Oral History Interview with Margaret Beer

Mr. Hillman describes his training and service as a military policeman attached to the United States 1st Army, processing German prisoners of war in England and Europe. He relates what he saw when he entered Dachau concentration camp near Munich, Germany, as well as the condition and care of the remaining survivors, until the entire camp was evacuated by U.S. troops. He visited Dachau twice after the war, and was disturbed that it had been completely transformed and sanitized, but felt that the smell of burning flesh was still present even on his third visit.

Kurt Kupferberg was born September 1907 in Berlin, Germany to an observant, middle-class family from Galicia. After World War I, their citizenship was changed to Polish, resulting in their being part of the mass deportation to Zbąszyń, Poland, in 1938. A Nazi policeman had warned them to leave. Kurt describes his return to Germany in 1939, as well as his deportation and experiences in Sachsenhausen in 1939, Dachau in 1940, and Buchenwald in 1941. He details the selections of Dr. Mengele and medical experiments performed on him in Buchenwald, describing his suffering from typhus following an injection of the microorganism under his skin.

As Allied Forces approached Buchenwald, non-Jewish political prisoners sheltered Jews from the S.S. He was liberated by General Patton’s unit July 11, 1945. He married a survivor in Berlin in 1946 and emigrated with his wife and baby to the United States in 1947.

Also see testimony of his wife, Hardy W. Kupferberg.

Ernest Kaufman was born in Drove, Germany, a small town with about 25 Jews. His father served in the German army during World War I and was a butcher and also a shochet. They had no problems with gentile neighbors but Ernest could not complete his education or his apprenticeship because he was Jewish. During Kristallnacht a local police man refused to arrest his father, but Ernest was arrested and transported to Buchenwald. He describes the terrible conditions and brutality in Buchenwald. The prisoners arrested during Kristallnacht did not have to work, but were forced to watch other prisoners being tortured and killed. Ernest explains how he managed to get an affidavit that enabled him to be released from Buchenwald after four weeks. He got a visa for the United States on April 20, 1939 and arrived in New York two weeks later. Ernest describes his unsuccessful attempts to get his parents out of Germany and into Cuba. His parents did not survive. Ernest describes how he lived and supported himself in New York and later in Philadelphia.

After Pearl Harbor, Ernest enlisted in the U.S. Army, became a naturalized citizen and eventually an officer. He served in England and Germany in 1943 and relates many of his experiences as an intelligence officer on an interrogation team. He discovered that Christian neighbors in Drove smuggled food into a house where local Jews were assembled before they were deported. In July 1945, he was wounded and sent to England General Hospital in Atlantic City. After he recovered, he was assigned to the European Command Intelligence Center in charge of the document section. He describes his intensive but futile search to discover what happened to his parents. After two more years in the service, he bought a poultry farm in Egypt, N.J. where he and his wife Minna lived for 30 years.

Chayale Ash-Fuhrman, nee Averbuch, was born in 1920 in Kishinev, Bessarabia, Romania. She describes life in Kishinev, her education in public school and private Jewish school. Her parents led a troupe of Yiddish actors which she joined until she turned professional at age 15. She gives a thorough and highly descriptive account of the Yiddish stage. She details Romanian government restrictions in the inter-war period and the effects of the Russian occupation of Bessarabia in 1940. The Moldavian Yiddish State Theatre, as it was then called, could function only under strict Communist guidelines.

In June 1941, the theatre group and other civilians were evacuated to Ukraine with Russian help. They were forced to stop in a kolkhoz (cooperative village) in Kharkov to help with the harvest. The refugees lived under primitive conditions and encountered antisemitism from the villagers. In November 1941 they followed the government to Kuybishev, then to Tashkent to pick cotton in another cooperative. She describes the difficulties of adapting to the Russian way of getting along; relations with the locals, and the onset of hatred for Jews. Her father died of dysentery in 1942. Using her training from professional school, she joined a sewing cooperative to get more bread. Chayale and the other Jews tried to practice their religion. Chayale later worked as a clerk in a steel mill in Begovat. She married a man who was working as a mechanic at the mill in 1943. In 1945, Chayale and her husband returned to Poland in an exchange program for Polish citizens. They settled in a Displaced Persons camp in Silesia because of the post-war violence against Jews by Poles. She worked as emigration secretary for PoaleiTzionand mentions various strategies Jewish refugees used to leave Russia.

In 1948 Chayale, her husband and her mother, walked to Vienna. Israelis met their group and placed them in a Displaced Persons camp in Linz, in the American zone, where Chayale gave birth to a daughter. UNRRA and the Joint Distribution Committee helped them go to Jaffa, Israel in August 1948 with false papers, on an Italian ship Campidoglio. She talks about early immigrant life in Israel under wartime conditions. In 1949 she founded the Haifa Yiddishe Operetten Theatre and later went to Tel Aviv. She also performed in London, and toured South Africa with an all-Israeli ensemble. She divorced in 1953. She married an actor from Romania in New York in 1959 and stayed in the United States. She discusses her feelings about the Holocaust and its effect on children of survivors.

Sylvia Ebner, née Klein, was born September 10, 1929, in Bodrogkisfalud, Hungary. She describes her education, relations with non-Jews, and learning to cope with children who stoned her on her way to school. After the German invasion in March 1944, persecution and anti-Jewish measures increased. Sylvia and her family were taken to the Satoraljaujhely Ghetto with Jews from several other towns. Their house was looted as soon as they walked out. She describes several incidents of extreme brutality by Germans.

She describes the transport to Auschwitz in cattle cars and their dehumanization. Her parents managed to observe Shabbat and her father tried to prepare Sylvia to cope with what she had to face. Sylvia describes their arrival at Auschwitz May 1944, processing and selections by Dr. Mengele. Many, including her mother and other relatives, were loaded on trucks and gassed immediately.

Sylvia was marched to Birkenau. She describes the horrible conditions, the smell from the crematorium and how they tried to survive. She worked as a slave laborer in Brzézinka also known as “Canada”, sorting belongings taken from Jews. She risked her life to smuggle food to her cousin. The starving girls were offered food on fast days such as Tisha B’ Av but refused to eat because the food was not kosher.

Sylvia got Scarlet Fever and was hospitalized in a Revier (sick quarters) for six weeks. She survived seven selections by Dr. Mengele, saw him operate without any anesthesia, and a Christian woman kill her newborn baby to save him from Mengele’s experiments. Germans drained large amounts of blood from girls who survived typhus or scarlet fever to make serums. After Sylvia recovered, she worked as a slave laborer. First at heavy-duty unproductive work while living in the barracks, then in a factory in Oberhohen-Elbe, Sudeten, Germany. The German woman in charge risked her life to find food for the prisoners. She was liberated by Russian troops May 1, 1945, returned to Hungary, received aid from the Joint Distribution Committee (Joint); escaped from Hungary and immigrated to Canada.

Interviewee: EBNER, Sylvia Date: February 14, 2001

Alan Spiegel was born August 11, 1903 in Orahovicza, Yugoslavia into a wealthy Zionist family. He details his family history in Hungary including his grandfather being a Second Adjutant during the Hungarian Revolution. Mr. Spiegel studied medicine at Budapest University. He discusses the difficulty for Jewish students to be admitted due tonumerus clausus policy and that he was dismissed in 1920, three months before graduation by a prejudiced faculty. An ardent Zionist, he then worked for the Jewish National Fund while employed in a family business.

In 1932, he married Elizabeth Boschan, in Cluj, Romania, where they lived until 1939. In Budapest, he had to serve as a slave laborer under the Hungarians. Mr. Spiegel gives testimony about working with Rezsö Kastner and Joel Brand to exchangethe release of over 1,000 Jews to Switzerland for money in 1944 and how he found out from one of the more humane German officers that their transport was destined for Auschwitz even though they paid. He details how he arranged to bribe other SS to have the transport sent to Bergen-Belsen instead. Two months later, a smaller group of 350 was sent to Switzerland of which he and his family were a part. He discusses how Kastner was condemned in Palestine for his actions. Mr. Spiegel also shares a vignette about how he secured the release of hundreds of Jewish boys and how small meaningful occurrences helped him have the strength to continue his work. He also relates memories about theVizhnitzerRebbe.

In 1947, Spiegel emigrated from Switzerland to the United States with his wife and daughter.