Oral History Interview with Marian W. Turzanski

Fanny Schwartz was born on December 16, 1911 in Stavna, Czechoslovakia. She was brought up by a very observant father who was a shochet (ritual slaughterer) who tutored his children in their Jewish subjects. He was also a leader in the local kehillah. There were nine children in the family; only Fanny, two of her sisters and two brothers survived. Her brothers came to the United States in 1939.

Fanny was living in Berecin1 with her husband and young son before the war started. They lost their store in 1938 when the Hungarians occupied Czechoslovakia. Fanny describes the Hungarians as very antisemitic. Fanny’s husband was taken to a work camp but was able to return and the family was able to remain in Berecin for a time. By early 1940 men were taken daily to work camps, but in 1944, right after Passover, the Hungarians took the Jews from Berecin, via the Ungvar Ghetto, on transports to Auschwitz. Fanny describes in great detail the horrific conditions of the transport: Hungarian police overseers marching them to the cattle trains, hysterical mothers and children, no food or water.

She describes in detail her arrival at Auschwitz, separation of families, selections by Mengele, delousing and head shaving, atrocities and cruelty toward the prisoners. Fanny and the healthier women were sent to Birkenau, Camp C. She details surviving several selections by Mengele. From October 1944 until January 1945 Fannyand her sister were sent to a women’s work camp Schlesiersee, a sub-camp of Gross Rosen, in Poland.

Fanny discusses her religious faith and how it helped her to survive and gives examples of religious observance: trying to light holiday candles and observing Tisha B’Av. Fanny details the death march in January 1945 during which time she injured her leg. Her health deteriorated and she and her sister escaped from the march and spent four nights hiding in a box. She managed to get to a hospital for foreign refugees and was very ill, with back injuriesas well as tuberculosis. Fanny was liberated from a Red Cross hospital in Pirna, Germany by Russian soldiers on May 8, 1945.

In Germany,Fanny suffered for 10 years inmany hospitalizations. She was in a hospital in Heidenau (near Dresden) for two years. In 1947, Fanny was in the DP camp, Schlachtensee, in Berlin, and later in hospitals in Munich and Gauting for TB, where the Germans paid her medical bills. Finally, in 1955, after procuring papers, she joined her relatives in the United States.

Pearl Herling was born in Budapest, Hungary August 24, 1924 to a religious upper middle class family. Her father was in the wholesale textile business. She describes her family history and pre-war life, antisemitism and discrimination against Jews which peaked in 1938. She also describes the increasingly harsh restrictions against Hungarian Jews between 1940 and 1944 and the creation of ghettos (“Yellow Star Houses”), labor battalions, and cruelty exhibited by Hungarian Nazis. Her father disappeared and never came back.

Pearl gives detailed descriptions of her many efforts to stay alive: she never wore the mandatory yellow star, avoided transport to a labor camp, posed as a Gentile using false papers she typed herself, through a bluff managed to get herself and all the people in her building into one of the Swedish “safe” houses established by Raoul Wallenberg and also obtain Schutzpasses. Just before this building was raided, she managed to join her sister at a labor camp in Kelenföld, run by Hungarian Nazis. She describes an incredible vignette of how she, her sister, and her sister’s two young children avoided a roundup, then got papers classifying them as refugees in Russian-occupied Hungary. Her mother and other family members survived under the protection of the head of a German labor camp. She describes her family’s continued struggle living in Budapest posing as non-Jews using false papers, starvation, and near escapes from detection. She refers to a special transport of Hungarian Jews from Bergen-Belsen to Switzerland and a failed attempt to exchange Jews for trucks. She witnessed a death march from Buda. She met and married her second husband while both were posing as non-Jews, and relates how difficult it was for him to get his son back from a Catholic family that sheltered him.

Pearl was liberated by the Russians in January 1945. She gives a very extensive and graphic account of her experiences in Hungary under Russian occupation, and many attempts to flee. She also mentions Russian soldiers raping women. Pearl details her husband’s flight from Soviet authorities while she was running two businesses. She describes her own harrowing attempted escapes from Budapest-- one with her sedated infant, another when she was separated from her seven-year old step-son and got arrested, and her final escape to Vienna using an Israeli passport. Pearl and her husband survived in Vienna for two years but experienced discrimination. They emigrated to the United States in 1950.

Daniel Levey, born April 24, 1925 in Sarajevo, was one of eight children in an impoverished Sephardic family who spoke Ladino at home. His father was a tailor and served in WWI under the Ottoman Empire. Daniel shares his childhood memories of their poverty and pre-war life. They lived in a Muslimneighborhood, where Daniel was assaulted by street gangs. His family attended the Sarajevo Synagogue, in a community of 15,000 Jews, who were forced into a ghetto after the German invasion in 1941. They had to wear an armband with the letter “Z” for Židov, the Croatian word for Jew. He did forced labor briefly in a military work crew, having been assigned to a skilled labor brigade because of his electrician experience. He evaded Nazi registration and stopped wearing his star.

After he escaped from a roundup, he passed as a Muslim with an assumed name of Gerald Levvage [phonetic] and a false ID. He joined partisans fighting Germans and Russian Cossacks near Mostar, which was occupied by Italians. In 1942, he was captured and imprisoned at BokaKotorska. He describes humane treatment by the Italians. He got himself a job on kitchen duty and helped other prisoners by bringing them food. After Italy surrendered in 1943, the prison became a hospital where Daniel worked as a cook until he emigrated to Canada and then to the United States in 1948. He credits the Italians for saving him and other Jews from the brutal Croatian prison guards at Rab concentration camp. All of the Levey family, except for Daniel and one brother, who settled in Israel, perished in German camps.

Yehuda Mandel was born in Csepe, Hungary, March 3, 1904, into an orthodox family, describes Jewish life in Csepe, before and after World War I, relations with non-Jews, his education, and occupation by various countries, until Csepe became part of Czechoslovakia.

He served in the Czech army from 1924 to 1926. He was a cantor in Vienna, Austria in 1928; Novisad, Yugoslavia, 1928-1934; in Riga 1934-1936, and in Budapest in 1935 at the Rombach Temple while also serving as a chaplain in the Hungarian army. He was offered a position in London but chose to remain in Hungary. He describes Jewish and congregational life in each location. He cites anti-Jewish feelings in Austria and talks about the implementation of anti-Jewish laws in 1939, and mentions a mass grave where Jews were killed and buried in Kamenetz-Podolsk.

Cantor Mandel was in various labor battalions, escaped, and returned to Budapest in November 1944. He stayed in a house protected by the Swiss consulate, served as a messenger “Eilbotenausweis”, participated in rescuing 300 Jews from a prison; and made illegal trips to Czechoslovakia. He describes his experiences with Russian occupiers, and the desecration and reconsecration of Rombach Temple. His wife and children, who were in Bergen Belsen as part of a Sondergruppe organized by Dr. Kasztner, went to Palestine after the war. He gives a very detailed account of his illegal passage to Palestine in May 1946, aided by the Haganah. He was reunited with his family in Kibbutz Shar Hamakkim, served as a cantor in Haifa until he moved to the United States in 1948 and became a cantor at Beth Judah in Philadelphia in 1950.

Collateral Material available through the Gratz College Tuttleman Library:

Original typed testimony from Emanuel Mandel, son of Cantor Mandel, obtained on June 6, 1980, describes the 1944 transfer of the Jews from Hungary.1

Photocopies of documents:

Travel documents from Czechoslovakia to Hungary, 1945

Czech Passports

German Certification Employment

Document from the Central Council of Hungarian Jews “ Spezia"

Copy of Original Music about the town of Spezia, Italy from which

he made Aliya,1946

Work Papers From Israel, 1946

Irmgard Zacharias, nee Pinkus, was born July 15, 1904 in Friedrichshagen, Germany, a suburb of Berlin. She attended a private lyceum in Berlin. Her parents had a variety store. Her father, a World War I officer and veteran, believed this would save them from persecution. After Kristallnacht, when their store was demolished, he realized they had to leave Germany. By that time most of their money had already been confiscated and they were not able to secure an affidavit or visa. Through connections of a cousin, the family was able to obtain four tickets on a re-conditioned Japanese warship to Shanghai. They arrived in Shanghai in May, 1939.

Irmgard met her husband, a Prussian engineer, upon her arrival and they married five months later. They lived and worked with her family in a grocery store purchased from other refugees. The family lived above the store and she relates that the living conditions were decent in comparison to the majority of Shanghai residents. She details life in the compound of Hong Kew, where food was scarce, sanitation was lacking and infection was rampant. Dysentery, for which they often received immunization shots, was normal. Cholera and typhoid were also common. Dead bodies were left on the streets for pickup twice a week.

For a short time Mrs. Zacharias and her husband got jobs in a department store in Tzingtao [now Qingdao], a city located on the coast of China north of Shanghai, which was reached by boat. Irmgard’s son was born in 1941. Her husband died of typhus in 1942, seven weeks after their child’s birth. When the Japanese arrived, the family was forced to move to a ghetto but were able to take their possessions and opened another grocery store. Her father died in 1945.

Irmgard left Shanghai with her mother and son in 1948. The American Joint Distribution Committee and the Sassoon family provided the means for their emigration to the United States. In 1981, when Irmgard returned to Shanghai to visit the graves of her husband and father, the gravestones were gone and the cemetery was replaced with a children’s park.

Note: Collateral material file available through the Gratz College Tuttleman Library includes correspondence containing additional detail on life in Shanghai.

Writing to her aunt Rebecca, Miriam offers congratulations to Isaac and Sally Hays, who just gave birth. Miriam also expresses her anxiety over her current pregnancy, after having lost several in the past, and thanks Rebecca for the baby gifts.