Oral History Interview with Nina Frisch

Anne Dore Russell, née Weidemann, a non-Jew, was born in Brandenburg, Germany in 1926. She went to school from 1933 to 1945 in Brandenburg. Her father told her about experiences of Germans opposed to Hitler. She knew that her uncle was sent to Sachsenhausen and heard about a Jehovah’s Witness who was imprisoned and later killed for his beliefs. A neighbor who had been a Nazi sympathizer, had a mental breakdown after executing Jews as a soldier on the Eastern Front.

She speaks briefly about Kristallnacht and life in Branderburg under the Nazis. Her father, a civil servant, lost his position in 1933 because he was a Social Democrat and belonged to the Socialist Party (SPD). He told Anne Dore why he opposed the Nazi regime. He avoided using the “Heil Hitler” salute and secretly listened to the BBC (British Broadcasting Company). She learned to be careful in public because of her father’s beliefs. The local police took her father into protective custody in July 1944 during a roundup of men suspected of involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

She mentions the behavior of local Nazis near the end of the war, after which she went to Humbold University in East Berlin and then the Free University in West Berlin.

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.

Daniel Goldsmith was born in Antwerp, Belgium on December 11, 1931 to Polish parents. His family was orthodox and he was educated at a Yeshiva. They lived in Antwerp under German occupation and suffered under the ever-increasing anti-Jewish measures. His father was transported to a labor camp in France, August 1942 and never heard from again.

His mother, Ruchel Goldschmidt – who was in contact with the Belgian underground – managed to get some money, safeguard their possessions, and find a hiding place just before and while the Germans raided their neighborhood and ransacked Jewish-owned houses, helped by Belgians who pointed out Jewish residents. Daniel cites several instances when Belgians cooperated with the Germans. He also gives many examples of aid by non-Jewish Belgians, especially Father André (who was recognized as a “Righteous Gentile”) and other Catholic clergy and nuns. He also mentions his mother’s work with the underground.

Daniel and his sister were placed in a convent in December 1942, then with Christian families after their mother found out the Germans were going to enter the convent to look for Jewish children. He was in a succession of orphanages in Weelde and Mechelen, run by Father Cornelissen, from 1943 to 1944, while his sister lived with another Christian family. Daniel got false baptismal papers, changed his name, lived as a Catholic, but refused to convert.

In May 1944 the Germans imprisoned all circumcised boys in the orphanage, then transported them on cattle cars with other Jewish children. Daniel and several other boys escaped from the moving train and managed to contact a priest who placed each of them with a different Christian family who hid them. Monsieur and Madame Botier, hid Daniel, were kind to him, and worked to reunite him with his mother after liberation in September 1944.

Daniel describes various placements post liberation, especially in AischeEnRefail; mentions a French committee that collected hidden Jewish children, and Aliyah Bet. His mother was injured during an air raid and could not take care of her children at that time. He relates how difficult and painful it was for all parties, especially his sister, when his mother wanted to reclaim her daughter from the Christian family that sheltered her for three years.

In April 1948, Daniel, his mother and his sister went to the United States from Belgium, sponsored by his father’s family. He talks about his family’s life shortly after they arrived, and his own life from that time to the present.

Suzanne Gross, nee Sarah Pertofsky, was born in Paris, France in 1931. Her parents were born in Belz (Russia) and emigrated to France around 1924. They had a beauty parlor in Paris which was closed by the Germans after the invasion of Paris. At that time Jews were rounded up systematically and families were forcibly separated. Non-native born Jews were rounded up before Jews who were considered French.

As a child, especially after she started school, Suzanne was made to feel she was not really French. Suzanne talks in detail about her experience when she had to wear her Yellow Star to school.

Her father went underground, worked at first on a farm, then joined the Jewish French partisans. He later worked in a steel factory be‌cause the French partisans did not want Jews. Her mother was hidden by neighbors for three months.

Sarah was sent to a farm in Normandy with 5 or 6 other children by the French Jewish Scouts (Eclaireurs Israelites de France) who had an underground network to hide Jewish children. She worked on various farms under harsh conditions. She was a hidden child in a convent school where she had to pretend she was Catholic.

She was reunited with her parents in Paris, who lived clandestinely on and off in their boarded up shop. The family received money from a resistance movement in the steel factory where her father worked. The concierge helped by selling items knitted by her mother. During this time Suzanne and her sister often warned Jews when a police round-up started. Many Jews were imprisoned at Drancy. She describes how families searched for arrested relatives from afar.

She gives a detailed account of her emotional responses to the childhood trauma she experienced and to surviving the Holocaust. The family emigrated to the USA in 1946.

Interviewee: GROSS, Suzanne Date: August 9, 1983

Myra Davis, nee Miki Heller, was born July 12, 1936 in Kovno, Lithuania, the only child in an affluent Jewish family. Her parents were Franz and Fanny Heller. After the Russian invasion in 1940, her family was forced to move from their large home to much smaller quarters. In 1940, they immigrated to Japan with transit visas and visas for Curacao, which were not used. Instead, they went to Shanghai, in 1941, after a year in Kobe, Japan, where Myra attended a French Catholic school.

In the French quarter of Shanghai, they lived comfortably until the Japanese occupation forced them into the Hongkew Ghetto. Her father, despondent about their impoverishment, committed suicide. When the war ended, her mother worked for the American Army and met a Jewish colonel, David Bare (phonetic), whom she married in 1947. The family lived in Beijing, China, Linz, Austria and South Carolina, United States. Myra became a translator for the American government, married Arnold Davis and they live with their two children in Boca Raton, Florida.

Recorded at the Rickshaw Reunion - a meeting in October 1999 at the Holiday Inn in Philadelphia of refugees who found refuge in Shanghai during World War II.

Stephen Lerman, the youngest of seven children, was born on September 15, 1927, to an orthodoxfamily in a small, predominately Jewish town, Zambrow, Poland. He also states that his mother was quite traditional, but that his father less so later in life. He describes pre-war Zambrowincluding his schooling, Zionist youth groups, and antisemitism. He shares his very vivid childhood memory of his first experience with a Nazi soldier in 1939 before the Russian occupation. He describes a relatively normal life under Soviet rule until 1941.

Stephen describes the marked difference when the Germans came in in 1941 and details an actionwhen Jews were told to gather at the marketplace. Stephen describes telling his parents he was going to defy the order and run away. His older brother and parents went and were killed outside of town and buried in a mass grave with hundreds of other Jews. The Germans then made a ghetto of the remaining Jews in the town. Stephen describes the conditions in the ghetto and also describes sneaking out to work for a Pole who was his father’s business associate who fed him a little bit.

Toward the end of 1942 the ghetto was liquidated and Stephen describes the deportation in cattle cars to Auschwitz, journey, arrival, and his selection to a non-work group. Due to his quick thinking, he jumped off the truck and snuck into the group slated for work. He became a prisoner of Birkenau from December 1942 until mid-year 1943.Though he was 14, he had a very young appearance and describes several instances when people protected him and helped him to survive. He describes an SS officer in charge of the dynamite commando who snuck him extra food and brought him medicine when he was sick. This officer even helped Stephen not get selected for the crematorium by talking to his friend who was in charge of selections.

Stephen describes a very brief stay in Oranienburg in 1943, a forced march to Sachsenhausen and deportation to the labor camp, Landsberg, a subcamp of Dachau. He describes the treacherous work at Landsbergand how he volunteered for a carpenter position and again was given extra food by his foreman. He was able to stay on this assignment for six months. Stephen describes then end of the war when they were again forced on a march. Eventually as German soldiers started fleeing, the prisoners found themselves hiding for cover in a forest as the American army approached. They were liberated in May 1945. Stephen briefly stayed at Buchberg [phonetic] and then made his way to Munich where he was helped by UNRRA. He eventually made contact with an uncle from Philadelphia who helped him emigrate to the United States August 27, 1949.