Oral History Interview with Per Anger

Zina Farber, nee Bass, one of six children, was born December 6, 1933 in Bialystok, Poland. Her father was a businessman. She shares her very early childhood memories of antisemitism (having been taught to always step off pavements when encountering Gentiles, at the risk of being beaten). She also recounts that the most vivid detail of her early life in Poland is her very warm family.

Having been separated from both parents very early in the war, her eldest brother took care of the family. In 1943, after confinement in Bialystok and PruzhanyGhettos, she and four brothers were sent to Auschwitz. She describes the round up of Jews in Pruzhany, the deportation in open cattle trucks, arrival, selection, and shaving. She describes the absolute miracle that she was not immediately gassed, being dragged out of her assigned truck and put instead with the group of women assigned to hard labor. She was 10 years old. She attributes this miracle to the fact that she was wearing her mother’s coat which made her look older than she was. She explains several times that it is too painful to recount the innumerable stories she could tell about her one and half year experience in Auschwitz. She is able to share descriptions of her constant hunger and fear. She describes fear of punishment – i. e. having her head pushed into a barrel of excrement– and relates the necessity of always wearing her soup bowl on a rope around her neck, even when sleeping. She also describes how the girls took care of each other, reddening cheeks before selections for example. She endured a two-week death march in mid-April 1945 to Ravensbrück and Neustadt-Gleiwitz (possibly Neustadt-Glewe).

Liberated by American soldiers, she travelled to Bialystok, where she was reunited with her father who had survived five years in Siberia. Mrs. Farber was separated several years earlier from her mother, who had been transported to Treblinka. After a failed attempt to emigrate to Palestine from the Landsberg displaced persons camp, Mrs. Farber left for the United States in 1949. Sponsored by an uncle in Philadelphia, she remained there, married and had two sons.

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

Betti Frank, née Koppel, was born in Zutphen, Holland. Her parents had a butcher shop. She briefly describes pre-war life. Betti and her brother belonged to Hehalutz, a Zionist youth group. Betti describes life after the German invasion, including registration of Jews, roundups, Razzias, raids, and collaboration by some Dutch people. The Dutch police arrested her father, sent him to a Dutch concentration camp and then to Mauthausen where he was killed. Betti describes how later the Dutch police came back for the rest of the family: Betti and her mother were taken to a building owned by the Jewish community which had been converted into a hospital for older Jews. She describes the round up of elderly and sick Jews in the community. Her brother was deported to Westerbork. She found out after the war that he was killed in Auschwitz.

In April 19431, Betti and her mother were deported to Vught concentration camp with all Dutch Jews who did not live in Amsterdam. She describes in great detail their arrival, the horrible conditions in Vught and a separate children’s camp where her mother worked as a nurse, Appells, extreme cruelty and constant terror. She also describes contact with non-Jewish prisoners and an offer to her by Hehalutz members to escape with false papers which she turned down to stay with her mother. Her mother was eventually deported along with the children and she never saw her again. Betti was then assigned to a slave labor group working for the Philips company together with non-Jews making radios and welding. She talks about how the SS tried to deport this group to Auschwitz several times and how they were saved by working for Philips. Finally in June they were sent to Auschwitz arriving June 6, 1944. She describes in great detail their brutal reception, processing, conditions and cruel treatment from Jewish Kapos. After 10 days, Betti, with the group selected by Philips, was transported out of Auschwitz to a factory in Reichenbach to work with German civilians. From there, the workers were sent to Lanowice concentration camp, and later forced on a death march to Trausenau, Czechoslovakia in February 1945, then forced on rail cars to a small camp near Port of Westfalen close to the Dutch border. Betti describes in detail their deportation to and working conditions in several camps: a salt mine in Braunschweig, Magdeburg; Lüneburger Heide, where they had to dig trenches at the front; and finally a small camp in Hamburg. She describes brutal living and working conditions, cruel behavior by German civilians, and some acts of compassion in great detail. She talks about some of her survival strategies and how she saved her life by following her instinct.

After the end of World War II, the prisoners were transported to Denmark under the auspices of Folke Bernadotte. They were sent to either Malmo or a “holiday” camp near Göteburg in Sweden, depending on their physical condition. Betty again worked for Philips. After a stay in Holland, she emigrated to Israel on March 12, 1950.

Ilse Stamm was born in Eichstetten am Kaiserstuhl, Baden, Germany. Her family was one of the 30 Jewish families in a village of 1,000 people. Her father owned a paper factory from 1876 to 1938. She describes antisemitic incidents in her school and on a train. She attended a secular school in Freiburg, an hour and a half railroad trip from home, from 1933 to November 11, 1938. Dismissed early that day, she walked past the burnt foundations of synagogues in Freiburg and in Kaiserstuhl. She witnessed Jewish men, including her father, loaded into trucks for incarceration and mentions the kindness of a non-Jewish friend. This man walked from his home a mile away to bring food for her family every night during the three weeks her father was away.

Her family was able to leave Germany through sponsorship from relatives in Philadelphia which secured her father’s release from Dachau in 1938. Ilse and her mother followed shortly thereafter (1939), with visas secured through bribery at the American Consulate in Stuttgart. When grandparents, who had been interned since 1940 in the Gurs camp in France, arrived in Philadelphia in 1946, they were described as skeletons.

Saul Horn was born in Lódz, Poland in 1913. Saul briefly describes the thriving pre-war Lodz Jewish community. Saul recounts the effects of the German occupation on his family, losing the family business and fleeing to the Glowno Ghetto in December 1939, which was outside the German Reich at the time. He describes the difficult conditions in the ghetto, working outside the ghetto and trying to buy extra food. He describes their deportation to the Warsaw Ghetto when Germany took over that area in 1941. Saul describes working as a slave laborer in the Warsaw Ghetto, at Okecie airfield, and the gruesome effect of starvation, especially on children, as well as on people in general. He explains how he escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto to Opatów and later rescued 10 women, using bribery. After six months in Opatów they were captured by the SS and sent to Skarzysko labor camp. He details the horrible living conditions and brutal treatment by Ukrainian guards. His wife died of typhoid in 1942.

Saul details his deportation to Buchenwald by cattle train in 1944. Of the 2000 Jews on this transport only 200 survived. He describes the brutal conditions, especially the hunger, and how he became the head of the small hospital - staffed by Jewish doctors - that had no supplies. Saul witnessed several atrocities committed by Germans.

Buchenwald was liberated by the Russians in May, 1945. He mentions what occurred after liberation and his search for relatives in Lódz. He was reunited with three of his wife’s sisters and later married one of them. In 1945 he established a manufacturing business in Poland.

He explains how they were smuggled out of Poland to the Schlupfing Displaced Persons camp in Germany, helped by the Haganah, in 1946. He went to Landsberg Displaced Persons camp in 1948. Saul, his wife and two year old daughter, arrived in the United States in June 1949. He lived in Patterson N.J. and briefly talks about his life there and how he taught himself to speak English.

Bernard S. Mednicki was born in 1910 in Brussels, Belgium, the youngest of four children in an orthodox Russian Jewish family from Kishinev. His father served in the Russian army until the 1903 pogrom, when he deserted and moved his family to the West. Bernard attended a cheder and public school in Brussels, where he experienced some antisemitism. He was apprenticed to an orthopedic technician, became a Belgian citizen in 1928 and was married in 1931. In 1933, he became active in the anti-fascist Socialist Party and anti-fascist resistance. He describes the German invasion on May 12, 1940.

Assuming Christian identities, his wife and children fled to Paris and he travelled through southern France until they were reunited in Riom. He details extensively the travails of fellow refugees, his work with the French resistance during 1941-1942 in Clermont-Ferrand, and sabotage activity with the Maquis in the mountains near Volvic. He relates smuggling goods and other survival techniques to obtain food for resistance families. He travelled with his wife and children to Paris, aided by American soldiers, remaining until 1946, when he returned to Brussels. He found his sister’s three children, who were hidden during the war in a convent and a monastery. He arrived in the United States with his wife and children in 1947. His Memoirs: Never be afraid: A Jew in the Maquis, were published posthumously in 1997.

See also interviews with his son, Armand Mednick and with his nephew Charles L. Rojer.

Interviewee: MEDNICKI, Bernard S. Dates: April 27 & 30, 1982

Vera Otelsberg, nee Neuman, a Warsaw Ghetto survivor, was born to a wealthy family in l924 in Bielitz (Bielsko-Biala), Poland. Her father was an industrialist who owned several factories and a mill. Her mother died when she was a young child and she was brought up by a nanny. The family was not religious, attended synagogue only on High Holidays. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she escaped to Warsaw with her older sister, her husband and child and nanny. Her sister with family were able to buy visas to South America and left in l940 while Vera stayed in the Warsaw with her nanny and brother-in-law’s parents.

Vera explains how they were forced into the ghetto and gives a detailed description about how she was able to get money through a relative on the Aryan side of Warsaw and describes the scarcity of food, illness, forced labor and dangers of living in the Warsaw Ghetto including a time when they had to hide from German soldiers in an attic. She describes the long hours working at the Toebbens Factory, sometimes days at a time, without being allowed home. She describes several instances of help from Poles and Germans.Mr. Wagenfeld brought money into the ghetto to Vera when her relative could not get in and also arranged to help her escape from the ghetto in the summer of 1942. A non-Jewish acquaintance of hers got her an Arbeitskarte, a work card, testifying that she worked in his office.She describes in detail living on the outside on false papers, working as a maid in a German household and later, in a village, listening to the radio illegally and translating the reports into Polish for an underground paper. She also describes how her friend Steffi was assisted by a German soldier to escape the ghetto and how family friends secured false papers for her, as well as other evidence regarding the workings of procuring false papers and how one lived as a non-Jew on the outside of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Vera describes life in Sochaczew before and during the retreat of the Germans and the killing of German soldiers by the advancing Russians. When Bielitz was liberated, she returned home with help from Russian Jewish officers. Her father had perished in Lemberg, her nanny in a death camp.Eventually Vera married, had a daughter and in l957 moved to Monte Video, Uruguay.