Oral History Interview with Sally Abrams

Irmgard Zacharias, nee Pinkus, was born July 15, 1904 in Friedrichshagen, Germany, a suburb of Berlin. She attended a private lyceum in Berlin. Her parents had a variety store. Her father, a World War I officer and veteran, believed this would save them from persecution. After Kristallnacht, when their store was demolished, he realized they had to leave Germany. By that time most of their money had already been confiscated and they were not able to secure an affidavit or visa. Through connections of a cousin, the family was able to obtain four tickets on a re-conditioned Japanese warship to Shanghai. They arrived in Shanghai in May, 1939.

Irmgard met her husband, a Prussian engineer, upon her arrival and they married five months later. They lived and worked with her family in a grocery store purchased from other refugees. The family lived above the store and she relates that the living conditions were decent in comparison to the majority of Shanghai residents. She details life in the compound of Hong Kew, where food was scarce, sanitation was lacking and infection was rampant. Dysentery, for which they often received immunization shots, was normal. Cholera and typhoid were also common. Dead bodies were left on the streets for pickup twice a week.

For a short time Mrs. Zacharias and her husband got jobs in a department store in Tzingtao [now Qingdao], a city located on the coast of China north of Shanghai, which was reached by boat. Irmgard’s son was born in 1941. Her husband died of typhus in 1942, seven weeks after their child’s birth. When the Japanese arrived, the family was forced to move to a ghetto but were able to take their possessions and opened another grocery store. Her father died in 1945.

Irmgard left Shanghai with her mother and son in 1948. The American Joint Distribution Committee and the Sassoon family provided the means for their emigration to the United States. In 1981, when Irmgard returned to Shanghai to visit the graves of her husband and father, the gravestones were gone and the cemetery was replaced with a children’s park.

Note: Collateral material file available through the Gratz College Tuttleman Library includes correspondence containing additional detail on life in Shanghai.

Individual was a Captain in the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) of the United States Army during World War II. He entered Dachau Concentration Camp in April 1945, a few days after liberation, to interrogate Nazis who stayed behind because they wanted to be questioned by Americans not Russians. He was taken on a tour of Dachau and describes what he saw and heard, including accounts of atrocities inflicted on the prisoners, and what he learned during the interrogation, in gruesome detail. He mentions how the experience of seeing Dachau affected him and the other men in his unit.

He reported to his commanding officer in Munich. He was assigned to a Displaced Persons camp at Coburg, Germany. He describes poor conditions at the camp, nightly searches, the treatment of survivors, and briefly mentions a riot at the camp in 1946. He explains why he feels that the displaced persons could have been treated more humanely and how these experiences affect him still.

Anna Sultanik, née Tiger, was born May 20, 1929 in Krakow, Poland as the older of two children of Dr. Tiger and Sara Meth Tiger. Her pre-war memories include her family’s sheltering of German-Jewish refugees en-route to America. She describes the sudden changes in her secure, upper-middle class life with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 including her father’s escape, confiscation of the family’s possessions, forced sharing of the family’s apartment with five other families when the Krakow ghetto was established, involuntary participation in medical experiments. In March 1940, she begins to work in Plaszow work camp connected to the Krakow Ghetto after mother volunteers to join her 6-year-old brother in transport from the ghetto. She describes work in detail and mentions Amon Goeth, camp commander, later tried and executed as a war criminal. She details her narrow escapes from death after being forced to dig her own grave, being hidden from camp hospital evacuation by her parents’ friends. She describes her work as tailor’s apprentice until Plaszow was evacuated in 1944.

She describes march to Auschwitz and her one-week stay there followed by prolonged cattle-car trip to Bergen-Belsen. Many details are included about her one-year stay in Bergen-Belsen until liberation by British on April 15, 1945. She tells of immediate tragic aftermath of liberation from misguided overfeeding of prisoners. She mentions her two-year stay in Displaced Persons Camp in Frankfurt-am-Main including efforts to find her father. Following her marriage in 1948, she was able to emigrate to U.S. with sponsorship of a family who had received pre-war shelter from her family. She details her eventual reunion with her father shortly before his death in Israel in 1967.

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.

Lory Cahn1, nee Grünberger, was born May 17, 1925 in Breslau, Germany into a religious home. Her father was a lawyer. Her younger brother was sent to England in the 1930's, joined the British army and remained in England permanently.2 Lory's schooling stopped after Kristallnacht, 1938. The family's attempts to emigrate to Argentina failed. Because her father was a captain in the German army during World War I, he was able to buy his way into Theresienstadt and Lory was allowed to stay with her parents when the family was deported in the spring of 1941. Lory reports in detail the roundup of Jews, the transport by cattle car, and every aspect of life in Theresienstadt. She was treated for meningitis with medicine provided by the Red Cross.

In 1943 Lory was sent to Auschwitz after a two week trip in a cattle car. She survived a selection by Dr. Mengele. She describes living and working conditions of female prisoners and mentions the Auschwitz orchestra. Auschwitz was so overcrowded prisoners were exterminated before being processed. Lory witnessed many brutal acts.

In 1944 she was sent to Mauthausen after ten days in Buchenwald. Outside Buchenwald Jews in the transport were bombed during an air raid. She describes a brutal trip, guarded by SS, to Kurzbach, a labor camp in Silesia. Pointless labor and a starvation diet were designed to kill the prisoners.

After a death march to Gross-Rosen, in the fall of 1944 (which only 30 of the 150 in her group survived) they were taken to Bergen-Belsen. She describes conditions in Bergen-Belsen. Prisoners who reported sick disappeared. Due to extreme starvation, some prisoners resorted to cannibalism. Just before the war ended the SS guards gradually disappeared and the number of prisoners who died increased greatly. Lory survived bitter cold, typhus, and starvation and was liberated by British troops April 15, 1945.

She describes chaotic conditions in Bergen-Belsen and attempts to rehabilitate the survivors after liberation. Many prisoners died from eating regular food. At a Jewish information office in Hannover Lory learned that her mother was gassed in Auschwitz and her father was still alive in Theresienstadt. She went to Bavaria, in the American zone, with friends. American Jewish soldiers looked after them. One managed to find her father in Berlin. Her father joined her in Bavaria, April 1946. After some time in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany she came to the United States on April 17, 1947 and married one of the soldiers she had met in Bavaria. Her father stayed in Germany.

Elizabeth J. Levy, nee Dreifuss, was born in 1927 in Ludwigshafen am Rheim, Germany. She attended a local school as the only Jewish child in classes for Catholics, whom her parents believed were friendlier than the Protestants. She also studied Hebrew in Mannheim.

After the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, her family was ostracized and her father was dismissed as a language professor. She moved with her parents to Leipzig, where her father taught in a Jewish school until Kristallnacht, when he was arrested. He was held at Buchenwald until family visas and tickets to Peru were obtained.

In February, 1939, they left Germany with visitor visas for England where her father taught German language classes for British police and worked at Bloomsbury House, helping German Jews to emigrate. Personal connections enabled his family to avoid internment as German nationals. In February, 1940, they sailed to the United States. Mrs. Levy married in 1949, had three children and became a language teacher.

She believes her religious faith sustained her during her youth and maintains that Jewish people must remember the Holocaust by avoiding intermarriage and abortion, to compensate for those Jews who were killed.

Elizabeth’s granddaughter, Rebecca, age 12 at the time, did an interview with her great-grandmother Lina Dreifuss (Elizabeth Levy’s mother) about her experiences in Nazi Germany. Mrs. Dreifuss is age 102 at the time of this interview.: https://vimeo.com/201457472/5b06ce1456