Oral History Interview with Lili Altschuler

Milton Harrison was a 19 year old First Sergeant in the Medical Detachment of the Ninth Armored Infantry Battalion of the Sixth Armored Division. In 1945 he heard about German atrocities from home but not in the army. On April 11, 1945 on the way from Mühhausen towards the Saale River, his unit encountered Russian Prisoners of War who had escaped from Buchenwald. From them they learned about this camp and that most of the SS had already left. A tank under the command of Captain Kiefer, with a total of four Americans was dispatched to investigate. Shortly thereafter, a small group of 28 men, including Mr. Harrison, followed. On the way they stumbled on the now unguarded "Little Buchenwald," a camp for mostly Jewish children between 10 and 14 years old who had worked at hard labor.

They were the first American soldiers to enter Buchenwald, and Captain Kiefer and First Sergeant Harrison reported the situation at Buchenwald to their superior officers that evening. When his group reached the main camp, the ovens were still hot. He inspected the camp, was shown a lampshade made from human skin and rows of bottles containing human parts which were part of Ilse Koch's collection. He describes the survivors’ physical condition and their reaction to the liberators.

On April 12, the Waffen SS attacked Buchenwald with small arms and mortar. Two American captains and Rabbi Herschel Schacter were in the camp at this time, and called for assistance. With help from the 44th Infantry Battalions, the SS was overwhelmed on April 14th, and Buchenwald was declared a "non-combat zone" on that day and medical assistance began arriving. Generals Groh and Patton toured the camp and were horrified. Inhabitants of Weimar were ordered to bury the dead.

Mr. Harrison, who is one of the historical officers of the Buchenwald Information Committee of the Sixth Armored Division Association, stresses that only soldiers of Command A of the 6th Armored Division can be called liberators of Buchenwald. He cites several references to verify this claim. He describes the lasting effect seeing Buchenwald had and still has on these soldiers.

Lola Krause, née Miestschanimoff, was born March 1,1916, in Vitebsk, Belarus. Her father, a successful movie photographer, and her mother, an accomplished pianist from Latvia, were non-observant Soviet Jews. Lola studied music with her mother, learned German from her governess and attended public school in Vitebsk. Rejected by the local Soviet college because of her father’s upper-class status, she moved to Leningrad, studied engineering and worked in film and scientific instrument factories. She married in 1938 and a son was born in 1939.

She details the siege of Leningrad; German bombardment; disease; lack of food and all public services. Her husband died of starvation, her weight dropped to 60 pounds and at three years of age, her son weighed only seven-and-a-half pounds. When her factory was relocated to Samarkand in 1941, she traveled with her son in a cattle car for six weeks, stopping in Tashkent. There she met her uncle, a doctor, who insisted that the fragile child remain with him in the hospital. A year-and-a-half later, he joined her in Samarkand, where she worked until 1946. She married again and the family moved illicitly across European borders, living in Jewish Agency camps in Wroclaw (Breslau), Poland and at Waseralfinger, near Stuttgart, Germany. Another son was born and they survived with food packages from American relatives.

In 1949, Lola and her familyemigrated to the United States. Lola describes their adjustment in Bradley Beach, N.J. and in Philadelphia, working in factories and establishing their own cleaning business. She sold her valuable bracelet to buy a piano, suffering ridicule from poor neighbors, because she believed children had to learn to play an instrument. She had her sons circumcised, sent them to Hebrew school and began to observe Jewish holidays. A visit to Israel in 1972 further heightened her Jewish consciousness.

Nina Frisch, née Dannenberg, was born July 25, 1935 in Stanislawa (Stanisławów), Poland to an orthodox family. The family was moved into a ghetto when she was six years old. She remembers hiding in nearby woods in 1943, surviving on hazelnuts, periodically running from German troops, and that her mother was shot to death and buried there.

Staszek Jaczkowski, a Polish man, who was honored by Yad VaShem for saving 31 Jews, hid Nina and her father in a bunker in the cellar of his house from September 1943 to July, 1944, along with many other Jews, until they were liberated by the Russians. She describes in great detail how the Jewish families hiding in this bunker survived, established daily routines, and tried to keep some degree of normalcy. Mr. Jaczkowski treated the group very humanely and tried to establish an escape route for them after it became extremely dangerous to stay in the bunker. Nina and her father came to the United States in May 1949, because they could not go to Israel.

She explains how she came to terms with surviving when so many others were killed, why she is willing to talk about her experiences, and that she cannot understand how Germans could commit such atrocities and still have a normal family life.

Interviewee: FRISCH, Nina Date: April 22, 1985

MirjamPinkhof, nee Waterman, was born May 12, 1916 in Loodsdrecht, Holland. Her father, an idealistic socialist, left Amsterdam, where he worked in the diamond trade, to found an agricultural training center on a farm in Loodsdrecht in the 1920’s. Her mother once belonged to an agricultural commune named “Walden”. Mirjam attended the modernist school at Bilthoven, where one of her teachers was JoopWesterweel, who became a Christian rescuer of Jews. Mirjam started a private school on her parents’ farm in 1940. Until 1943, she worked with Jews and non-Jews in the resistance movement led by Westerweel, Joachim Simon (Schuschu) and Menachem Pinkhof whom she married in 1945. They sent youths from Zionist training centers across Europe to Palestine. (See Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, p. 1648). In 1943, her parents were freed from Westerbork through her bribe of diamonds. In 1944, she was imprisoned at Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen. She describes the deprivation in the camps and on the evacuation train, where she was kept for two weeks in the spring of 1945. Russians liberated the train in June, 1945 at Troebity, near Leipzig. She was in Displaced persons camps in Luxembourg and Eindhoven. Her husband worked with Aliyah Bet and a Jewish Brigade group to send illegal immigrants to Palestine. The Pinkhof family obtained legal British certificates for entry and settled in Haifa in 1946.

Interviewee: PINKHOF, Mirjam Waterman Date: July 8, 1989

This document is a program for the 16th Annual Holocaust Art & Writing Contest, an event presented by Chapman University and The 1939 Society, with its awards ceremony held on March 6, 2015. The program details the contest's theme, "From Discovery to Action: Making Meaning from Memory," and acknowledges various sponsors, partners, and individuals involved as speakers and judges. It also includes information on a related "Evening of Holocaust Remembrance" held on April 16, 2015, which commemorated the 70th Anniversary of Liberation. A significant portion of the program features student artwork and a detailed biography of Holocaust survivor Jack Pariser, highlighting his remarkable story of survival during the Holocaust. Additionally, the program lists the numerous middle and high schools from across the United States and one from China that participated in the contest. The document serves as a comprehensive record of the event, its participants, and its educational mission.

Lilly Friedman, née Lax, was born in Zarica, Czechoslovakia on January 20, 125. Her father taught Hebrew. Lilly describes how Jewish life and her relations with non-Jews changed after the Hungarian occupation in 1939. In 1944, after the Germans rounded up all the Jews, Lilly and her family were sent to Auschwitz. She describes arrival in Auschwitz, the selections, and brutal murders of infants. After three days she was taken to Plaszow, Krakow with a group of girls for forced hard labor under brutal conditions. In September 1944 they returned to Auschwitz. As transports arrived, women and children were taken straight to the crematoria. After three weeks she was put in charge of 400 of the healthiest girls who were selected to work as weavers in a factory in Neustadt.

As the front came closer, the camp was evacuated. The girls were transported to Mauthausen and then marched to Bergen-Belsen. She gives a graphic description of the transport to Mauthausen by train under Allied bombardment, the casualties and their attempts to help each other. She describes terrible conditions in Bergen-Belsen and how the girls helped each other to survive. They were liberated by the English Second Army April 15, 1945. She slowly regained her health and met and married another survivor. The family came to the United States in March, 1948.

Her daughter, Miriam adds her insights about growing up as a child of survivors. Lilly mentions the impact living through the Holocaust still has on her and her sisters.

Interviewee: FRIEDMAN, Lilly Date: April 21, 1985