Oral History Interview with Roland D. Turk

Max Mantelmacher, the youngest of five children was born May 1, 1925 in Kozienice, Poland. His father was a tailor.1 Max describes his pre-war life in Poland, including schooling, antisemitism and an apprenticeship with a tailor.

Max describes the German invasion in 1939 and how Jewish men were assigned forced labor. He worked under his brother’s Leo’s name while Leo went outside the ghetto to barter clothing for food. He explains that he was sent with about 50 other Jewish young men to another village for four months for hard labor under cruel conditions including daily beatings.

Max chronicles his harrowing journeys and existence for the next three and a half years always with a goal of remaining a laborer to stay alive. He endured 10 labor camps including: Kruszyna, Wolanów, forced labor in the Radom Ghetto, Pionki, Buna Flossenburg and Obertraubling. In Kruszyna he built railroads, bears witness to beatings, cruel labor conditions and a starvation diet. He also explains his unsuccessful attempt to join Polish partisans because he had no weapons. He details a dangerous journey to join his brother at Wolanów labor camp and relates that when he finally got in, he was denied food rations for being illegal. His brother Leo and he shared a meager 300 gram per day ration of bread. After his five months stay, Max describes fleeing Wolanów in May 1943 after many unregistered prisoners were executed one day while he was working off-site. He also relates his slated execution in a Radom jail after a Jewish policeman turned him in and his secret release by a Jewish woman who had known him from Kruszyna. Max became legally registered in the Radom Ghetto and describes the forced labor there as not as severe as others. He found a small sack of gold items which he smuggled to his brother Leo then in an ammunition factory near Radom. He describes taking a 5,000 zlotys bribe to go to Pionki labor camp from other Jews who wanted to dodge forced labor. He explains the health danger of his work in Pionki making gunpowder. Max also describes his relatively easy time working for I.G. Farben in Buna/Auschwitz because an old acquaintance from Kozienice was a kapoand protected him.

Max describes beatings and killings during the forced march to Gleiwitz during freezing January 1944. They were then deported on open cattle cars to Oranienburg where Max says maybe 400-500 of the original 10,000 survived. In Flossenburg, he describes a Ukrainian Stubenälteste [barrack elder] brutally shooting several Jewish boys each morning for fun. Max was 1 of 600 prisoners deported to Obertraubling where they filled airfield holes left by American bombs. From there he was on a forced march to Dachau, arriving April 27, 1945 and was liberated two days later, weighing 68 lbs. He recuperated in a hospital at Dachau until he was reunited with his sisters and later with his brother.2 He was in Freimann and Landsberg Am Lech Displaced Persons camps and emigrated to the United States in 1949.

See also interview with his brother, Leo Mantelmacher.

Diane Weinstock, nee Gottlieb, was born in Radom Poland in 1923 into a modern religious family. Her mother was a member of WIZO and Diane attended Zionist youth activities. She describes pre-war antisemitism, the German Occupation, the establishment of the Radom Ghetto in 1941 and her family’s living conditions there until 1942. She also details clandestine education and religious observances that happened in the ghetto.

She and her mother were able to obtain false papers and hide posing as non-Jews in Warsaw from November 1943 until October 1944. Diane describes how after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising she, her mother and several others hid out in a bunker in the demolished Warsaw Ghetto until January 1945. She gives a detailed description of how they managed to survive including being warned by a Jewish father and son that the Germans were scouting the area. They were liberated by the Soviets in January 1945. She returned to her hometown of Radom but encountered severe antisemitism. She then fled to Regensburg, Germany to reunite with a brother and an uncle who survived. Her father perished in the same camp three weeks before liberation. Diane worked as an interpreter for UNRRA, then married and emigrated to United States after the war.