Oral History Interview with Stephanie Clearfield
Title
Date
Contributor
Summary
Stephanie Clearfield, nee Orenbuch, was born in Lodz, Poland December 25, 1930. She talks briefly about her life before 1939 and in the Lodz Ghetto. She learned to hide whenever there was a search, but her mother was taken away by the Germans in 1942. Many of her relatives in the ghetto starved to death.
In 1944 she was transported to Auschwitz by cattle car with her father, brother and sister under horrible conditions. Upon arrival in Auschwitz, she was separated from them and put to work in a factory making carpets. She describes conditions in Auschwitz and living in constant fear. Even though Stephanie knew she would never see her family again, she wanted to survive and explains how she managed to do this. She was part of a death march from Auschwitz to Bergen - Belsen in deep snow without shoes.
Stephanie and other prisoners were liberated by the British Army in April 1945. The British medical staff cared for the survivors, took some to hospitals, and provided food. She describes how the conditions in Bergen-Belsen affected the soldiers. Stephanie was sent to Feldafing, a displaced persons camp. She found an uncle in America she had never heard of through HIAS. She sailed to New York on the Marine Perch with a group of children on February 1947. They lived in a house run by HIAS. Members of Stephanie’s new found family visited her and invited her to live with them in Philadelphia. She stayed with them until she got married.
More Sources Like This
of
Eva Cutler
Eva Cutler, née Frederich, was born in 1925 in Budapest, Hungary, the second child of a cultured, Jewishly emancipated family. She describes her family’s change from being unaware of existing Hungarian antisemitism and of Nazi persecutions of Jews elsewhere, to growing dread under government imposed restrictions, almost secret attempts to emigrate, along with continuing disbelief. She tells of varied attitudes of Hungarians under German occupation and help given by some non-Jews, even a German administrator. Her brother was inducted into a work brigade and later her father was taken away.
In the fall of 1944, Eva—along with many other young Jewish women—was herded out of Budapest. She details horrendous conditions and brutality during the death march to Bergen-Belsen. She witnessed a mass execution of men. A German army officer helped her walk so she could keep going. Some townspeople offered food to the marchers, others abused them. She mentions a brief encounter with Wallenberg at the Austrian border, where he saved those who had Swiss or Swedish protective passes or said they had. Eva arrived at Bergen-Belsen in January 1945 after enduring a prolonged cattle car ride. She describes how survivors suffered from continued deprivation and illness there and also had to cope with hostility from Polish and Czech Jews already there. After liberation in April, she learns that her parents survived in Budapest and her brother is presumed dead. Eva was sent to Sweden for recovery and rehabilitation by the Red Cross. She praises the excellent medical care and kindness she experienced there. She came to the United States in 1946. Her parents came to the United States via Canada, after Eva attained U.S. citizenship. She closes with an account of her return to Hungary after 37 years and stresses the brotherhood of man.
of
Yehuda L. Mandel
Yehuda Mandel was born in Csepe, Hungary, March 3, 1904, into an orthodox family, describes Jewish life in Csepe, before and after World War I, relations with non-Jews, his education, and occupation by various countries, until Csepe became part of Czechoslovakia.
He served in the Czech army from 1924 to 1926. He was a cantor in Vienna, Austria in 1928; Novisad, Yugoslavia, 1928-1934; in Riga 1934-1936, and in Budapest in 1935 at the Rombach Temple while also serving as a chaplain in the Hungarian army. He was offered a position in London but chose to remain in Hungary. He describes Jewish and congregational life in each location. He cites anti-Jewish feelings in Austria and talks about the implementation of anti-Jewish laws in 1939, and mentions a mass grave where Jews were killed and buried in Kamenetz-Podolsk.
Cantor Mandel was in various labor battalions, escaped, and returned to Budapest in November 1944. He stayed in a house protected by the Swiss consulate, served as a messenger “Eilbotenausweis”, participated in rescuing 300 Jews from a prison; and made illegal trips to Czechoslovakia. He describes his experiences with Russian occupiers, and the desecration and reconsecration of Rombach Temple. His wife and children, who were in Bergen Belsen as part of a Sondergruppe organized by Dr. Kasztner, went to Palestine after the war. He gives a very detailed account of his illegal passage to Palestine in May 1946, aided by the Haganah. He was reunited with his family in Kibbutz Shar Hamakkim, served as a cantor in Haifa until he moved to the United States in 1948 and became a cantor at Beth Judah in Philadelphia in 1950.
Collateral Material available through the Gratz College Tuttleman Library:
Original typed testimony from Emanuel Mandel, son of Cantor Mandel, obtained on June 6, 1980, describes the 1944 transfer of the Jews from Hungary.1
Photocopies of documents:
Travel documents from Czechoslovakia to Hungary, 1945
Czech Passports
German Certification Employment
Document from the Central Council of Hungarian Jews “ Spezia"
Copy of Original Music about the town of Spezia, Italy from which
he made Aliya,1946
Work Papers From Israel, 1946
of
Max Roisman
Max Roisman was born July 25, 1913 in Warsaw, Poland. In 1939, before the German invasion of Poland, he and his wife left Warsaw to go to Russia. Stopped at the border, he remained in Slawatycze and worked with a local tailor for German SS border guards. Warned by an SS officer, who had made a deathbed promise to his Jewish grandfather never to kill a Jew, Max and his wife hid in a nearby town, then went to Wohyn posing as a Gentile. Using a sewing machine smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto, he worked as a tailor with a non-Jewish partner until he was ordered to work for the Germans as a tailor in Suchowola, an open labor camp.
On May 3, 1943, the camp was liquidated and workers were evacuated to Majdanek. Max, with his wife and her brother, signed up to go to Auschwitz unaware of the nature of the camp. He was sent to Buna to work as a slave laborer for I.G. Farben Industry, then on a forced march to Gleiwitz where they borded a train to Oranienburg (a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen) to work in a brick factory. Later he worked as a tailor for the commandant of the camp, Major Heydrich and was put in charge of four other tailors. He obtained food and clothing for other inmates and himself by trading stolen supplies. In April 1945, Max was wounded during an air raid. He received excellent medical care due to the intervention of the camp commandant. He hid when the camp was evacuated and the German military ran away. The remaining survivors organized to get food and water until the Russians liberated the camp. He describes conditions at Oranienburg, help from the Russians, and how he traveled East, across the border and was separated from his wife. He was sheltered by a Polish family who had hidden him once before and was reunited with his wife.
They lived in his wife’s hometown, moved to Reichenbach where he opened a shop, then briefly in Israel. He returned to Austria, worked as a tailor for USEC, and later emigrated to the United States with his wife and children in January 1956.
Interview: ROISMAN, Max Date: April 22, 1985
of
Judy Freeman
Judy Freeman, nee Beitscher, was born in Uzhgorod (also known as Ungwar) in the Hungarian part of Czechoslovakia, March 2, 1929. Her father was a baker and she was educated in public school. She describes changes in Jewish life after the German occupation in August 1944. Jews were herded into two temporary ghettos and then transported to Auschwitz in cattle cars. During a selection by Dr. Mengele, she was separated from her family, processed, and taken to Jewish Lager C in Birkenau with 1000 young Jewish girls. She vividly describes the daily routine, roll calls, selections and terrible conditions at Birkenau. She devised several survival skills to keep her sanity and promised herself she would live to tell about her experiences. She was sent to a gas chamber once, survived, and later selected to go to Guben, a small labor camp near Berlin, to work in an electronics component factory, in November 1944. She mentions attempts at sabotage by the slave laborers.
She describes a Death march from Guben to Bergen-Belsen in January 1945, horrible conditions, treatment of prisoners and brutality by a Blockälteste at Bergen-Belsen extensively. She lost her will to live for the first time even though some hoarded jewelry saved her life at Bergen-Belsen during a typhus epidemic.
She was liberated by the British Army April 15, 1945. She recalls actions taken by Brigadier General Grimm Hughes and British liberators vis -a- vis the survivors and the Germans. After liberation, she was hospitalized, returned to her home town, and was smuggled into Munich with her new husband, also a survivor, from Czechoslovakia. They lived and worked in two Displaced Persons camps: Gabersee and Wasserburg for almost two years. They came to the United States September 21, 1947. She explains how they built a life and started a family, after a difficult beginning in New York, assisted by HIAS.
of
Bess Freilich
Bess Freilich, née BashaAnusz, born in1928 in Pruzany, Poland, was the eldest of eight children in a religious Jewish family. Her father was a poor butcher, but she attended private Hebrew school. Her family lived in harmony with Polish neighbors (to whom her grandfather lent money with little or no return).
In 1939 under anti-Zionist Russian occupation, her Hebrew school was closed and teachers were sent to Siberia. Fearful of arrest, Bess burned her Hebrew books and then went to a public Jewish school where a communist curriculum was taught in Yiddish.
When the Germans invaded in June, 1941, the local population swelled from 3000 to 15,000 as Jews were brought from other towns to the Pruzany Ghetto. Food shortage was acute, and Bess often slipped through the ghetto walls to trade clothing for potatoes or steal potato peels from a German kitchen. She describes in detail the ghetto evacuation, when her grandfather was shot before her eyes, in January 1943.
Bess describes in detail the three day train trip in cattle cars to Auschwitz, arrival, brutality of the guards, and atrocities committed there including her six-year old brother’s murder for picking up snow for their mother to eat. Bess saw her mother fall from a blow to her head and later learned that she was burned in an open pit. Her older brother and father were sent to work in a crematorium as Sonderkommandos.
Bess was sent to Birkenau and then to Budy, a camp she describes as hell, where about 400 girls, ages 14 - 25, pushed heavy wagons uphill to build an artificial mountain. Some were forced to strip, dance and sing and then were shot. Some were eaten by dogs. She vividly describes suffering from typhus and lice infestation of a breast wound from beatings. Left unconscious in a morgue, she was returned to Birkenau, where she was saved from death several times, twice by German guards.
After passing three Mengele selections and seeing her father briefly in the men’s camp in Auschwitz where she worked picking weeds for soup, she was evacuated on a death march, January 18, 1945. She recalls thousands left dead in the snow before they reached Ravensbrück. They were then left in the woods near Malchow. At liberation, she weighed 67 pounds and could not retain food eaten for months afterwards.
Returning to her home town, she was taken by the Russians to a camp and questioned as a suspected German spy. Finding nothing of her home in Pruzany and threatened with transfer to Siberia, she fled to Lodz where she met and married another survivor. She found her father in Munich, spent two years in Feldafing DP camp and came to the United States in 1949.
She was unable to speak about her holocaust experience until the time of her interview in 1981.