Oral History Interview with Steffi Schwarcz

Norman Rosen, one of seven children, was born in a religious family in Nowe Miasto, Poland in 1922. He describes life before and after 1938, when he first experienced antisemitism. Norman fled to Warsaw after the German invasion in September 1939, but returned home after Warsaw fell. He describes life under the German occupation before the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto, including hiding during the day, forced labor, abuse of Jews, and confiscation of Jewish owned businesses.

Norman describes in great detail his experiences in both the Warsaw and the Nowe Miasto Ghettos, smuggling food aided by non-Jews, and a brief detention by the GESTAPO. Norman escaped from the Nowe Miasto Ghetto with a small group of young men aided by non-Jews. They hid in a cellar for 27 months. Later Norman and his brothers hid in a hole under a haystack and then in an attic, again helped by non-Jewish farmers.

In January 1945, as the Russians advanced and the Germans fled, Norman returned to Nowe Miasto. He describes the hostile reaction by Poles. His parents were killed in Auschwitz, but he was reunited with his surviving brothers. They travelled together to Germany, stayed in Zeilsheim Displaced Persons camp near Frankfurt from 1945 to 1946, and subsequently in Backnang Displaced Persons camp near Stuttgart until 1949 when he came to the United States.

Ina Rothschild talks about her life, education and work in Germany after World War I. Both women lived through Hitler’s rise to power, starting in the 1920s, experienced changes in Jewish life after 1933, and explain the effects of these events on the Jewish community and their interaction with Gentiles. Elsa Jaeckel’s husband, a Gentile, refused to divorce her and suffered the consequences. She mentions a group of Jews in Frankfurt who committed suicide to avoid deportation in 1941. Throughout the interview, Mrs. Rothschild cites many instances of aid and acts of kindness by Gentiles.

Mrs. Rothschild and her husband ran a Jewish orphanage in Esslingen am Neckar, near Stuttgart from 1933 to 1942 when they were deported. The orphanage was ransacked on November 9, 1938. Her husband was beaten, arrested, but later released to care for the displaced orphans. She describes what happened to the children in their care.

Elsa Jaeckel had to work for the Gestapo with 600 other Jewish women who had gentile husbands. She talks about conditions for couples in mixed marriages and living through air raids in Frankfurt. She avoided the transport to Theresienstadt because her husband bribed a former SA man to let her hide in his house. She hid in the attic until the Americans came in 1945.

When the orphanage was closed, the Rothschilds returned to Stuttgart. She describes their lives, her work in an old age home, and her attempts to care for Jewish children. Many of the children, especially the retarded ones, were deported and killed at Ravensburg. The Rothschilds were deported to an Old Age Home in Theresienstadt on August 22, 1942. She describes the process, the actual transport, arrival at Theresienstadt, and brutal treatment and living conditions which improved once the International Red Cross supervised this institution. She saw Reinhard Heydrich shoot Jewish prisoners. Ina Rothschild worked as a nurse, her husband died in July 1944. Many inmates killed themselves. Ina mentions attempts to care for newborn babies. She also volunteered to care for 50 young children from Holland with typhoid fever together with a Jewish doctor. The children survived and were adopted after the war. She was transported to Switzerland with 600 people in February 1945. Elsa came to the United States in 1957, Ina in 1947.

Note: Collateral Material available through the Gratz College Tuttleman Library:

Scanned copy of a German letter and the translation.

Mina Lustiger, nee Bochner, was born July 30, 1929 in Bielitz, Poland. Her father was in the scrap metal business. She shares childhood memories including frightening antisemitic attacks. She describes the commotion and uncertainty after the German invasion, first sent with her siblings to her grandfather in Kęty, to avoid the Germans but then having to return home. After finally reunited with her parents in Bielsko she witnessed Jews being harassed and her family experienced the plunder of their silver by Germans. The whole family then fled toKęty because it was a smaller citywhere they hoped to avoid harassment. When her mother was jailed in Kęty for trying to send a package of food and her father was sent to a labor camp, the four girls were left alone. Mina describes the Kęty Ghetto and her subsequent deportation to the Neudorf Ghetto in 1941.They were warned1 not to be in the area during a selection and fled, posing as Aryans, to their uncle in Chrzanów. She describes the harrowing journey, travelling alone as a 12 year old, and then being joined by her sisters. Subsequently, they found out that some of the family had survived the selection and were then in Wadowice and the sisters again made a dangerous journey to join family. Mina describes the gated Wadowice Ghetto and how they had to sneak in with a labor brigade. Soon after, she and her sisters were deported to Sucha labor camp where they did hard labor regulating water near railways. She describes being sent to a distribution center at Sosnowiec and again being deported with her sisters to forced labor, this time in a spinning factory in Freiberg, Germany in 1943. She speaks about slightly better treatment there, but still long working hours and the scarcity of food. They were deported to Röhrsdorflabor camp and describes harsh working conditions, with little food and much suffering from disease. She mentions fasting on Yom Kippur.

In 1945, as Russian forces approached, they were sent on a death march to the Sudeten in Czechoslovakia, walking for several days, without food and sleeping in the snow. At Kratzau concentration camp, they joined inmates from many other countries. They finally were incarcerated at Gross Rosen, where she experienced the most brutal conditions. She describes beatings, many deaths from typhus and exhausting work in freezing weather.

On May 8, 1945, she was liberated by the Russian Army and then re-united with her family in Bielitz. In 1946, she went to England with a group of 100 other children and attended an ORT school. In 1951, she married Samuel Lustiger and they emigrated to the United States in 1952. They have a family of three children.

Mina does not indicate whether these were Jews or Gentiles who warned them.

Born December 17, 1917 in Warsaw, Poland, Marian Filar was a member of a musical and religious Jewish family who became a child prodigy and a noted concert pianist and teacher. His father was a manufacturer and his grandfather was a rabbi. He studied at the Warsaw and Lemberg conservatories and graduated from Gymnasium in Warsaw. In September, 1939, he fled to Lemberg following the German invasion. After graduation from the Lemberg Conservatory in December, 1941, he rejoined his family in the Warsaw Ghetto. He worked with a labor group taken outside the ghetto to a railroad workplace in Warsaw West. He describes severe beatings by S.S. guards and his rescue by a Polish railway man. He details his solo performance and other symphony concerts in the ghetto by Jewish musicians, often playing music by forbidden composers. He mentions ghetto deportations, 1942-43, when his parents and siblings were taken.

In May, 1943, after the ghetto uprising, he was deported to Majdanek. After beatings and near-starvation, he volunteered for a labor camp in Skarzysko-Kamiena, where he received aid from a fellow worker who was Polish. Moved to Buchenwald in August 1944, he was housed in a tent camp with Leon Blum, Deladier and other prominent politicians and clerics. Mr. Filar was moved next, by train, to Schlieben, near Leipzig, to work in a bazooka factory, where a Polish kitchen maid gave him extra food. His piano playing impressed the German civilian camp supervisor who transferred him to an easy job to protect his hands. As the war front moved near, he was sent with other prisoners by train to Bautzen and then on a death march to Nicksdorf (Mikulasovice) in Czechoslovakia. He and two brothers survived and lived in Zeilsheim Displaced Person’s camp in Germany for two and a half years.

After liberation, he performed in concerts through Western Europe and toured Israel, playing with the Israeli Philharmonic during the war in 1956. He shares a moving vignette about going to Professor Walter Gieseking’s villa and auditioning to become his student. He studied with him for five years.He emigrated to the USA in 1950, where he played with many American orchestras, headed the piano department at Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, and joined the faculty at Temple University. After retirement, he taught privately and judged international piano competitions.

Werner Glass, born in 1927, the youngest child of a Berlin pediatrician, emigrated to Shanghai in 1933 with his family and governess. His father, a founder of the Shanghai Doctors Association, practiced medicine in the family’s apartment in the International Settlement. A comfortable life, with many Chinese servants, is described. Werner attended German and English schools, technical college and a French-Jewish university. A vignette relates student resistance to Japanese occupation.

In 1938, his father’s passport was not renewed and the family became stateless. An influx of German refugees, including his grandparents, led to the formation of the JüdischeGemeinde; he details refugee support by the “Joint” and the Sephardic community. He describes his religious education, his Bar Mitzvah in 1940, and his activity in a Jewish Boy Scout troop.

After Pearl Harbor, enemy nationals were interned in a Japanese POW camp, and a ghetto was established in Hongkew for all post-1937 refugees, both Jews and non-Jews. The Glass family, as stateless immigrants who arrived in 1933, were unaffected. In 1942, they were dispossessed by a Japanese officer and moved into one room in a hotel occupied by Chinese and Russian prostitutes. Difficult living conditions, Japanese rules of conduct and penalties for infractions are depicted.

Werner emigrated to the United States in 1947, sponsored by his sister Helga who married an American-Jewish soldier. He completed graduate studies in Chemical Engineering at Syracuse University, married and fathered several sons.

Sylvia Schneider, née Balbierer, was born in Cologne, Germany on May 4, 1928 to an Orthodox Jewish family. Her father, a language teacher was born in Belgium of Russian ancestry. Her mother was from Krakow, Poland. A happy childhood ended for Sylvia in 1935-36, when her sister Ruth was beaten by Hitler youth. Years later, while studying nursing in England, Ruth died in 1943 of a brain aneurysm presumably caused by that injury.

On October 28, 1938, the Gestapo deported Sylvia, Ruth and their mother, along with many others with Polish passports to Zbaszyn. She described freezing living conditions in 1938-39 in the no man's land between the German and Polish borders. In May 1939 her family joined an aunt in Krakow and then went to Otwock, near Warsaw for the girls to await a Kindertransport ship to England. They were parted from their mother and experienced unhappy stays in private homes and a children's hostel, but Sylvia names several caring women who befriended her. In 1947, she immigrated to the United States, where she married and had a daughter. She gave up her Orthodox religious faith when she learned that her mother was gassed at Auschwitz and her father died in another camp, but she continued to identify herself as a traditional Jew.