Oral History Interview with Konrad Bieber

Arthur Goldstein served in the 80th Infantry Division, 305th Medical Battalion during World War II. He mentions encountering an Italian priest who had been tortured and prisoners of war left behind by German soldiers, including Colonel Hallen, a war correspondent who had been mistreated. When Mr. Goldstein liberated Dachau Concentration camp he found piles of corpses scattered throughout the camp, mass graves, charred remains of civilians tied to railroad tracks who were burned to death, and evidence that many prisoners were obviously killed just prior to liberation. He went inside a room full of ovens as well as a gas chamber. He saw a few surviving inmates stoning a German guard. Other inmates described atrocities committed by the guards. His medical unit fed and cared for the approximately 50 survivors and evacuated them to the base hospital. Sometime after leaving Dachau, he found several hundred women, imprisoned in a barn, who had been used as sex slaves by German soldiers. He mentions showing pictures he took of the bodies at Dachau to German-Americans, some of whom denied that this actually happened.

This document is a certificate issued by the President of the French Republic, François Mitterrand, appointing Monsieur Elie Wiesel as a Grand Officier of the Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur. The certificate identifies Wiesel as a writer, university professor, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. The appointment was made by a decree on the same day the certificate was issued. It was done in Paris on July 25, 1990, and sealed under the order number 294 LHE 83. The document bears the handwritten signatures of François Mitterrand (President of the Republic) and Général Biard (Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour).

Lory Cahn1, nee Grünberger, was born May 17, 1925 in Breslau, Germany into a religious home. Her father was a lawyer. Her younger brother was sent to England in the 1930's, joined the British army and remained in England permanently.2 Lory's schooling stopped after Kristallnacht, 1938. The family's attempts to emigrate to Argentina failed. Because her father was a captain in the German army during World War I, he was able to buy his way into Theresienstadt and Lory was allowed to stay with her parents when the family was deported in the spring of 1941. Lory reports in detail the roundup of Jews, the transport by cattle car, and every aspect of life in Theresienstadt. She was treated for meningitis with medicine provided by the Red Cross. In 1943 Lory was sent to Auschwitz after a two week trip in a cattle car. She survived a selection by Dr. Mengele. She describes living and working conditions of female prisoners and mentions the Auschwitz orchestra. Auschwitz was so overcrowded prisoners were exterminated before being processed. Lory witnessed many brutal acts. In 1944 she was sent to Mauthausen after ten days in Buchenwald. Outside Buchenwald Jews in the transport were bombed during an air raid. She describes a brutal trip, guarded by SS, to Kurzbach, a labor camp in Silesia. Pointless labor and a starvation diet were designed to kill the prisoners. After a death march to Gross-Rosen, in the fall of 1944 (which only 30 of the 150 in her group survived) they were taken to Bergen-Belsen. She describes conditions in Bergen-Belsen. Prisoners who reported sick disappeared. Due to extreme starvation, some prisoners resorted to cannibalism. Just before the war ended the SS guards gradually disappeared and the number of prisoners who died increased greatly. Lory survived bitter cold, typhus, and starvation and was liberated by British troops April 15, 1945. She describes chaotic conditions in Bergen-Belsen and attempts to rehabilitate the survivors after liberation. Many prisoners died from eating regular food. At a Jewish information office in Hannover Lory learned that her mother was gassed in Auschwitz and her father was still alive in Theresienstadt. She went to Bavaria, in the American zone, with friends. American Jewish soldiers looked after them. One managed to find her father in Berlin. Her father joined her in Bavaria, April 1946. After some time in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany she came to the United States on April 17, 1947 and married one of the soldiers she had met in Bavaria. Her father stayed in Germany.

Kurt Kupferberg was born September 1907 in Berlin, Germany to an observant, middle-class family from Galicia. After World War I, their citizenship was changed to Polish, resulting in their being part of the mass deportation to Zbąszyń, Poland, in 1938. A Nazi policeman had warned them to leave. Kurt describes his return to Germany in 1939, as well as his deportation and experiences in Sachsenhausen in 1939, Dachau in 1940, and Buchenwald in 1941. He details the selections of Dr. Mengele and medical experiments performed on him in Buchenwald, describing his suffering from typhus following an injection of the microorganism under his skin. As Allied Forces approached Buchenwald, non-Jewish political prisoners sheltered Jews from the S.S. He was liberated by General Patton’s unit July 11, 1945. He married a survivor in Berlin in 1946 and emigrated with his wife and baby to the United States in 1947. Also see testimony of his wife, Hardy W. Kupferberg.

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.