Oral History Interview with Norbert Zeelander

William Mc Cormick was a sergeant in the 15th Reconnaissance Group, attached to Seventh Army Headquarters. He entered Dachau one day after the initial liberation and stayed for two days. He gives a very powerful description of the physical and mental condition of the survivors; bodies in boxcars and in piles on the ground, and human ashes in boxes near the crematorium. He reports that the Nazis killed 30,000 prisoners the week before liberation. He describes his reaction as well as that of others in his unit, and the lasting effect that what he saw in Dachau had on him.

Interviewee: MC CORMICK, William Date: January 11, 1988

Bess Freilich, née BashaAnusz, born in1928 in Pruzany, Poland, was the eldest of eight children in a religious Jewish family. Her father was a poor butcher, but she attended private Hebrew school. Her family lived in harmony with Polish neighbors (to whom her grandfather lent money with little or no return).

In 1939 under anti-Zionist Russian occupation, her Hebrew school was closed and teachers were sent to Siberia. Fearful of arrest, Bess burned her Hebrew books and then went to a public Jewish school where a communist curriculum was taught in Yiddish.

When the Germans invaded in June, 1941, the local population swelled from 3000 to 15,000 as Jews were brought from other towns to the Pruzany Ghetto. Food shortage was acute, and Bess often slipped through the ghetto walls to trade clothing for potatoes or steal potato peels from a German kitchen. She describes in detail the ghetto evacuation, when her grandfather was shot before her eyes, in January 1943.

Bess describes in detail the three day train trip in cattle cars to Auschwitz, arrival, brutality of the guards, and atrocities committed there including her six-year old brother’s murder for picking up snow for their mother to eat. Bess saw her mother fall from a blow to her head and later learned that she was burned in an open pit. Her older brother and father were sent to work in a crematorium as Sonderkommandos.

Bess was sent to Birkenau and then to Budy, a camp she describes as hell, where about 400 girls, ages 14 - 25, pushed heavy wagons uphill to build an artificial mountain. Some were forced to strip, dance and sing and then were shot. Some were eaten by dogs. She vividly describes suffering from typhus and lice infestation of a breast wound from beatings. Left unconscious in a morgue, she was returned to Birkenau, where she was saved from death several times, twice by German guards.

After passing three Mengele selections and seeing her father briefly in the men’s camp in Auschwitz where she worked picking weeds for soup, she was evacuated on a death march, January 18, 1945. She recalls thousands left dead in the snow before they reached Ravensbrück. They were then left in the woods near Malchow. At liberation, she weighed 67 pounds and could not retain food eaten for months afterwards.

Returning to her home town, she was taken by the Russians to a camp and questioned as a suspected German spy. Finding nothing of her home in Pruzany and threatened with transfer to Siberia, she fled to Lodz where she met and married another survivor. She found her father in Munich, spent two years in Feldafing DP camp and came to the United States in 1949.

She was unable to speak about her holocaust experience until the time of her interview in 1981.

Mina Kalter, née Basseches, was born in 1921 in Przeworsk, Poland, into a religious family. Her father was a traveling merchant and her mother in retail fabrics. Both parents were active in Zionist organizations and charitable endeavors and on good terms with Christian neighbors, until 1939. She describes the extensive work of the Kehillah in helping those in need. She provides extensive detail of life after the German invasion of Poland in 1939: bombing and desecration of the synagogue, forced labor, confiscation of Jewish property, ghettoization of all Jews, the lack of any help by former Christian friends, ghetto conditions. She describes smuggling her small brother to the home of a loyal former family housekeeper and later her escape from a work detail in March 1941. She then crossed the River San to Soviet-controlled Poland where she was helped by a Russian Jewish family prior to being resettled in a small town near L’vov. She describes in detail life under Soviet rule in Poland. She was exiled to Siberia because she refused to accept Soviet citizenship. She describes her transport to and life in a labor camp for four years, until May 1945. She also relates her clandestine trip outside the Siberian camp to obtain potatoes for planting.

In March 1945, as a Polish citizen, she received by mail permission to return to Poland. Recently married, she describes working her way across Siberia toward Poland with her husband in June 1945, where she experienced antisemitism. Through the Joint Distribution Committee in Szczecin, she learned of the survival of her two brothers and joined them in a displaced persons camp in Berlin in August 1945. She describes in detail the living conditions with her new born baby. There is a brief mention of her stay at another camp near Landsberg in 1948. She and her family immigrated to the United States in 1950. She describes her adjustment in the U.S., her children’s awareness of their parents’ background, and their commitment to Judaism. She concludes with the hope that her testimony will remind future generations of the horrors of the Hitler years.

Paul Kurschner was born May 16, 1916 in Vienna, Austria into a wealthy, Reform Jewish family. As a boy, he experienced antisemitism and engaged in bloody fights at school. His family belonged to the OesterreichnerJudenCentralverein, an anti-Zionist group of Austrian Jews, but Paul broke away from that affiliation at age 13. He joined HaShomerHaTzair, KidutTsurim, Betar and GedutHaKhoyal. In 1936 he became the youngest member elected to the New Zionist Congress.

In 1937, Paul joined the Austrian Army and in 1938, he became a German soldier. He then deserted and was hidden by gentile friends until he fled to Italy. There, he met hundreds of other young Zionists who traveled together to Greece. Aided by the mayor and priest in a fishing village, they soon sailed on the Artemisia to Palestine.

Paul had been an atheist until the Israeli War of Independence. He then came to believe in a higher power and became a Conservative Jew. He left Israel in 1950 and settled in the United States, living in Philadelphia, where he joined B’nai Tikvah B’nai Jeshurun congregation. He married and had two children in Israel in 1942 and remarried in the United States in 1982.

Ruth (Renee) K. Hartz.

Dr. Julius Eingorn served with the 79th Infantry Division, U.S. 3rd Army in a special 12 unit dispensary that liberated Ohrdruf, April 1945. There were no survivors. He describes what he saw there, including evidence of primitive cremations, and prisoners marched out of Ohrdruf and killed just before liberation. He mentions General Eisenhower’s orders that all service men had to tour the camp.

In May, 1945 his unit entered an unnamed labor camp near either Weida or Werdau, Germany. He spoke with many of the 150 surviving Jewish Hungarian girls in Yiddish. They all told him that their choice had been either to stay with their mothers and be exterminated or work in the camp. Whoever got sick was killed. He also stopped at a German hospital for Polish and Russian prisoners and discovered that out of 1500 patients only 400 survived. His unit liberated British Prisoners of War. He encountered streams of German refugees fleeing the Russian army and mentions accepting the surrender of whole German divisions. He interviewed many people around Ohrdruf who all felt no guilt and pleaded total ignorance of what happened there. Dr. Eingorn reflects on what he saw during the war and the need for constant vigilance to prevent another Holocaust.

Margaret Beer, nee Weiss, was born January 9, 1911 in Sighet, Hungary. She details the swift transfer of all the Jews of Sighet in the first month of the German invasion, describing howS.S. troops moved into many Jewish homes, including hers during the German occupation, and how Hungarian authorities identified prominent Jews whomthe S.S. forced to form a Jewish Council. The Germans then confiscated Jewish businesses and personal property. Once ghettoized, the Jews were helped by non-Jewish Hungarians who smuggled food into the ghetto. She describes the evacuation of all Jewish patients from the local hospital, the formation of a Jewish police force, the evacuation of the Jews from the ghetto and the transports to Auschwitz.

She describes in great detail life in Auschwitz including the initial selection, showers, barracks, Appells, work conditions, food allotment, wash barracks, and her selection by Mengele. In July 1944 she was transported to Gelsenkirchen, Germany to work in the Krupp armament industry. She describes the working conditions and Allied bombings. In September 1944 she was transferred to Sömmerda in Thuringia, Germany to work in another ammunition factory. As the Allies drew close in April 1945, the camp was evacuated; Margaret escaped during the death march and eventually found housing in a German village until liberation at the end of April 1945. She describes help from Russian POW’s and later American liberators. Her skills as a dressmaker helped sustain her until May 1946 when she could join her brother who had been living in Philadelphia.