Oral History Interview with Minna Perlberger

Bernard S. Mednicki was born in 1910 in Brussels, Belgium, the youngest of four children in an orthodox Russian Jewish family from Kishinev. His father served in the Russian army until the 1903 pogrom, when he deserted and moved his family to the West. Bernard attended a cheder and public school in Brussels, where he experienced some antisemitism. He was apprenticed to an orthopedic technician, became a Belgian citizen in 1928 and was married in 1931. In 1933, he became active in the anti-fascist Socialist Party and anti-fascist resistance. He describes the German invasion on May 12, 1940.

Assuming Christian identities, his wife and children fled to Paris and he travelled through southern France until they were reunited in Riom. He details extensively the travails of fellow refugees, his work with the French resistance during 1941-1942 in Clermont-Ferrand, and sabotage activity with the Maquis in the mountains near Volvic. He relates smuggling goods and other survival techniques to obtain food for resistance families. He travelled with his wife and children to Paris, aided by American soldiers, remaining until 1946, when he returned to Brussels. He found his sister’s three children, who were hidden during the war in a convent and a monastery. He arrived in the United States with his wife and children in 1947. His Memoirs: Never be afraid: A Jew in the Maquis, were published posthumously in 1997.

See also interviews with his son, Armand Mednick and with his nephew Charles L. Rojer.

Interviewee: MEDNICKI, Bernard S. Dates: April 27 & 30, 1982

Lili Altschuler was born September 30, 1928 in Lodz, Poland to a well-to-do, non-observant Jewish family. Before the war she was educated in a private Jewish school. Lili describes the change in atmosphere in 1937-38, the prohibition against kosher slaughter and the Polish Jewish citizens being expelled from Germany and forced to return to Poland (‘38).

In 1939, just before the Lodz Ghetto was formed, Lili and her parents fled to relatives in a suburb of Kielce, called Opatow. She describes the hardships and restrictions that ensued and describes and encounter with Volksdeutsche in which she was injured. Her father, fearing the reality of the deathcamps, bought their way into the slave labor camp Skarazysko Kamienna, run by HASAG. They worked in a munitions factory. She describes the scant daily rations, the lack of medical treatment, and the cruelty of Ukrainian guards and also Jewish Kapos’ cruel behavior. She also describes some resistance in the camps: the formation of small singing and reading groups.

In the summer of 1944, she and her parents were deported to a munitions factory in Czestochowa. She describes slightly better conditions there. On January 16, 1945 the Germans attempted to deport everyone to a location farther away from the Soviets. After the men were sent off in trains, the Germans fled, leaving the women on the train platform. They were liberated by the Soviets that night. She and her mother stayed for a time in Czestochowa, then returned to Opatow, then Lodz to look for surviving family members.

Her grandparents perished in the Lodz Ghetto. Her father was sent to Buchenwald and later liberated by the Americans in May 1945. They were reunited in Lodz and later went to Stuttgart, Germany through Czechoslovakia with the help of the Zionist group, Brihah1 and UNRRA. They came to the United States via a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart in 1948.