Oral History Interview with Louie Mermelstein

Original File

Transcript

English

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Title

Oral History Interview with Louie Mermelstein

Date

May 1, 1984

Contributor

Interviewee:

Louie Mermelstein

Interviewer:

Rebecca Korntreger

Summary

Louie Mermelstein, the second oldest of 13 children, was born May 12, 1927 in Klascanovo 1, Czechoslovakia, near Munkács. His father was a kosher butcher. He describes good relations between Jews and non-Jews before the war. Louie details changes during the Hungarian occupation in 1940: his father’s deportation to a slave labor camp, restrictions against the Jews, having to wear yellow star, and clandestine slaughtering and delivering of kosher meat to make a living.

Louie describes fleeing from a round-up in 1944. He hid in the forest about four weeks with two uncles. During this time he found out that the Jews were forced to a brick factory in the Munkács Ghetto and deported to concentration camps and Auschwitz among them most of his family. Louie mentions help by Gentiles who brought him food while in hiding. A gentile friend also gave him his nephew’s identity papers. Louie traveled to Uzhgorod with these false papers, went to the step-sister who helped him settle there with a job, and lived in their house. After some time, he returned to the forest to find his uncles and was denounced by a Gentile who knew him. He describes being beaten by police, thrown in jail and that his employer was also brought to jail for hiring a Jew.2

Louie was held in the jail for days and gives a detailed description of how the police rounded up more of the few Jews who were still hiding. Eventually his group of 30 people is deported to a transit camp called Sarvar where they join a group of about 2,000 to be deported to Auschwitz. Louie details his escape from the train in an area that happened to be under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg and how a decent Slovakian farmer and SS officer direct him to the Jewish Committee in Žilina about 13 miles away. He connects with an uncle and his family in Bratislava and secures a job as a plumber’s helper. In the fall of 1944, Louie’s uncle gathers the 10 family members in an attic hideout above the factory where he works. A middle-aged gentile friend takes over his position as superintendent of the factory and brings them food after dark. They hide there six months, surviving the Allied bombing, and are liberated by the Soviet army May 8, 1945.

After the war, Louie works for the Soviet army. Because he didn’t like how they treated the farmers, he went to the American liberated zone (Germany) and started looking for surviving relatives. He describes returning to Munkács, reuniting with his sisters in Neustadt-Holstein, Germany, finding a cousin in the U.S. Army and discovering that his father was killed the week before liberation in Flossenbürg, Germany. His G.I. cousin’s family in Long Island secures them affidavits to emigrate. Louie emigrates to the United States in June 1946.

See interviews with his siblings Lillian Taus and Shirley Don and brother-in-law, Sam Don.

More details

Publisher:

Gratz College

Number of Tapes:

Language:

English

Identifier:

HOHAGC00352

Rights

Copyright date:

2023

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