Oral History Interview with Paul G. Eglick

Hardy W. Kupferberg, nee Wiersh, was born on September 15, 1922 in Berlin, Germany to a religious family. Her mother died when she was three years old. Her father remarried when she was seven. Her father, a decorated WWI veteran, owned a lamp factory and was active in synagogue and community life.Hardy’s relationships with non-Jews was positive until 1931 when she experienced antisemitism both in school and during several hospitalizations. She describes increasing antisemitism with the Nuremberg laws --the Aryanization of her father’s business, Jews forbidden from public parksand required to bring their pets to be killed.No longer permitted in the public school, she describes the positive atmosphere ofher Jewish school. She was taught by Rabbiner Doctor Regina Jonas, whom she loved and who is known to be the first woman rabbi. She relates that the school included Mischlingerwho very often sided with the anti-Semites.

Hardydetails the horrors and emotional toll of Kristallnacht. She saw a group of Hitler Youth throwing stones through the broken windows of the burnt synagogue. She shares a story that she buried inside for 30 years -- when one of the stones rolled near her in her hiding place, she picked it up and threw it at one of the boys. It hit his head and he fell. In the commotion she left the scene and walked home.

The morning of Kristallnacht, the family apartment was ransacked. In 1939 she and her parents were compelled to do forced labor. For a small salary, she worked outdoors in a tree nursery under horrible conditions and described that the girls’ arms would bleed daily. She was granted a transfer to a plane factory making cables. In 1941 Hardy witnessed the shooting of her little cousins during a deportation. She also saw zoo personnel desecrating the synagogue by bringing elephants from the Berlin zoo into it. Hardy describes the deportation of her grandmother to Riga. They never heard from her again.

In February 1943, Hardy’s parents were taken from their place of work by Viennese Gestapo who arrested 10,000 Berlin Jews. Because they were taken from work, they did not have their knapsacks, in which they had packed some necessities including poison. When Hardy went to Gestapo headquarters with the knapsacks to find her parents,an official pointed

out a window toward a group of vans from which dead bodies were being pulled and told her that was where her parents were. She learned later that they were murdered in Auschwitz.

Hardy went into hiding for a year and a half, helped by several non-Jews. Some asked to be paid and a friend of her father’s provided money. Hardy was caught by a Jewish woman and deported to Ravensbrück in March 1944. She details some experiences, including witnessing an atrocity against a child and her job clearing the dead from the barracks in the morning. At Hardy’s request, the focus of this oral history is mainly the years in Berlin and not on her concentration camp experience as she felt that her camp experience was not unique to her.

She was liberated by the Soviets and repatriated to Berlin, where she met her husband Kurt Kupferberg in March 1946. They arrived in the United States August 20, 1947.1

See also her second 1983 interview and also her husband’s 1981 interview.

This is an auxiliary interview to the 1987 interview with Anna Berenholz, nee Bohorochaner, about her experiences living in Budapest, Hungary during WWII.

She feels she owes her life to Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. In November/December 1944 she was put on a death march. At the time Anna was 19 years old. She was pulled out of the march along with other young Jews by orders of Raoul Wallenberg. Working as a translator for the Russians, Anna survived in Budapest until the Soviets freed the city on January 20, 1945.

Once in America after the war she worked hard to find Wallenberg and thank him. She went to the Swiss, Spanish and Swedish embassies and she wrote to President Carter, and Pennsylvania Senators Heinz and Specter to try and find him, but to no avail.

Gerald Adler, born June 27, 1925 in Elmshorn, Germany, grew up in a middle-class Orthodox Jewish family. They moved to Berlin where he attended school until 1938. His father lost his job after Hitler came to power. Gerald talks about the effects of the Nuremberg laws on German Jews. During Kristallnacht his father was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen. He was released after two months when his wife secured passage to Trinidad.

Gerald worked on Hakhsharah farms near Hamburg from 1939 to 1941, when he rejoined his family in Berlin. He briefly mentions an aktionin Berlin in 1942 in which all the Jews were arrested at their work places. He explains how he was allowed to go home that night for some unknown reason.

In 1943, after immigration to Trinidad was stopped, the family was deported to Theresienstadt. He credits his father’s record as a decorated World War I veteran for saving them from deportation to Poland. In August of 1943, Gerald was sent back to Wulkow, Germany in a labor detachment building barracks. He describes the increased brutality shown by the SS as the war was coming to a close and describes one incident of humanity shown to him by a lower-ranking officer when he injured his foot.

He discusses his belief in the power of prayer and tells the story of how he and several other workers tried to figure out when Rosh Hashanah would be in order to observe Yom Kippur. On the day they observed Yom Kippur, they received an astonishing and unusually large lunch, which he kept until the evening. When he returned to the barracks prisoners were checked for food, but incredibly he was skipped and enjoyed his large portion of lunch as well as a dinner they received. He returned to Theresienstadt in January 1945 where he was liberated on May 11, 1945. He emigrated to the United States May 21, 1946.

Ida Firestone, née Hoffman, born February 19, 1929, in Pont-a-Moussou, France, attended public schools and studied music privately, aspiring to be a concert pianist. In 1942, her father was falsely accused of being a Communist and was sent to Drancy concentration camp. He was later released.

In March, 1944, Ida and her family went into hiding. They were sheltered by a teacher, a grocer, a baker, a prostitute and several farmers. Separated from her family, she posed as an orphan, working for a farmer’s wife who treated her cruelly.

Ida hid in forests and in a barn, sleeping with animals and stealing food to survive. Before liberation by the Americans in December, 1944, she found protection on the Gouy family farm. She had lost 25 pounds and suffered with stomach problems which persisted throughout her life.

Reunited with her family in 1945, Ida resumed her music studies and graduated from a conservatory. In 1948, she and her family emigrated to the United States, settling in Philadelphia, where she married Herman Firestone in 1949. She became a piano teacher and a Holocaust speaker in schools and synagogues.

YadVashem has recognized as Righteous Among the Nations Victor and CecilleHergott, Germaine Bour, Lucien Louyot, Emile and GenvièveThouvenin and Victor and Marie (Friboug) Guoy, who protected Ida and her family members.

Poetry and a letter to her mother written by Ida during her wartime wandering is included in this interview.

Marian Turzanski, born January 18, 1934 in Zupanie, Poland, was one of four sons in a Catholic family who owned large forest land. Before 1939, he recalls good relations with the few Jews in his village, one of whom once hid in the Turzanski home. After the German invasion, hostile Ukrainians threatened to kill Marian’s father; a friendly Ukrainian intervened and urged the family to flee. In Hungary, they moved frequently, settling in Keszthely, where Marian attended a school for Polish children.

His parents had left their baptismal papers in Poland, to be used by Samuel Goldreich, the Jew they once sheltered.

Life in Hungary after German occupation is detailed: terrorization by the Arrow Cross and German soldiers, ghettoization of Jews and Poles, deportation of Jews and Gypsies. Marian’s father was active in the underground, together with Hungarian Jews and other Christians; Marian and his brothers became messengers.

He describes in detail the family’s deportation December 31, 1944, to Germany, via Prague and Vienna in sealed cattle cars and the luxury of bedsheets and decent food at the Wilhelmshaven work camp near Berlin. This contrasts with the starkness of the other camps he mentions briefly: Strashof, Bayreuth, Neumarkt. He describes brutal treatment by Ukrainians at Neumarkt.

After liberation by Americans in 1945, he lived in Displaced Persons camps at Neumarkt, Hochenfels, Annsbach, Wildflecken, Heilbronn, Ludvigsburg and Bremenhafen. He came to the United States on August 27, 1949 after losing all of his relatives outside of his immediate family.

Eva Burns, nee Gerstl, was born in 1924 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where her father was a pediatrician and her mother a concert pianist. They lived a mostly secular life with some inter‌ marriages in her mother's family. The German takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1939 drastically affected their lives with her brother being sent to Kladno and the rest of the family to Theresienstadt. She refers to help from non-Jews. She was deported to Theresienstadt November 17, 1942. She describes Theresienstadt as a "show" camp with books, a coffee house and concerts. Eva was part of a chorus preparing Verdi's Requiem and observed religious activities and humor.

She was deported to Auschwitz in May 1944 and six weeks later to Christianstadt, a women's labor camp. There she helped sabotage grenades in the ammu‌nition factory. She refers to the cruelty of the women S.S. guards. In February 1945 she es‌caped from a death march. Assuming a German identification, she worked in the Sudetenland until the spring of 1945 when she went to Prague where she worked for the family of an S.S. officer serving at the front. In May 1945, with the Czechoslovakian liberation near, she revealed her Czech identity. She married in November 1947 in Prague and immigrated to the USA in June 1948.