Oral History Interview with Michael Ebner

Louie Mermelstein, the second oldest of 13 children, was born May 12, 1927 in Klascanovo1, 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.

Suzanne Leibowitz, née Langer, was born May 27, 1928 in Prague and later lived in Novy Jičin, Moldavia. She and her parents were totally assimilated, patriotic Czechs. After the German occupation in 1938, the family fled to the Protectorate of Bohemia where Suzanne first experienced antisemitism. She mentions how the Nuremberg laws affected her. She was forced to quit school and had to work on a farm until 1942.

Suzanne and her parents were sent to Theresienstadt in 1942. She describes conditions in Theresienstadt in great detail. She mentions friction between Jews from different countries and that many Jews when they first arrived believed they were going to a rest home. Warnings about death camps scratched on many of the cattle cars were not believed. She managed to work outside the ghetto on a farm, to help people on the transports, and to trade for food. A Czech policeman - who also saved Suzanne and her parents from being sent to Birkenau - helped her do this.

Suzanne witnessed the charade Germans put on for the Red Cross in 1944. She explains how the concentration camp was transformed. She recalls how a baby born in the camp was hidden and kept alive for one year. She briefly refers to a Catholic prayer group, attempts to educate Jewish children, and plays and concerts performed by the prisoners. In October 1944, the Germans tricked all the men and later the women – including her parents – into going on a transport to Auschwitz, so that only young girls and children remained, to prevent an uprising. Suzanne never saw her parents again. Suzanne describes survivors from these transports, who returned in January 1945, as walking skeletons who had become cannibals.

Suzanne relates her post-liberation experiences. She was involved in a campaign to rid the town of Teplitz Schönau of Germans. She got married in 1947 and came to the United States in October 1948.

Note: Collateral Material available through the Gratz College Tuttleman Library:

Photocopy of first person memoir from Terezin survivor,"Making Moving Pictures" Jewish Exponent, Nov 21, 1988.

Interviewee: LEIBOWITZ, Suzanne Langer Date: April 18, 1981