Oral History Interview with Lisa G. Tyre

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.

David Buchsbaum was born in Gorlice, Poland on April 20, 1921 to a religious family. He was one of 11 children.. He gives a brief description of pre-war Gorliceand the Jewish community which was 25% of the population, about 3,500 Jews. David’s family owned a grocery store.

David describes the mood change among non-Jewish neighbors in 1938 after Germany occupied Czechoslovakia and describes how they would stand in front of Jewish stores and businesses announcing, "Do not buy from Jews".

In 1939 once the Nazis occupied Gorlice the family was warned by a non-Jewish neighbor to flee, but the family could not afford the certificate to emigrate to Palestine. David details the anti-Jewish measures 1940: Jews had to wear the Yellow star, Jewish businesses were confiscated, synagogues were closed, Jewish" quarters" were created and David’s father was shot to death by a German soldier right before his eyes. David also witnessed the machine gun shooting of entire Jewish families.

In July, 1942 all males from 12-65 were arrested and marched in the streets; some were shot and David, a brother and others were sent to the Plaszow concentration camp. David describes the horrific conditions there: cold, typhus, appells, beatings and the electrified fence. In 1943, as the Russians advanced David and 1,000 other Jews were sent in boxcars to the slave labor camp, Skarzysko. Those who were left behind were either shot in the woods or were gassed in vans and burned. In Skarzysko they made ammunition and David was in in the harshest area, Barrack C. In 1944 David was sent to Buchenwald where all his personal possessions were confiscated, including his tallit and tefillin, which distressed his greatly because he had tried to observe tradition as best he could. As the Russians advanced he was sent to Terezin(Theresienstadt) and was liberated from there on May 8, 1945. David describes that many survivors from Terezin died from overconsumption of food immediately after liberation.

David later returned to Poland to find his relatives but left because of fierce antisemitism and the Kielce pogrom. He traveled to Prague, and was then sent to Salzburg, Austria by the Joint Distribution Committee. The Joint arranged for him to join an uncle in the United States. On June 2, 1949 David arrived in Boston. He and two brothers survived the war.

Armand Mednick, named “Avrum” by his Yiddish-speaking parents, was born in 1933 into a close, extended family in Brussels, Belgium. He grew up as a stranger in a non-Jewish neighborhood, often taunted by anti-Semites influenced by the fascist Rex Party. At age six, he was hospitalized with tuberculosis until May 1940, when his father, an active political leftist, fled with his family to France. His father was drafted into the French Army, deserted and placed his son, renamed “Armand”, in a sanitarium at Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne Mountains. Armand’s father, mother and baby sister hid nearby in Volvic, where they passed as Christians. When Armand recovered, he joined his family and attended Catholic school. At home, there was some Jewish observance and Armand recalls walking for seven miles with his father to attend a clandestine seder.

Armand’s father joined the French resistance in 1944 and the family returned to Brussels in 1945, where Armand was the first Bar Mitzvah celebrant after the war. The Mednick family moved to Philadelphia in 1947. Buchenwald death lists confirmed that most of their extended family of 55 relatives had been killed. Armand became a potter and teacher and produced a series of clay reliefs with symbolic Holocaust images, in an attempt to exorcise his painful childhood memories.

See also interview with his father, Bernard S. Mednicki.

Interviewee: MEDNICK, Armand Date: June 15, 1983

Suzanne Gross, nee Sarah Pertofsky, was born in Paris, France in 1931. Her parents were born in Belz (Russia) and emigrated to France around 1924. They had a beauty parlor in Paris which was closed by the Germans after the invasion of Paris. At that time Jews were rounded up systematically and families were forcibly separated. Non-native born Jews were rounded up before Jews who were considered French.

As a child, especially after she started school, Suzanne was made to feel she was not really French. Suzanne talks in detail about her experience when she had to wear her Yellow Star to school.

Her father went underground, worked at first on a farm, then joined the Jewish French partisans. He later worked in a steel factory be‌cause the French partisans did not want Jews. Her mother was hidden by neighbors for three months.

Sarah was sent to a farm in Normandy with 5 or 6 other children by the French Jewish Scouts (Eclaireurs Israelites de France) who had an underground network to hide Jewish children. She worked on various farms under harsh conditions. She was a hidden child in a convent school where she had to pretend she was Catholic.

She was reunited with her parents in Paris, who lived clandestinely on and off in their boarded up shop. The family received money from a resistance movement in the steel factory where her father worked. The concierge helped by selling items knitted by her mother. During this time Suzanne and her sister often warned Jews when a police round-up started. Many Jews were imprisoned at Drancy. She describes how families searched for arrested relatives from afar.

She gives a detailed account of her emotional responses to the childhood trauma she experienced and to surviving the Holocaust. The family emigrated to the USA in 1946.

Interviewee: GROSS, Suzanne Date: August 9, 1983

Norbert Zeelander was born in Antwerp, Belgium on February 24, 1938. He was the first-born in a middle class family. His family had lived in Holland for hundreds of years but subsequently moved to Belgium for business. As he was two years old in May of 1940 when the family left Belgium, Norbert’s recollections are from what he was told and from photos.

Norbert was told that when the bombing of Belgium began his family,together with his father’s parents, drove south towards France. It took them nine months, moving from farm to farm to stay ahead of the Germans. Norbert learned that his father’s brother killed his family and committed suicide.

Norbert’s familystayed at one farm for one and a half years where his sister was born November 1941. When the Nazis drew near in late 1942 or early 1943, they escaped through Spain to Portugal. Norbert describes the train ride with German soldiers on the train and that his parents, who had false papers, were helped by a network of people including the stationmaster. He also believes that the Dutch Red Cross was involved in their escape from France, through Spain and Portugal, where they boarded a ship to the West Indies.The family stayed in a large refugee camp with other Dutch people. Eventually they went to Curacao, a Dutch island.

After the war, the family came to the U.S. but because they had entered illegally they had to return to Belgium for two years to await their quota, where Norbert recalls much antisemitism. In 1948 the family returned to the U.S.

Norbert expresses theimpact of psychological characteristics that he feels are related to his family’s experiences with which he still struggles: developing into a loner (since he was without any playmates while in hiding), nightmares in which he is always running, being angry and quick tempered as an adolescent, especially when faced with antisemitism. He describes how he coped with these emotions by keeping very busy and working long hours to which he attributes his later success in business. Norbert explains that because he was never in a camp or a ghetto he never considered himself a "survivor" until the 1985 American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia. See also the interview with his father, Theodore Zeelander from 1985.

Ephraim Glaser, born in 1922 in Cluj, Transylvania, Romania, was the son of an orthodox shochet, mohel and chazan. He describes pre-war Cluj and recalls a pogrom that took place in the courtyard of his family’s home when he was five years old.

He describes changes that occurred when the Hungarian occupation began in 1940, including beatings and exclusion of Jews from public schools. He attended cheder and yeshiva until 1943, when he was taken to a forced labor camp. He escaped in 1944, and because of his Aryan appearance and ability to speak German, was able to pose as a Hungarian Christian and join a German army unit as a translator. After several months, suspected of being a Bolshevist, he ran away and found refuge in a factory, whose owner, a baron, hid him in an unused oven.

His sister and her family, hidden in a Czechoslovakian monastery, were deceived by a German promise of safety and returned to their home in August 1941. They were then seized and sent on the last transport to Auschwitz. His brother-in-law, an opera singer and cantor in Bratislava, was shot while singing for the Germans.

Ephraim fled to Miskolc in the Russian zone and was liberated at the end of 1944. He briefly mentions Russian plunder of the local population. After his return to Cluj, he was active in the Zionist underground movement, Bricha2, transporting Jews illegally to Palestine. Accused of being a fascist by former friends who had become Communists, he went to Palestine and worked on a kibbutz in1946. He describes the difficulties encountered among kibbutz members who stigmatized survivors like himself as being cowards who willingly submitted to their own slaughter. That experience caused him to remain silent for many years, not even telling his children about his experiences until later in his life. He explains how his silence and then finally talking about the Holocaust affected his children.

See also Ephraim’s second interview conducted in 1989 during which he discusses more in-depth about his experiences in the German army unit.

Interviewee: GLASER, Ephraim Date: August 10, 1988