Oral History Interview with Willie Nowak

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.

Tibor Baranski, honored as a Righteous Among the Nations by YadVashem, was born June 11, 1922 in Budapest, Hungary. He was educated in Hungarian Gymnasia and aware of rising antisemitism by 1938. He studied for the priesthood in Vesprem in 1940 and in Kassa (Kosice) in 1943. He learned of Nazi extermination plans through church channels. He returned to Budapest October 20, 1944 as the Russian army drew near.

Mr. Baranski provides a very detailed and extensive description of several rescues of Jews, from October to December, 1944, at the request of Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio, who acted as a representative of the Vatican under orders of Pope Pius XII. He rescued Jews from a transit camp to safe houses in Budapest. He worked with representatives from neutral nations and the Red Cross to stop deportations from Hegyeshalom, using protective letters (Schutzpasse), and safe houses to shelter almost 6000 Jews. He was almost executed several times. He provides details of efforts to hide Jews by Christian groups and individuals. He credits Elizabeth Kemeny, Raoul Wallenberg, Prince Esterhazy, Father Hummel and a number of priests and nuns who helped in the rescue. He talks about his encounter with Wallenberg and why he was arrested by the Russians.

Mr. Baranski was arrested by the Russians December 30, 1944 and sent on a deathmarch from Budapest to Szekszarv. Saved by a Russian soldier, he returned to Budapest. He worked with an underground movement opposed to communist rule and was arrested by the Russians again November 1948. He describes postwar life in Hungary under communist rule.

He discusses Hungarian-German relations, Miklo Horthy’s attitude towards Jews and Nazis, German occupation of Hungary, and the role of the Vatican in great detail based on his contacts. He entered the United States in 1961 and became a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Note: Audiotaped interviews of Per Anger and Elizabeth Kemeny Fuchs (referred to by Tibor Baranski) are at the Holocaust Oral History Archive and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Anatole Gorko was born in Lodz, Poland on June 28, 1907 of well-to-do Zionists. He worked in his father’s spinning factory until 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. He fought in the Polish Army for three weeks. After being in the Reserves, he was taken to a prisoner of war camp for a few weeks. He found himself with his family in the center of the Lodz Ghetto in January 1940 and describes the life there. He worked as head cashier for the ghetto stores until August 1944.

He and his family including his wife and child were finally deported to Auschwitz, in cattle cars, where, in the presence of Mengele, only he and his brother-in-law were selected for work and the rest of the family perished. He describes the train ride, arrival, selection, and shaving. He remained there for one month, then pretended to be a mechanic and was selected for a camp in Sudeten where after two weeks of training he worked on V2 rockets. Here he managed to sabotage, and persuade other workers, including German mechanics, to sabotage the work. He worked there from September 1944 until May 1945 when the Russians liberated the area. He made his way back to Lodz where he remarried, became head of the textile production for Communist Poland, but decided to leave. He smuggled himself and his wife to Munich, and waited from 1946 to 1948 to obtain necessary papers to resettle in the United States. He describes in some detail his adjustment to the United States.

Albert (Abraham) Ferleger was born in Chmielnik, Poland, June 15, 1919. He was one of six children from a very Orthodox family and had a public school as well as a yeshiva education. He describes the customs of the Jewish Kehillahin histown, relates the Polish antisemitism before the war and describes what occurred after the Germans took over the town. He describes the influx of populations from several different towns being forced into their ghetto and describes atrocities (people being killed on the spot and burying them) and deportations. Albert was sent tozwangsarbeit, forced labor, where he shoveled snow and worked in the ghetto community kitchen.

Albert fled from the Germans and was hidden by a Polish farmer for two years: he was buried in a hole, naked, under the farmers stable, along with another Jewish man. They subsisted on bread and potatoes. He details their horrid conditions.

With the Russian victory and the help of the Briha1 (underground Zionist organization helping Jews get to Palestine) he became the leader of a group of Jews that was smuggled across the Polish and Czechoslovakian borders to Germany pretending to be Greek and later as German Jews.

He met his wife (who was liberated from Theresienstadt) through the Briha, as well. They were sent to Munich and then to a displaced persons camp in Regensdorf, Germany for seven months. With the help of HIAS and President Truman’s aid to refugees they went to relatives in Philadelphia. He relates in great detail how he was able to survive during and after the war, how his experiences challenged his religious beliefs and his bitterness that not more was not done to help the Jews.

Jenny Sommer describes her life, education, and Zionist activities in prewar Libau, Latvia in great detail, including some incidents of antisemitism and discrimination. In 1940 conditions for Jews started to get worse. Because her family was upper middle class they lived in fear of the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) and the Russians.

Jenny describes life under the German occupation of Libau in great detail: the execution of all able bodied Jewish men on July 22, 1941; a mass execution of Jews, including her relatives, and how her sister managed to rescue them just before they were to be executed during an Aktion. She witnessed a mass execution of Jews, including her relatives. The Christian superintendent of her uncle’s house hid Jenny and her remaining family in the attic until the round-up of Jews was over. Jenny, her mother and her sister, moved into the ghetto with about 600 other Jews and worked for the Germans as slave laborers. Her sister worked as a nurse in the ghetto. Some Christian Latvians smuggled food to them.

On Yom Kippur night they were taken to Kaiserwald concentration camp, near Riga. Jenny describes their arrival at Kaiserwald, where mothers were forcibly separated from their children. Some women committed suicide. Her sister carried a bottle of cyanide pills. While in Kaiserwald, Jenny did hard labor as part of a Kommando, at a work camp, and later inStutthof. She describes their horrible existence in Stutthof and how she managed to find the will to survive. Her husband worked at Stutthof as an electrician and managed to survive a typhoid epidemic.

As the Russian army approached, the inmates were shipped out of Stutthof on a designated typhoid boat. It was bombed, set on fire and capsized. She was rescued by a German fire boat after ten days without food or water, liberated two days later in Kiel, Germany by English forces. She stayed at a field Lazarett (hospital) in Itzehoe, near Hamburg for six months. She talks about her post-liberation experiences in a German hospital, and finding her husband in Neustadt.

Emmi Loewenstern was born on February 19, 1925 in Emmerich, Germany. She briefly describes pre-war life: schooling and relations with non-Jewish Poles. The family was well known in the town. Emmi describes the change in attitude toward Jews after the Nazis came to power. She gives a detailed description of Kristallnacht, the damage done to their home by soldiers they knew, the imprisonment of her father.

In December 1941, Emmi and her family were deported to the Riga Ghetto in Latvia. She describes the journey and arrival in detail including hearing about the mass murder of the Latvian Jews by Jewish survivors still working in the ghetto. She details the lack of food, crowded conditions, forced labor, brutality and atrocities: people being taken out on work shifts and shot if they were caught stealing food. She discusses some holiday observances in the ghetto. She also describes an incident in October 1942 when some young Latvian Jews tried to bring ammunition into the ghetto, were caught and 39 were shot to death.

In November 1943 Emmi, her sister and her mother were sent to various places for forced labor: working for the German army at the Armeebiekleidungsamt [army quartermaster] sorting clothes of deceased German soldiers and in another (unnamed) camp. She describes how the young children were separated from their parents and never heard from again. In the fall of 1944, they were deported to Stutthof and then to Libau (Latvia) where they had to work at a shoe factory. She describes how they took the handkerchiefs off their heads during the trip to and from work so the townspeople would see how they were being treated. In February 1945, they were deported to Hamburg, Germany to Fuhlsbüttel (a subcamp of Neuengamme) where they had to label bags of spices. She describes the deplorable conditions of the deathmarch from Hamburg to Kiel where they had to sort bricks.

In 1945, they were taken to Malmö, Sweden via Denmark by the Red Cross due to the Bernadotte Agreement. Emmi contacted relatives in the United States and Sweden. Emmi emigrated with her mother and sister to the United States where Emmi married in 1947 and had two daughters.