Oral History Interview with Lili Altschuler

Henry Skorr was born in Kalisz, Poland on October 11, 1921. He describes in detail Jewish life in Kalisz before WWII including the antisemitism that existed, his traditional upbringing and schooling, and the special relationship between parents and children. He discusses the atmosphere before and after German occupation; the arrest, detention and forced labor of Mr. Skorr and his brother; his realization that they must escape Poland.

He describes a mass execution in a Kalisz cemetery during which he and other boys were ordered to help in the burial and then his subsequent escape from the cemetery. He tells of traveling through Poland to Russian occupied territory of the Ukraine until he reached Kovel. He then decided to return to Kalisz to take family and friends through this escape route.

Mr. Skorr, now with his family, was resettled in Cherepovetz in deep Russia. He describes the train trip and his recruitment to work deep in the forest to cut down trees. Conditions, as he describes them, were terrible and he escaped back to Cherepovetz and found work as a sailor on a boat hauling lumber and barges. Throughout the testimony, Mr. Skorr comments on life in Russia and gives insights into Russian people and society and how the system worked.

He was mobilized to work on the fortification near Leningrad and describes the German breakthrough and his joining and organizing a guerrilla movement. He was wounded and evacuated to Wologda. Upon recovery he returned to Cherepovetz, where his family had stayed. There he found work in the Fire Department where he eventually rose to head the department.

Although offered an opportunity for mobilization to the Polish Army he refused because of fear of antisemitism in the ranks. He met his future wife at the end of the war and returned to Warsaw, Poland where they married. His description of life in postwar Poland tells of much antisemitism and attacks on the returning Jews from antisemitic bands. Eventually, he emigrated to Israel in 1950 and to the United States in 1958.

This interview was conducted on multiple dates in 1983: February 8 and 28, April 12, May 2, June 14 and 28, July 5 and 19.

Simon Aufschauer was born on February 15, 1915 in Żółkiew, near Lvov (Lemberg) Galicia, Poland. His father died when he was 4 and at age 13 he was apprenticed to a furrier. He described the antisemitism of the Polish and Ukrainian schoolchildren of Lvov when he was growing up. Simon belonged to Betar, a Jewish youth movement, and he and his brother worked to help their widowed mother.

Simon was drafted into the Polish army in 1937 and he fought briefly against the German Army when they invaded Poland in 1939. He was captured and then escaped from a detention camp by putting on civilian clothes. In Lvov, now under the Soviets, Simon, worked as a furrier until being drafted into the Soviet Army with his brother, on June 21, 1941. When his brother was killed by the German Army Simon fled and returned to his mother in Lvov. After the German invasion of Lvov she was sent to Belzec, where she perished. Simon describes the murder of 2,000 Jews from the ghetto in Lemberg in April 1942. Since Simon was a strong worker, he was sent to several slave labor camps: in December 1941 to Janowska, Lemberg; in 1943 to Plaszow, Krakow; in 1944 to Gross Rosen; and finally on May8, 1945, he was liberated by the Soviets from Reichenbach. He described the horrific conditions in these slave labor camps: 12 to 18 hour days of slave labor, sickness, brutalities, crematoria (in Gross Rosen), and digging out dead bodies and burning them in order to erase evidence of the murders (in Plaszow, Krakow,1943). He also described attempts of the Jews to pray and fast for Yom Kippur at these places.

Simon met his wife in a Displaced Persons camp (May 1945) and they were marriedAugust 12, 1945. They were able to come to the United States soon after. He attributed his ability to survive to his experience as a furrier and to his youthful strength. Throughout his testimony is the pervasive recounting of Polish and Ukrainian antisemitism, even after the war.

See also the oral history of Hasia Aufschauer, Mr. Aufschauer’s wife, who was also interviewed for the Gratz College Holocaust Oral History Archive.

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.

K. R. was born in Tarnopol, Poland, March 31, 1922. Her father was a businessman and her family was greatly influenced by Viennese culture. She briefly describes the start of overt antisemitism in her schools. She was a member of HanoarHatzioni and active in Zionist youth groups in Tarnopol and L’vov.

In 1940, under Russian Occupation, she and a group of HanoarHatzioni members were caught by some Ukrainian villagers—as they tried to cross the border illegally—and delivered to police. K. R. was sent to prison and later transferred to a labor camp near the North Pole. She describes the harsh conditions in the camp and why some of her fellow prisoners did not survive. She was released because she was Polish but given Soviet citizenship and sent by train to another part of Russia. Many strangers helped her during this time. She worked as a bookkeeper at a collective farm (kolkhoz) near the Russian village Devochki Gorki on the Volga River. When the German Army advanced, she was deported to Kazakhstan by train. She describes the conditions under which she lived. She worked as a bookkeeper in Kustanay. After the NKVD tried to recruit her as a spy, she fled to Alma Ata using documents she forged.

In 1945, after the war, she returned to Tarnopol and found it almost completely destroyed. She joined a kibbutz in Lodz and worked with HashomerHatzair to prepare young Russian refugees for life in Palestine. She also organized and led illegal border crossings to get them there. During this time she met and married her husband. They went to Palestine, from Cyprus, on a ship called The State of Israel in 1948, escorting a group of young Jewish children who had been hidden in monasteries or by Polish families. K. R. then reflects about how her experiences have shaped her outlook on life and her views about human behavior.

Ida Rudley, née Rothman, was born April 22, 1922 in Vienna, Austria, into a middle class family. She encountered antisemitism even before Hitler annexed Austria. Her life changed after the Anschluss in 1938, as anti-Jewish measures took effect. She explains why it was almost impossible for Jews to leave Austria. She mentions several instances of help from non-Jews, including an encounter with a German officer who took an interest in her while she and her mother were trying to escape from Austria. They were smuggled across the border to Yugoslavia in 1941 and lived in Zagreb illegally, always on the run, sheltered by both Jews and non-Jews until they were warned that the Gestapo was looking for them. Ida and her mother turned themselves in to the Gestapo - armed with enough pills to commit suicide - and managed to talk their way out of detention. Using forged papers, they accompanied a group of German-Jewish orphans bound for Palestine to the Italian part of Yugoslavia.

After living briefly in Ljubljana, they were sent to a concentration camp in Ferramonti, Italy. Prisoners included Greek, Italian and Yugoslavian Partisans as well as Jews. The Italians ran the camp in a very humane fashion and even told Jews where to hide from the retreating German troops. Ida and her husband were married by a rabbi in the concentration camp and had a civil ceremony later, after liberation by the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in 1943. After a brief stay in a transit camp in Cinecitta, run by UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) Ida, her husband and her mother went to the United States on a military ship in 1947.

Interviewee: RUDLEY, Ida Date: April 5, 1984

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