Oral History Interview with Nelly B. Thalheimer

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English
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Title

Oral History Interview with Nelly B. Thalheimer

Date

November 10, 1988

Contributor

Interviewee:
Nelly B. Thalheimer
Interviewer:
Davida Glick

Summary

Nelly B. Thalheimer, nee Bokros1, was born October 4, 1929 into a middle-class Jewish family in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. She shares her childhood memories of pre-war life. She attended public school until 1941, when the government formed an alliance with Hitler and Mussolini. Days before the German invasion her father insisted they flee. They were seized by the German Army in Split and interned on the island of Korcula. She describes the conditions there: confined to house arrest, they were dependent on black market trading and fisherman who shared seafood freely. She and her two siblings supplemented the family diet with stolen potatoes.

Nelly details her family’s separation in 1943, when Italy capitulated, and how she, her sister and mother spent two weeks with partisans in the woods to avoid Germans soldiers. She describes her family’s reunion and escape by sailboat to a POW camp in Bari, Italy run by the Americans and the British. They remained there until August 1944, when they were granted a temporary stay in Oswego, New York by President Roosevelt’s executive order. HIAS, ORT and the Friends Service Committee facilitated their permanent residence. Nelly married Hans Thalheimer in 1955.

She is troubled by young Jews in the United States including her three children, who assimilate, and she feels that more Holocaust memorials and educational programs are needed.

Maiden name possibly spelled Bokris.

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Publisher:
Gratz College
Number of Tapes:
1
Language:
English
Identifier:
HOHAGC00527
Cite this item
Oral History Interview with Nelly B. Thalheimer. 1988. InterviewInterview by Davida Glick. Audio. Oral History Interview With Nelly B. Thalheimer. Holocaust Oral History Archive. Gratz College. https://grayzel.gratz.edu/hoha/oral-history-interview-nelly-b-thalheimer.

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