Oral History Interview with Rita Harmelin

Mr. Maas served in the 242nd Infantry Regiment of the 42nd Division, U.S. 7th Army. He was taken on a brief, partial tour of Dachau concentration camp short after it was liberated, and only glimpsed corpses and survivors.

Interviewee: MAAS, Thomas E. Date: December 3, 1990

Liesl Joseph Loeb was born on June 17, 1928 in Rheydt, Rhineland, Germany. Liesl, together with her father, Josef Joseph, an attorney, and her mother, Lilly Salmon Joseph, was a passenger on the S.S. St. Louis. This German luxury Liner sailed on May 13, 1939, from Hamburg toward Havana, Cuba, with 937 Jewish refugees on board.

Liesl speaks about her family background and life leading up to Kristallnacht which she experienced, hiding in her own home while Nazi hoodlums were vandalizing it. She describes the months leading up to embarkation and conditions which had to be met before leaving Germany and immigration into Cuba, which was to be temporary until the family’s quota number was called for the United States.

She describes the trip and its complications from a child’s perspective. She speaks of her father’s sense of duty as the chairman of the passenger committee and the commitment and devotion of all its members. The desperate situation of the hapless passengers to whom no country offered a haven, especially not the United States, is emphasized. After 40 days at sea, the passengers are rescued through the efforts of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), by four countries - England, Holland, France, and Belgium.

Finally the Joseph family lands in England, and their life as World War II began is described. The destiny of most of the passengers who were taken in by Holland, France and Belgium ended in tragedy when these countries were invaded by the Nazis.

She describes attending school as an “evacuee”, the internment of her father on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien and arrival in New York on September 10, 1940. She concludes with her graduation from high school, and her immediate marriage thereafter. Several footnotes pursuant to the St. Louis story are added at the end of this memoir.

Self-taped oral memoir: LOEB, Liesl Joseph Date: Nov. 17, 1998

Ida Rudley, née Rothman, was born April 22, 1922 in Vienna, Austria, into a middle class family. She encountered antisemitism even before Hitler annexed Austria. Her life changed after the Anschluss in 1938, as anti-Jewish measures took effect. She explains why it was almost impossible for Jews to leave Austria. She mentions several instances of help from non-Jews, including an encounter with a German officer who took an interest in her while she and her mother were trying to escape from Austria. They were smuggled across the border to Yugoslavia in 1941 and lived in Zagreb illegally, always on the run, sheltered by both Jews and non-Jews until they were warned that the Gestapo was looking for them. Ida and her mother turned themselves in to the Gestapo - armed with enough pills to commit suicide - and managed to talk their way out of detention. Using forged papers, they accompanied a group of German-Jewish orphans bound for Palestine to the Italian part of Yugoslavia.

After living briefly in Ljubljana, they were sent to a concentration camp in Ferramonti, Italy. Prisoners included Greek, Italian and Yugoslavian Partisans as well as Jews. The Italians ran the camp in a very humane fashion and even told Jews where to hide from the retreating German troops. Ida and her husband were married by a rabbi in the concentration camp and had a civil ceremony later, after liberation by the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in 1943. After a brief stay in a transit camp in Cinecitta, run by UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) Ida, her husband and her mother went to the United States on a military ship in 1947.

Interviewee: RUDLEY, Ida Date: April 5, 1984

Jadwiga3Zoszak, nee Greifinger, was born in 1906 in Sambor, Poland (Galicia). Before WWII, Giza lived in Katowice, Poland with her non-Jewish husband Adam Zoszak. Although Adam was a lawyer and judge, he was forced to become a day laborer after the Russians took over in 1939. Because she had once officially registered as a Jew, Giza was unable to apply for another identification card.

Giza describes the fate of her family members from the town of Boryslaw. Most perished in various concentration camps or at the hands of the Gestapo. One brother Herman was forced to play in the orchestra in Auschwitz. Giza, who spoke fluent Polish, survived by passing as Polish. Giza describesthe difficult and dangerous living conditions and how she and her young niece lived in constant fear of being discovered. During her time in a small town, StaraSól, she and her niece lived in isolation for fear of discovery of her true identity. She slept with an axe to protect herself from Ukrainians who attacked Poles.In addition to her husband’s help, she was aided by a priest and a Polish teacher from Warsaw.

Adam aided Giza and her family, and moved in and out of the local ghetto, where he secretly fed and sheltered nine Jews in a basement in Boryslawfrom May 1943 until August 1944. These Jews gave testimony after the war, and Adam was recognized by YadVashem as Righteous Among the Nations. After the war, Giza and Adam divorced.

In 1957, Giza and her niece settled in Israel. In 1960, Giza married Dr. Israel Sternberg, who had been a physician in Krakow. During the war he was a medic in Auschwitz concentration camp where he

secretly

administered penicillin to German officers to treat syphilis. While on a death march, one of these officers recognized him and saved

his life

. Giza lived in Tel Aviv and of her large family of eight siblings only three survived the war.

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.

Elizabeth Bleiman, née Zuckerman, was born July 10, 1921 into a modern Orthodox family in Ófehértó, Hungary and completed elementary school there. She attended Jewish high school in Debrecen until 1937 and returned home, where all of her family suffered from antisemitic government restrictions. After German occupation in March 1944, they were deported to the Kisvarda Ghetto. She details their transport to Auschwitz in July 1944, her separation from her parents during selection by Dr. Mengele, and the harsh conditions in thecamp, starvation rations and being advised by an elderly German prisoner to try to escape via transport. She describes how she and a friend got into a transport and were moved to Stutthof, the terribly crowded conditions and prisoners getting burned from standing in the sun all day during Appells. She again escaped via transport with a friend, this time to Praust, where they were forced to install cables for a new airport. She describes that French prisoners would write them uplifting notes indicating that the Russians were advancing and to hold on to life. She details cruel conditions of a forced march to Danzig.

Liberated by Russians in February 1945, she was hospitalized for two months with typhus. After recovery, she and a friend foraged for food, shelter and clothing in abandoned houses as they traveled from Danzig to Hungary. In Ófehértóshe found her family home was occupied by non-Jewish refugees but she recovered some gold and other valuablesburied by her father before his deportation. In 1946 she moved to Germany to live in an American displaced persons camp, where she married a Lithuanian Jew in 1947 and they emigrated to the United States in 1949. Elizabeth refers to continuing antisemitism in Hungary despite a new liberal constitution.