15th Annual Holocaust Art & Writing Contest Brochure

An invitation from the Office of Protocol, US Mission to the UN, on behalf of the Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations, Richard C. Holbrooke, and Kati Marton Holbrooke. The invitation requests the pleasure of the company of Mr. and Mrs. Elie Wiesel at a dinner held on Monday, June 12, 2000, at 8:00 p.m. at The Waldorf Astoria Towers in New York City. The dinner is held in honor of H.E. Mr. Jean David Levitte, Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations, and Mrs. Marie Cecile Levitte. The invitation includes RSVP contact details, notes "Business Attire", and has a handwritten annotation requesting "vegetarian" for E. Wiesel.

This is an invitation from the organizations "HANDICAP AMITIÉ CULTURE" (H.A.C.) and "l'OSE" (Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants) to a conference-debate. The event is scheduled for Tuesday, September 9, 2014, at 7:00 PM in Marseille. The theme is the presentation of the OSE's Caregivers' Club, a service dedicated to the families and friends of people with Alzheimer's disease. The conference will be presented by Paul Benadhira, Director of OSE's day care centers, with the participation of Dr. Patrick Padovani, Deputy Mayor of Marseille whose delegations include health and Alzheimer's. The event will take place at 96, Avenue du Prado, Marseille, and will be followed by a cocktail. An attendance fee of 10€ is requested. Attendees are asked to RSVP by phone or email.

Armand Mednick, named “Avrum” by his Yiddish-speaking parents, was born in 1933 into a close, extended family in Brussels, Belgium. He grew up as a stranger in a non-Jewish neighborhood, often taunted by anti-Semites influenced by the fascist Rex Party. At age six, he was hospitalized with tuberculosis until May 1940, when his father, an active political leftist, fled with his family to France. His father was drafted into the French Army, deserted and placed his son, renamed “Armand”, in a sanitarium at Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne Mountains. Armand’s father, mother and baby sister hid nearby in Volvic, where they passed as Christians. When Armand recovered, he joined his family and attended Catholic school. At home, there was some Jewish observance and Armand recalls walking for seven miles with his father to attend a clandestine seder.

Armand’s father joined the French resistance in 1944 and the family returned to Brussels in 1945, where Armand was the first Bar Mitzvah celebrant after the war. The Mednick family moved to Philadelphia in 1947. Buchenwald death lists confirmed that most of their extended family of 55 relatives had been killed. Armand became a potter and teacher and produced a series of clay reliefs with symbolic Holocaust images, in an attempt to exorcise his painful childhood memories.

See also interview with his father, Bernard S. Mednicki.

Interviewee: MEDNICK, Armand Date: June 15, 1983

Frieda Appel, née Gottesman or Feldstein, was born into an Orthodox family August 18, 1929 in Kliachanovo, Czechoslovakia, near Munkács. Her father was a cattle dealer. Although, Frieda and her brother were offered shelter by the sheriff, a close friend of her father’s, her father decided to keep the family together. They were sent to the Munkács Ghetto for four weeks until transported to Auschwitz in May 1944. She refers to several interactions with Mengele, upon entering the camp and at a selection at the showers. After six weeks, she was sent to Gelsenkirchen and Essen labor camps. She was transported to Bergen-Belsen and describes the conditions there. She refers to several kindnesses shown to her by camp personnel in the different camps. She was liberated in Bergen-Belsen April 15, 1945. The Red Cross took her and her sister to Prague through Pilsen, and then to Munkács. In May 1946, she went to a DP camp in Germany where she married at age 16. They emigrated to the United States September 27, 1949, where Jewish Family Service helped them.

Recorded at the 1985 American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia, PA.

Rudy Klein was born in Bonn, Germany in 1904. His father died when he was 5 and he was raised

by his mother who died in Theresienstadt in 1942. Rudy had a standard German education but very minimal Jewish education. His family were members of a Reform synagogue but observed very little.

Mr. Klein talks about his reaction to Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and the effect it had on his job at a department store. He was fired in 1935, after the enactment of the Nuremberg laws.

Mr. Klein left for America in 1936 and he describes his beginnings in New York. He discusses the decimation of his family who had remained in Germany and tells the story of a cousin who was a brain surgeon. This cousin and his family fled to Russia but when Germany invaded Russia they were murdered by the Russians. Mr. Klein speaks briefly about his life in the United States.

Mr. Klein’s Arbeitsbuch[work permit book] was donated to the Holocaust Oral History Archive by his niece-in-marriage, Marcia Webber. A program book of a German government sponsored visit to Germany in 1987 was also donated.

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.