Oral History Interview with Sam Don

Moshe Moskowitz was born in 1922 in Lespitz-Baya, Romania to a merchant family that was traditional but not deeply religious. He studied in a Jewish school, then in a vocational school. He planned to go to Palestine, joined a Zionist youth group and worked in an agricultural community. After the German occupation, Jews were transferred from the villages to the large cities, and many were sent to forced labor camps. His Zionist youth group became active in the resistance. Moshe took on Aryan identity, as did others who had contact with Zionist emissaries in Constantinople and Switzerland. Emissaries from England and the U.S. often attended the resistance meetings. The diplomatic courier who carried letters from the resistance betrayed them, and those who were arrested were sent to camps in Transnistria.

Moshe and his group smuggled children out of camps, gave them false identities, and set up cultural activities until they could be processed to go to Palestine on illegal immigration on ships. In 1944, British-trained parachutists from Palestine landed in Romania and Moshe’s Zionist group was among those who gave them identity papers, living quarters and maps to help them reach Bucharest. They also helped German, American and English prisoners-of- war in Brasov with money, clothing and medicine. After liberation, they rushed to the American and British zones to take Jewish prisoners out of the range of German bombings. Moshe was in charge of the funds through the Landsmanshuteyfor such operations. Groups who were involved in saving children maintained connections in Israel. Moshe emigrated to Israel post-war.

RachelaFrydmanwas born on November 26, 1914 in Zloczew, Poland (near Lodz). She came from a large observant Zionist family. Her father was a wood merchant. Rachela belonged to Shomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth movement. One of her brothers was able to get to Palestine in 1928. Before 1930 Rachela had experienced antisemitism in the form of two pogroms and a robbery.

In the 1930s the family moved to Piotrkow, Poland, a mill town. By 1933 the Polish Jews who lived in Germany had been forced back into Poland. Rachela details how the PiotrkowGhetto was created and describes conditions there, overcrowding, starvation, laborbatallions.She describes treatment by the S.S. and many shootings. Rachela and her sister taught Jewish history and culture from their apartment until 1941. Rachela married while in the ghetto. Her husband was sent out for forced labor and did not return. Rachela recounts being terrorized by Ukrainian guards in the ghetto, witnessing murders and contracting typhus. Her mother and one sister died in the typhus epidemic. She was nursed by nuns in a hospital and one offered to hide her in their convent.

From 1942 - 1944 Rachela was in Skarzysko-Kamienna, a forced labor camp which was an ammunition factory. She describes her beatings by guards. In 1944, Rachela and many inmates were sent to Buchenwald’s sub-camp, Leipzig-Schoenfeld, in cattle cars. There Rachela along with 600 inmates lived in one large room.Rachela recounts their attempts to observe Jewish holidays by lighting candles with wicks made from stolen rope and saving crumbs for symbolizing matza.

In April 1945 they were marched toward Dresden. They were liberated at the River Elbe by the Soviet army. By then Rachela could no longer walk. She was hospitalized and later sent to a displaced person’s camp. There she met and married her second husband and gave birth to a daughter. They came to the United States on April 19, 1951. Rachela states that she’s alive because she willed herself to see the defeat of the Germans.

Jack Zaifman was born in Radom, Poland on March 2, l925 into an Orthodox Jewish family. His father was a merchant. He attended public school and chederuntil age l4. He describes the savagery of the German bombing and invasion of Radom in September l939. Escaping from a round-up of Jews, he bicycled to Wolanow and lived for a year with a Jewish family until that small town was liquidated. He was taken for slave labor at a nearby camp manned by Gestapo, Ukrainian and Lithuanian guards. He worked as a tailor for the German Army, witnessed a massacre of 350 Jews and had to dig trenches to bury the dead. When he was ill with typhoid fever, a righteous German soldier took him to the Rodomer Ghetto hospital.

In autumn of 1941, Jack was sent to Blizyn labor camp, near the German border, where he was betrayed by a Jewish Kapo and severely beaten by guards when he tried to help another prisoner. Among the 3,000 survivors (out of l0,000) of Blizyn, he was shipped to Auschwitz where he sorted clothing of the dead. He describes the train ride, selections and his bunk make being selected for an experiment by Mengele. Jack describes walking over to another Kommando one day which was deported to Dachau where he endured brutal labor, carrying cement and laying pipes. During a death march from Dachau, April l945, he was liberated by Americans and taken to a hospital at Wolfratshausen, weighing 70 pounds. At the Feldafing DP camp he met and married his wife; they came to the United States in April l949. He began speaking in high schools and colleges about his experience in l977.

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.

Malvina1 Herzfeld, born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1914 describes living in Tsobut, Danzig from 1924 to 1936; moving to Holland where she married Martin Sternfeld, a German lawyer, in December, 1937; the German invasion of Holland in May 1940; the establishment of Westerbork as a transit camp for German Jewish refugees who were supported by the Dutch Jewish community and the Jewish Council. Malvina explains that her husband was arrested by the SS during a roundup of Jewish men in 1941, sent to a camp in Holland and then to Mauthausen concentration camp. She received his death certificate September 1941.

Malvina worked for the Jewish Council. She was arrested and released. Malvina and other Jews were helped or hidden by a non-Jewish Dutch neighbor. Malvina agreed to work with the Dutch underground led by Walter Suskind. She describes how her group saved Jewish children, who had been taken from their parents, from the transports. While working as a courier to the Hague and Westerbork, she tried to rescue Jewish boys. She was arrested by the SS, put into solitary confinement, and tortured. She did not talk and was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where she encountered Hans Totman, a Jewish war criminal who worked for the Germans. She describes arrival, selection process, living and working conditions in Birkenau.

Because she spoke German, she was taken to work as a secretary for the Oberscharführer at Budy, together with another Jewish girl. They narrowly escaped being sent to the crematorium for stealing food.

In January 1945, Malvina was forced on a death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where she stayed until April 1945 during a typhoid epidemic. She describes liberation by British troops, punishment of the guards, the hanging of the camp commanders, and post-liberation conditions. The British took survivors to a military camp until displaced persons camps were established. She worked for the British army as a translator and had a brief reunion with her brother who served in the British army.

Malvina could not get permission to join her brother in England. She was sent to Holland and quarantined. She stayed in Holland until 1947 and relates attempts to find out what happened to her family and her husband, and located friends from the underground. An interesting vignette details how she located the Jewish girl from Budy after the war. She emigrated to the United States in 1947.

Bess Freilich, née BashaAnusz, born in1928 in Pruzany, Poland, was the eldest of eight children in a religious Jewish family. Her father was a poor butcher, but she attended private Hebrew school. Her family lived in harmony with Polish neighbors (to whom her grandfather lent money with little or no return).

In 1939 under anti-Zionist Russian occupation, her Hebrew school was closed and teachers were sent to Siberia. Fearful of arrest, Bess burned her Hebrew books and then went to a public Jewish school where a communist curriculum was taught in Yiddish.

When the Germans invaded in June, 1941, the local population swelled from 3000 to 15,000 as Jews were brought from other towns to the Pruzany Ghetto. Food shortage was acute, and Bess often slipped through the ghetto walls to trade clothing for potatoes or steal potato peels from a German kitchen. She describes in detail the ghetto evacuation, when her grandfather was shot before her eyes, in January 1943.

Bess describes in detail the three day train trip in cattle cars to Auschwitz, arrival, brutality of the guards, and atrocities committed there including her six-year old brother’s murder for picking up snow for their mother to eat. Bess saw her mother fall from a blow to her head and later learned that she was burned in an open pit. Her older brother and father were sent to work in a crematorium as Sonderkommandos.

Bess was sent to Birkenau and then to Budy, a camp she describes as hell, where about 400 girls, ages 14 - 25, pushed heavy wagons uphill to build an artificial mountain. Some were forced to strip, dance and sing and then were shot. Some were eaten by dogs. She vividly describes suffering from typhus and lice infestation of a breast wound from beatings. Left unconscious in a morgue, she was returned to Birkenau, where she was saved from death several times, twice by German guards.

After passing three Mengele selections and seeing her father briefly in the men’s camp in Auschwitz where she worked picking weeds for soup, she was evacuated on a death march, January 18, 1945. She recalls thousands left dead in the snow before they reached Ravensbrück. They were then left in the woods near Malchow. At liberation, she weighed 67 pounds and could not retain food eaten for months afterwards.

Returning to her home town, she was taken by the Russians to a camp and questioned as a suspected German spy. Finding nothing of her home in Pruzany and threatened with transfer to Siberia, she fled to Lodz where she met and married another survivor. She found her father in Munich, spent two years in Feldafing DP camp and came to the United States in 1949.

She was unable to speak about her holocaust experience until the time of her interview in 1981.