under horrible conditions and from there shipped them to Auschwitz. She describes the cattle cars, arrival, selection, unsanitary conditions and Appells. She recounts how she was helped by a fellow inmate. She was sent to work in a string factory in Lichtewerden, Czechoslovakia in the Sudetenland. She describes some of the brutality and also kindnesses of some Germans and others. After the liberation by the Russians, Sara managed to return totally destitute to Radom. Though helped by some Polish locals upon her return, other former Polish friends refused to return the family’s belongings to her. She left with some friends for Stuttgart, Germany, and got married. She emigrated to the United States in January 1949.

Recorded at the 1985 American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia, PA.

Sonja Samson was born in Aurich, Germany in 1931, into an assimilated but observant Jewish family. In 1936 she lived with her grandparents in Luxembourg until she joined her parents who had moved to France earlier. She talks about her family history and her childhood, and speculates about her parents’ reasons for staying in France instead of emigrating to the United States. Her father volunteered for the French army but was interned in 1939.

Sonja and her parents were in Gurs briefly, then lived in Garlin, a village near Gurs until August 26, 1942 when they were rounded up by French police, sent to Gurs and then transported to Rivesaltes in September, 1942. Her parents were deported and her mother managed to keep Sonja from going on this transport with the help of Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE). She never saw her parents again and still profoundly resents this separation. She briefly describes conditions in the two camps and her life and schooling in the villages of Garlin and Gurs, including pressure on a teacher to rescind an honor Sonja had earned.

Sonja stayed in a convent and then an orphanage at Palavas-les-Flots with other Jewish children, under the auspices of the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF) and OSE, then with distant relatives who were in hiding, later in a boarding school in Chambéry, constantly on guard. She mentions a failed attempt to cross the border into Switzerland.

Later Sonja worked as a maid at an inn that was a substation of the ArmeéSecréte (the French underground). She invented a new identity for herself as a non-Jewish war orphan, and participated in Catholic rites to avoid discovery. After she earned their trust, Sonja became a messenger. She relates how her presence of mind foiled a plot by the so-called “Butcher of Grenoble” to blow up the Underground headquarters just after liberation in August 1944. Sonja describes post-war life at the Chambéry boarding school, with her cousins, as well as her search for her parents, and was an active member of Hashomer Hatzair in Paris. She describes how she learned what she needed to do to survive, how the loss of her parents affects her to this day, and how her outlook about religion, Jewishness, and Zionism changed as she matured.

Sonja went to the United States from Sweden on the Gripsholm as a war-orphan in 1947, instead of making aliyah with her friends. She talks about the difficult adjustment to life in the United States, how she managed to get the higher education she wanted, and post-war trips to Israel in great detail.

Interviewee: SAMSON, Sonja Date: June 3, 1985

Caroline Gutman, nee Gersten, was born in Semipalatisnk, Siberia on November 9, 1944. Her family fled there when the Germans entered their town of Melitz, Poland in 1940. Her father was a shoemaker and tailor. After the war they smuggled out of Siberia to Germany. She and her family lived in a displaced persons camp in Berlin, Germany and later in another camp, Feldafing, near Munich. She came to the United States when she was 8 years old, on January 11, 1952.

The interview focuses on Caroline’s emotional responses to her childhood experiences. Caroline describes her feelings as a child survivor and daughter of two survivors (having lost much of her extended family) growing up in America.

Miro Auferber was interviewed in Haifa, Israel in Serbical Yiddish which his interviewer translated into English. He was born in Osijek, Croatia, November 22, 1913. His father was a manufacturer and his family was active in the Jewish community and belonged to Zionist organizations. Miro was taken to forced labor, his parents perished in Auschwitz, and his pregnant wife was killed by the Ustashi. He also served as a reserve officer in the Yugoslav army in April 1941, became a prisoner of war but managed to escape.

Miro talks about his experiences, often in great detail, as a slave laborer and a prisoner, in Gospic harvesting crops, and in Jasenovac working at a steam power plant in 1941. He gives a detailed account of the detention camp were his group and Jews from Pag were imprisoned; both Jews and Serbs were brutalized and starved, as well as cruel treatment by Ustashi guards. No written records of prisoners were kept until 1942. He explains how a leather factory established by Sylvio Alkali, a Sarajevan, and Avraham Dimayo, a Jew from Belgrade, enabled the prisoners to survive. In 1942 the Ustashi liquidated thousands of Jews they brought to Jasenovac. In April 1945, the population of Jasenovac was liquidated and the buildings destroyed. Two hundred and fifty of the leather workers, including Miro, resisted, but all but eight were killed.. Miro joined the partisans, the Yugoslav People’s Army. He mentions his return to Osijek, subsequent arrest and release.

Miro talks about his feelings of shame and guilt. He again details the atrocities the Ustashi committed against Serbs and Jews. Mr. Auferber emigrated to Israel in 1948.

Harold Stern, formerly Helmutt, was born August 31, 1921 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, the only child of middle class Jewish parents. His father came from an Orthodox background and his mother was raised in a non-observant home; as a family, they belonged to a large Liberal Congregation, the West end Synagogue in Frankfurt. Harold describes the educational system and antisemitism pre- and post- 1933. He discusses the Kultusgemeinde, his Jewish education, upbringing, and his studies at the Philanthropin (a Jewish secondary school), which he attended in 1935 due to increased Nazism and antisemitism experience at the public Gymnasium. His mother continued the family business after his father’s death in 1930, but had to give it up (1937) as a result of the Nuremberg Laws. He describes the “aryanization” of a shoe manufacturing company and other businesses where he was apprenticed/employed. Despite having an early quota number, Harold’s attempts to emigrate with his mother to USA were thwarted because their affidavits were not accepted by the American Consulate in Stuttgart. In March 1939, Harold left for England through the aid of family friends in England and Bloomsbury House, while his mother remained in Frankfurt. He describes life in London, working as a factory trainee, residing among British (non-Jewish) working class, until June 1940 when he was picked up and interned in Huyten, a camp near Liverpool, with other German Jewish refugees. In July 1940, he volunteered for transport on the Dunera, a ship supposedly bound for Canada but re-routed to Australia. He discusses in detail the desperate conditions at sea, harsh treatment by British soldiers, and refugee behavior during the ten week voyage. From Sidney, he was transferred to a barbed-wire enclosed compound in the Outback, in Hay, New South Wales. He refers to the internal camp leadership which emerged, the development of cultural and educational activities. He details help given by the Australian Christian Student Movement (under Margaret Holmes), Jewish Welfare Board, and Jewish people of Melbourne. Later he moved to a camp in Tatura, Victoria that had better conditions. After 20 months of internment, he joined the Australian army, the 8th Employment Company, where he did transport of munitions. He was discharged in 1946 or 1947, after serving 4 1/2 years in the army.

Harold kept contact with his mother and knew that she reached USA in late 1941. Through the help of a non-Jewish woman, she obtained a visa in September 1941, left Germany on a sealed train (to Berlin), journeyed through occupied and Vichy France and Spain to Lisbon, boarding one of the last steamers from Portugal to America. Her brother, however, was arrested by the Gestapo and never seen again. Her sister, a musician, later hospitalized in a sanitarium was “euthanized”.

Harold immigrated to the USA in 1947 under the German quota. In 1959, he moved to Philadelphia.

Sybil Niemöller (maiden name von Sell) was born in 1923 in Potsdam into an aristocratic Prussian family. Both her grandfathers were Prussian generals. After World War I her father was appointed by Kaiser Wilhelm to be his financial advisor and administrator. She grew up in Berlin-Dahlem where she had several Jewish friends. Her parents were strongly anti-Nazi. The family attended the Confessing Church which was led by their friend Pastor Niemöller. This church was founded as counterpart against the Christian German Church which had embraced Nazi ideology. Because she did not belong to the Hitler Youth she was prevented from graduating from high school and became an actress. During the war her parents sheltered several Jews, disguised as seamstresses and gardeners. Two of her cousins, Werner von Haeften (who was adjutant to Count von Stauffenberg) and Hans Bernd von Haeften were involved in the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944 and were executed. Both Sybil and her father were also arrested and interrogated at that time, but released. She arrived in the United States in 1952, became a U.S. citizen in 1957, and married Pastor Martin Niemöller. She accompanied him on his lecture tours but made their home in Wiesbaden, Germany. She describes his suffering as “Hitler’s special prisoner” when he was incarcerated in Sachsenhausen and later in Dachau.

Interviewee: NIEMÖLLER, Sybil (von Sell) Date: November 21, 1986