Oral History Interview with Sylvia Ebner

Genia Golombek, nee Fieman, was born on January 17, 1923 in Lodz, Poland into a religious middle class family. Her father was in the commercial wood-burning business. She attended a Polish state elementary school and then a private Jewish girls high school one of five in Lodz. In December, 1939 all the Jews of Lodz were forced into a ghetto. Genia describes life in the Lodz ghetto: the Judenrat, deeds of Rumkowski, its Jewish leader, Hans Biebow, German commandant, the round-ups and the inhuman conditions. Genia’s father worked for the Judenrat but later died of starvation in 1942.

In 1944 the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto were deported to Birkenau/Auschwitz. Genia describes her life there and even being passed over by Mengele twice. In October 1944 she was sent to Lenzing labor camp (a subcamp of Mauthausen) in Austria to work making artificial wool and bomb shelters for the Germans. She mentions kindnesses by the camp commandant and two women SS guards. She was also helped by two non-Jewish prisoners (one a Frenchman) while building the underground bomb shelters.

She was liberated by the Americans on May 5, 1945 in Lenzing, received food and medical help from the Americans and was relocated to Kammerscheffling (also in Austria) where they set up more aid facilities. In June, 1945 she went to Santa Maria di Leuca, near Naples, to receive aid from the Joint Distribution Committee. She was helped by the International Refugee Organization during her travels to Italy. While working for the Americans in Caserte, Italy, near Naples, she met her husband. They married and had two children. The family emigrated to the United States in 1950.

Liesl Joseph Loeb was born on June 17, 1928 in Rheydt, Rhineland, Germany. Liesl, together with her father, Josef Joseph, an attorney, and her mother, Lilly Salmon Joseph, was a passenger on the S.S. St. Louis. This German luxury Liner sailed on May 13, 1939, from Hamburg toward Havana, Cuba, with 937 Jewish refugees on board.

Liesl speaks about her family background and life leading up to Kristallnacht which she experienced, hiding in her own home while Nazi hoodlums were vandalizing it. She describes the months leading up to embarkation and conditions which had to be met before leaving Germany and immigration into Cuba, which was to be temporary until the family’s quota number was called for the United States.

She describes the trip and its complications from a child’s perspective. She speaks of her father’s sense of duty as the chairman of the passenger committee and the commitment and devotion of all its members. The desperate situation of the hapless passengers to whom no country offered a haven, especially not the United States, is emphasized. After 40 days at sea, the passengers are rescued through the efforts of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), by four countries - England, Holland, France, and Belgium.

Finally the Joseph family lands in England, and their life as World War II began is described. The destiny of most of the passengers who were taken in by Holland, France and Belgium ended in tragedy when these countries were invaded by the Nazis.

She describes attending school as an “evacuee”, the internment of her father on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien and arrival in New York on September 10, 1940. She concludes with her graduation from high school, and her immediate marriage thereafter. Several footnotes pursuant to the St. Louis story are added at the end of this memoir.

Self-taped oral memoir: LOEB, Liesl Joseph Date: Nov. 17, 1998

Still affected by the death of her brother Simon, Rebecca writes to her sister-in-law Maria, thanking her for her consolation. She also updates her on the health and travels of family and friends.

Irmgard Zacharias, nee Pinkus, was born July 15, 1904 in Friedrichshagen, Germany, a suburb of Berlin. She attended a private lyceum in Berlin. Her parents had a variety store. Her father, a World War I officer and veteran, believed this would save them from persecution. After Kristallnacht, when their store was demolished, he realized they had to leave Germany. By that time most of their money had already been confiscated and they were not able to secure an affidavit or visa. Through connections of a cousin, the family was able to obtain four tickets on a re-conditioned Japanese warship to Shanghai. They arrived in Shanghai in May, 1939.

Irmgard met her husband, a Prussian engineer, upon her arrival and they married five months later. They lived and worked with her family in a grocery store purchased from other refugees. The family lived above the store and she relates that the living conditions were decent in comparison to the majority of Shanghai residents. She details life in the compound of Hong Kew, where food was scarce, sanitation was lacking and infection was rampant. Dysentery, for which they often received immunization shots, was normal. Cholera and typhoid were also common. Dead bodies were left on the streets for pickup twice a week.

For a short time Mrs. Zacharias and her husband got jobs in a department store in Tzingtao [now Qingdao], a city located on the coast of China north of Shanghai, which was reached by boat. Irmgard’s son was born in 1941. Her husband died of typhus in 1942, seven weeks after their child’s birth. When the Japanese arrived, the family was forced to move to a ghetto but were able to take their possessions and opened another grocery store. Her father died in 1945.

Irmgard left Shanghai with her mother and son in 1948. The American Joint Distribution Committee and the Sassoon family provided the means for their emigration to the United States. In 1981, when Irmgard returned to Shanghai to visit the graves of her husband and father, the gravestones were gone and the cemetery was replaced with a children’s park.

Note: Collateral material file available through the Gratz College Tuttleman Library includes correspondence containing additional detail on life in Shanghai.

Mina Lustiger, nee Bochner, was born July 30, 1929 in Bielitz, Poland. Her father was in the scrap metal business. She shares childhood memories including frightening antisemitic attacks. She describes the commotion and uncertainty after the German invasion, first sent with her siblings to her grandfather in Kęty, to avoid the Germans but then having to return home. After finally reunited with her parents in Bielsko she witnessed Jews being harassed and her family experienced the plunder of their silver by Germans. The whole family then fled toKęty because it was a smaller citywhere they hoped to avoid harassment. When her mother was jailed in Kęty for trying to send a package of food and her father was sent to a labor camp, the four girls were left alone. Mina describes the Kęty Ghetto and her subsequent deportation to the Neudorf Ghetto in 1941.They were warned1 not to be in the area during a selection and fled, posing as Aryans, to their uncle in Chrzanów. She describes the harrowing journey, travelling alone as a 12 year old, and then being joined by her sisters. Subsequently, they found out that some of the family had survived the selection and were then in Wadowice and the sisters again made a dangerous journey to join family. Mina describes the gated Wadowice Ghetto and how they had to sneak in with a labor brigade. Soon after, she and her sisters were deported to Sucha labor camp where they did hard labor regulating water near railways. She describes being sent to a distribution center at Sosnowiec and again being deported with her sisters to forced labor, this time in a spinning factory in Freiberg, Germany in 1943. She speaks about slightly better treatment there, but still long working hours and the scarcity of food. They were deported to Röhrsdorflabor camp and describes harsh working conditions, with little food and much suffering from disease. She mentions fasting on Yom Kippur.

In 1945, as Russian forces approached, they were sent on a death march to the Sudeten in Czechoslovakia, walking for several days, without food and sleeping in the snow. At Kratzau concentration camp, they joined inmates from many other countries. They finally were incarcerated at Gross Rosen, where she experienced the most brutal conditions. She describes beatings, many deaths from typhus and exhausting work in freezing weather.

On May 8, 1945, she was liberated by the Russian Army and then re-united with her family in Bielitz. In 1946, she went to England with a group of 100 other children and attended an ORT school. In 1951, she married Samuel Lustiger and they emigrated to the United States in 1952. They have a family of three children.

Mina does not indicate whether these were Jews or Gentiles who warned them.

Jenny Sommer describes her life, education, and Zionist activities in prewar Libau, Latvia in great detail, including some incidents of antisemitism and discrimination. In 1940 conditions for Jews started to get worse. Because her family was upper middle class they lived in fear of the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) and the Russians.

Jenny describes life under the German occupation of Libau in great detail: the execution of all able bodied Jewish men on July 22, 1941; a mass execution of Jews, including her relatives, and how her sister managed to rescue them just before they were to be executed during an Aktion. She witnessed a mass execution of Jews, including her relatives. The Christian superintendent of her uncle’s house hid Jenny and her remaining family in the attic until the round-up of Jews was over. Jenny, her mother and her sister, moved into the ghetto with about 600 other Jews and worked for the Germans as slave laborers. Her sister worked as a nurse in the ghetto. Some Christian Latvians smuggled food to them.

On Yom Kippur night they were taken to Kaiserwald concentration camp, near Riga. Jenny describes their arrival at Kaiserwald, where mothers were forcibly separated from their children. Some women committed suicide. Her sister carried a bottle of cyanide pills. While in Kaiserwald, Jenny did hard labor as part of a Kommando, at a work camp, and later inStutthof. She describes their horrible existence in Stutthof and how she managed to find the will to survive. Her husband worked at Stutthof as an electrician and managed to survive a typhoid epidemic.

As the Russian army approached, the inmates were shipped out of Stutthof on a designated typhoid boat. It was bombed, set on fire and capsized. She was rescued by a German fire boat after ten days without food or water, liberated two days later in Kiel, Germany by English forces. She stayed at a field Lazarett (hospital) in Itzehoe, near Hamburg for six months. She talks about her post-liberation experiences in a German hospital, and finding her husband in Neustadt.