Oral History Interview with Agnes Adachi

Peter Cziffra was born in Berlin, Germany on October 6, 1930. Peter shares his childhood memories of the war years and living in Shanghai. His Hungarian Christian father and Jewish mother divorced when he was very young. When he was six years old he was sent to live with his grandmother in Buxton, England. His mother and the Jewish owner of a large German shoe factory were married in the United States in 1937. After the couple returned to Germany his step-father was held in jail until he agreed to sell the factory. In 1940 Peter’s mother and step-father left Germany. In order to join them, Peter, at the age of nine, flew to Paris alone, then accompanied by a Cooks Travel agent, crossed Switzerland by rail on the Sultan Express and joined them in Milan, Italy. Together they sailed from Trieste on the Conte Rosso. It was the next to last steamer to leave Trieste for Shanghai until the war ended.

The family lived first in the French Connection district. They were forced to move to the Hongkew Ghetto after Pearl Harbor. After the Americans entered the city, they were able to relocate. Peter was able to attend school throughout the family’s stay in Shanghai. Although he witnessed first hand the bombing and destruction of the city, Peter stated that he remained physically and emotionally unharmed.

In 1946 Peter came alone to San Francisco. His parents were unable to leave Shanghai until 1949, due to his step-father’s illness.

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.

Konrad Bieber was born in 1916 in Berlin, (Charlottenburg) Germany. His family lived in Gruenwald and Konrad went to the gymnasium there. His father was a German scholar and writer and his mother ran a gymnastics school. In 1933 the family left for Paris after warnings that the situation for Jews was worsening.

In 1939 Konrad married and joined the French army. He was captured and sent to various P.O.W. and labor camps in southern France. While his parents were in non-occupied southern France they received visas to the United States (via Marseilles and Lisbon) with the help of Varian Fry. In 1943 Konrad and his wife went into hiding with French farmers for 18 months. He describes his being helped by many French non-Jews. His wife lived in Montauban were she worked for the Joint Distribution Committee. In 1944 she witnessed a massacre by the retreating German army in Tulle, France. At that time Konrad was a sergeant in the French underground.

They were liberated on August 19, 1944 and were able to come out of hiding and live as Jews again in the town. Konrad was sent to Paris to be an interpreter. His son was born in 1945. He stayed in Marsac (near Montauban) and was a teacher there from 1945-47. In 1947 the family received visas to come to the United States, where Konrad taught scientific German at Lehman College, in New York.

Eva Burns, nee Gerstl, was born in 1924 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where her father was a pediatrician and her mother a concert pianist. They lived a mostly secular life with some inter‌ marriages in her mother's family. The German takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1939 drastically affected their lives with her brother being sent to Kladno and the rest of the family to Theresienstadt. She refers to help from non-Jews. She was deported to Theresienstadt November 17, 1942. She describes Theresienstadt as a "show" camp with books, a coffee house and concerts. Eva was part of a chorus preparing Verdi's Requiem and observed religious activities and humor.

She was deported to Auschwitz in May 1944 and six weeks later to Christianstadt, a women's labor camp. There she helped sabotage grenades in the ammu‌nition factory. She refers to the cruelty of the women S.S. guards. In February 1945 she es‌caped from a death march. Assuming a German identification, she worked in the Sudetenland until the spring of 1945 when she went to Prague where she worked for the family of an S.S. officer serving at the front. In May 1945, with the Czechoslovakian liberation near, she revealed her Czech identity. She married in November 1947 in Prague and immigrated to the USA in June 1948.

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.