Oral History Interview with Klara Leizerowski

Lillian Steinig, née Edelstein, was born January 23, 1923 in Stryj, Poland. Her father was a merchant and farmer until the Russian occupation in 1939. Forced to give up his large farm to the Soviet authority, he moved his family to the city and worked in a lumber yard. Lillian and her younger brother had to attend a strict Russian school until 1941, when the Germans occupied Stryj and relocated Jews. She describes Jewish attempts to hide and the 1942 round-up of Jews, including her father and brother, who jumped from a moving cattle car and returned home. She relates in detail aid by non-Jewish Poles who gave her false identification papers and hid her brother and parents. Another Polish family in Przedborz, near Kielce, sheltered her until 1945. She describes her trip through the Russian zone at the war’s end for a reunion with her family, who moved briefly to Krakow. Antisemitic outbreaks in Krakow forced them to flee to a Displaced Persons camp in Austria in 1946. Later, in Linz, Lillian and her brother worked in Simon Wiesenthal’s Jewish Identification Center. The family emigrated to the United States in January, 1949, aboard the SS Marina, joining relatives in Philadelphia.

Samuel Greenberg was born on June 6, 1910 in Szumk, Poland a small town near Vishnivits to a poor, orthodox family. Samdescribes pre-war antisemitism and lack of love between the Ukrainians and the Poles. His family belonged to Mizrachi, a Zionist organization.Sam describes difficulties they faced in 1939 under Russian occupation: scarcity of food,nationalization of businesses and fear of being sent to Siberia for “stealing” from the government.

Sam describes the maltreatment of Jews at the hands Ukrainians and Poles after the German invasion in September 1941. He mentions that women were violated. He describes the creation of the Vishnivits Ghetto in February 1941, crowded conditions, rampant illness and frequent deaths. He was forced there with his wife, young daughter and mother and father- in-law. He details men in labor brigades being beaten anddescribes 500 girls between 12 and 21 having their heads shaved.

Sam describes the horror of his town’s liquidation. He hid under a bed thinking that the women and children would be safe and he could be reunited with them later. After he escaped, a Polish acquaintance hid him and told him how the entire town was shot in mass graves and covered in lye. He describes his harrowing survival during the bitter winter and spring moving from farm to farm hiding in stables, the woods and wheat fields. He received some help from Poles in the form of bread and also shelter in a haystack in exchange for a fur coat. He also meta group of Ukrainian nationalists who followed Stepan Bandera and fought for Ukrainian freedomand were accused of antisemitic acts. He begged for his life on several occasions and was shocked when they let him go.

In the summer of 1944, the Russians arrived, but when Sam was the only Jew to survive in his whole area, the Russians accused him of being a German collaborator and shipped him to Siberia. He was housed with other German collaborators who had slaughtered the Jews. The Russians asked him to spy on them, which he did, but only earned himself a ticket to the front, walking all the way from Siberia to Berlin with the Soviet army. After getting shot in the head, he was sent to a hospital near Magdeburg and begged one Jewish doctor to keep him there so he could live. Sam was discharged there by the Soviet Army in 1945. After liberation, Sam returned to Poland but heard stories of Jews’ being killed by Poles after the war so fled to the American zone in Germany. He arrived in Philadelphia in April 1948 having been sent a visa through an uncle. Sam attributes his survival to his faith in God. Sam found out after the war, that his brother had survived the war in Siberia.

Ina Rothschild talks about her life, education and work in Germany after World War I. Both women lived through Hitler’s rise to power, starting in the 1920s, experienced changes in Jewish life after 1933, and explain the effects of these events on the Jewish community and their interaction with Gentiles. Elsa Jaeckel’s husband, a Gentile, refused to divorce her and suffered the consequences. She mentions a group of Jews in Frankfurt who committed suicide to avoid deportation in 1941. Throughout the interview, Mrs. Rothschild cites many instances of aid and acts of kindness by Gentiles.

Mrs. Rothschild and her husband ran a Jewish orphanage in Esslingen am Neckar, near Stuttgart from 1933 to 1942 when they were deported. The orphanage was ransacked on November 9, 1938. Her husband was beaten, arrested, but later released to care for the displaced orphans. She describes what happened to the children in their care.

Elsa Jaeckel had to work for the Gestapo with 600 other Jewish women who had gentile husbands. She talks about conditions for couples in mixed marriages and living through air raids in Frankfurt. She avoided the transport to Theresienstadt because her husband bribed a former SA man to let her hide in his house. She hid in the attic until the Americans came in 1945.

When the orphanage was closed, the Rothschilds returned to Stuttgart. She describes their lives, her work in an old age home, and her attempts to care for Jewish children. Many of the children, especially the retarded ones, were deported and killed at Ravensburg. The Rothschilds were deported to an Old Age Home in Theresienstadt on August 22, 1942. She describes the process, the actual transport, arrival at Theresienstadt, and brutal treatment and living conditions which improved once the International Red Cross supervised this institution. She saw Reinhard Heydrich shoot Jewish prisoners. Ina Rothschild worked as a nurse, her husband died in July 1944. Many inmates killed themselves. Ina mentions attempts to care for newborn babies. She also volunteered to care for 50 young children from Holland with typhoid fever together with a Jewish doctor. The children survived and were adopted after the war. She was transported to Switzerland with 600 people in February 1945. Elsa came to the United States in 1957, Ina in 1947.

Note: Collateral Material available through the Gratz College Tuttleman Library:

Scanned copy of a German letter and the translation.

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.

Hans Braun was born in Hanover, Germany on June 3, 1923. His family were German Sintis (a gypsy tribe). They had a small carnival and traveled around Germany during the summer and lived in Bernau in the winter. Nazi persecution started in 1939 and they had to wear a patch with the letter "Z". In 1941 Hans and his father were forced to work for the German army in the armament industry. Hans was suspected of sabotage after accidentally breaking a machine. To escape arrest by the Gestapo, he fled to his grandfather's home in Berlin. Pursued by the Gestapo, he went into hiding, first with friends in Berlin then with an uncle in Eger, and finally with Sintis in Luxemburg who gave him false papers. He was arrested and jailed when he returned home but escaped. Hans describes subsequent arrests and escapes-using disguises and false papers-in great detail.

After his final capture he was put on a transport to Auschwitz with other Sinti families. He was put into the Birkenau Gypsy camp where he was reunited with his family. He describes conditions in the Gypsy camp, his work loading and unloading the dead at the crematorium, and his beatings by guards. One by one his entire family died of typhus and starvation. After he got typhus, he was experimented on in the hospital barracks. He describes how Dr. Mengele tortured children and used them for his medical experiments.

Hans was sent to Flossenbürg Labor Camp where he was again beaten. He was on a death march with surviving inmates for four days and nights just before liberation. Hans and two other men escaped and hid in a village which was defended by the SS. They were liberated by the Americans. Hans lived in Germany after the war and emigrated to Canada in 1980.

Morris Steiman was born August 5, 1918 in Bodzanow, a small town near Warsaw. Morris attended cheder and yeshiva and was a member ofAgudah, a religious Zionist youth group. He experienced pre-war antisemitism because of his appearance as a religious Jewish boy, in his hometown and in Warsaw, where he worked as a tailor’s apprentice.

In November, 1939, he fled the German occupation and went east to the Russian-occupied area of Poland. In March 1940, homesick and concerned about his parents, he returned to Poland—first Warsaw and then made his way back to his hometown— where he worked as a tailor for the Germans until March 1941. He discusses being very aware as an older teenager about what exactly was going on and actively looking for ways to escape and emigrate. He gives a detailed description of the evacuation of Jews from Bodzanow, during which he and his father was severely beaten on the head. He describes the Germans indiscriminately beating everyone they could as they chased them into the trucks. They were taken to a camp in Dzialdowo for a few days, near the German border, with little food and no toilets or water. They were thendeported to the Czestochowa Ghetto, where he was cared for by Rose Tannenbaum. Morris’ parents fled to Warsaw to be with his sister and died of natural causes soon after.

Morris and Rose married and survived the war years together, doing forced labor at HasagPelzery, in metal and ammunition factories in nearby Rakow. Morris describes one Wehrmacht commander who treated them humanely and also assisted several Jews in escaping the ghetto and retrieving money left behind in the ghetto. They were liberated by the Russians in January 1945 and stayed in Czestochowa for almost a year. He secured work as a tailor. He describes returning to his hometown after the war and digging up a kiddish cup and candlesticks that his brother had buried. He and his wife moved to Lampertheim, a displaced persons camp in the American zone of Germany, until emigrating to the United States in March 1947 where he had a sister.