Oral History Interview with Margaret Eisen

Sarah Elias, nee Perl, was born in 1921 in Czechoslovakia, in what is now VelkýBočkov, Ukraine. Her father, as well as the rest of the family, was very involved in the synagogue. Her father worked in a woodworking factory and her mother and the children tended the farm and animals. There were nine children in the family. Sarah went to a Czech school. She lovingly describes the traditional Jewish observances of the family. Sarah completed high school in 1939, just around the time that their area of Czechoslovakia was annexed by Hungary. She and a group of friends then went to Budapest where she got a job working in a Jewish sanatorium for three years. When the Germans took over the facility, she went to work in a Jewish hospital. Sarah tells how, eventually, she was taken by the Germans for hard labor. In the summer of 1944, Sarah and her sister were on a forced march to Germany from which they escaped. They were helped by two strangers andthen returned to Budapest. Through a friend they were able to obtain Hungarian birth certificates and Sarah relates how they were tutored by friends, including a priest, on how to behave like Christian girls and on what they needed to know to pass as Christians. They went to a farm in the countryside but in a short time they were informed upon and were taken into custody. Sarah describes how they convinced the authorities that they were not Jewish.

When the war ended in 1945, Sarah went back to working in a hospital, where she contracted typhus and was very ill. When she recovered, she and her sister returned to their home to find her father and one brother who had survived1. Although Gentiles had moved into their home, they left when the survivors returned. Sarahmet and married Victor Elias and had a child. Sarah relates that when the Communists took over Czechoslovakia, people would disappear. Although they were doing well financially, they decided to leave for Israel where they had two more children. Sarah describes the difficult conditions in Israel, but was able to get a nice place to live and she says that they were happy there. However her husband then developed kidney disease and they came to the United States, to Philadelphia. She eventually got a job in nursing and her husband, who was not well, opened a bakery.

This interview ends rather abruptly at that point.

See also the interview with herhusbandVictorElias.

Sarah’s brother, Josef Perl survived Plaszow, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Gross-Rosen, Bolkenhain (a subcamp of Gross-Rosen), Hirschberg and Buchenwald. His testimony can be found at the websitehttp://www.josefperl.com/josefs-story/. There is also an interesting article about him here http://45aid.org/064/.

Anna Sultanik, née Tiger, was born May 20, 1929 in Krakow, Poland as the older of two children of Dr. Tiger and Sara Meth Tiger. Her pre-war memories include her family’s sheltering of German-Jewish refugees en-route to America. She describes the sudden changes in her secure, upper-middle class life with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 including her father’s escape, confiscation of the family’s possessions, forced sharing of the family’s apartment with five other families when the Krakow ghetto was established, involuntary participation in medical experiments. In March 1940, she begins to work in Plaszow work camp connected to the Krakow Ghetto after mother volunteers to join her 6-year-old brother in transport from the ghetto. She describes work in detail and mentions Amon Goeth, camp commander, later tried and executed as a war criminal. She details her narrow escapes from death after being forced to dig her own grave, being hidden from camp hospital evacuation by her parents’ friends. She describes her work as tailor’s apprentice until Plaszow was evacuated in 1944.

She describes march to Auschwitz and her one-week stay there followed by prolonged cattle-car trip to Bergen-Belsen. Many details are included about her one-year stay in Bergen-Belsen until liberation by British on April 15, 1945. She tells of immediate tragic aftermath of liberation from misguided overfeeding of prisoners. She mentions her two-year stay in Displaced Persons Camp in Frankfurt-am-Main including efforts to find her father. Following her marriage in 1948, she was able to emigrate to U.S. with sponsorship of a family who had received pre-war shelter from her family. She details her eventual reunion with her father shortly before his death in Israel in 1967.

Myra Davis, nee Miki Heller, was born July 12, 1936 in Kovno, Lithuania, the only child in an affluent Jewish family. Her parents were Franz and Fanny Heller. After the Russian invasion in 1940, her family was forced to move from their large home to much smaller quarters. In 1940, they immigrated to Japan with transit visas and visas for Curacao, which were not used. Instead, they went to Shanghai, in 1941, after a year in Kobe, Japan, where Myra attended a French Catholic school.

In the French quarter of Shanghai, they lived comfortably until the Japanese occupation forced them into the Hongkew Ghetto. Her father, despondent about their impoverishment, committed suicide. When the war ended, her mother worked for the American Army and met a Jewish colonel, David Bare (phonetic), whom she married in 1947. The family lived in Beijing, China, Linz, Austria and South Carolina, United States. Myra became a translator for the American government, married Arnold Davis and they live with their two children in Boca Raton, Florida.

Recorded at the Rickshaw Reunion - a meeting in October 1999 at the Holiday Inn in Philadelphia of refugees who found refuge in Shanghai during World War II.

Rabbi Helmut Frank, born April 15, 1912 in Wiesbaden,Germany, talks about his early interest in Judaism, details pre-war Jewish life including religious education, relations with Gentiles and sporadic antisemitism. He describes education at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin from 1931 to 1937. He also studied at Berlin University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn in 1935. He gives his impression of Leo Baeck and his role in the Reichsvertretung. He explains why many Jews still felt they could survive in Germany.

He was ordained in 1937 and was appointed as a Rabbi in Worms. He provides a history of the synagogue. His vivid, detailed eye-witness account of Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938 includes several vignettes, the burning of his synagogue, damage to his apartment, and lack of reaction by the fire department. He was arrested, along with other Jews. They were compelled to clean the debris in the streets, then transported to Buchenwald. He describes brutality, organization of camp life, lack of medical treatment, effect of incarceration on prisoners’ physical and mental health and religious observance. He mentions Aktion Jews and Jehova’s Witnesses and that Nazis warned released prisoners never to talk about Buchenwald. He worked in a labor squad but was released after his parents got him a visa for China.

Rabbi Frank returned to Worms where he opened a House of Prayer and a school with permission from the German authorities. He describes the extent of the damage in Worms and the continued persecution of the Jewish community. He left for the United States in August, 1939. He discusses the immigration process, postwar conditions in Worms, and restoration of the Worms synagogue in 1961.

Ursula M. Heisman was born in Mewe, Germany (now Gniew, Poland). Ursula grew up in Berlin and was a teenager when Hitler came to power in 1933. Her father, Isidor Hirschfeld, was a physician who served as such in the German army in World War I. He received the Iron Cross. Ursula had two older brothers. Her parents were “free thinkers” and her upbringing was an assimilated upper middle class one, with little Jewish content.

While still in high school Ursula was employed as an actress and dancer in a theater company. Ursula describes the rise of Hitler and the consequences it had for her and her family. For example, she was fired from her job as a dancer and her father could no longer practice medicine. She tells how they were made to wear the yellow star and of how her father resisted wearing it. When Ursula witnessed Kristallnacht she decided that she must leave Germany. One of her brothers, a physician, had already gone to the United States. Ursula recounts the difficulties she encountered in leaving Germany. It was only to Cuba that she was able to emigrate, and she tells of arriving in Havana, with her other brother, in 1938. Ursula recounts how she got a job as a dance teacher and that she was invited to move in with her employers, who were not Jewish, who subsequently paid $1000 to the Cuban government to obtain visas for her parents. They arrived in Cuba on the ship after the St. Louis. Ursula describes life in Havana which she enjoyed very much.

In 1945 Ursula and her parents moved to the United States, joining one brother and leaving one in Cuba, who did join them at the end of the war. She tells of resuming her career as a dancer and eventually marrying and moving to Philadelphia where she decided to open a dance school. Eventually she had three schools and a ballet company called Ballet des Jeunes which engaged the top 25 students at her schools. The company danced throughout the United States and in Europe. Ursula closes her testimony recounting a trip to Berlin she and her husband took in 1969 or 1970.

Willie Nowak was born August 1, 1908 in Berlin, to a family of libera1 Austrian Jews. His father owned a tobacco factory in Berlin. After attending a Realgymnasium in Berlin, Willie sold pharmaceuticals in Brunn, Czechoslovakia, 1935-37. On his return to Berlin, he found he had lost his German citizenship. During Kristallnacht in 1938, he witnessed the burning of the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue where he had celebrated his bar mitzvah. He emigrated to Shanghai in 1938 with his fiancée and the two children of his first marriage. He describes in detail the refugee camp in the Japanese district, the support from the Joint Distribution Committee and the Russian Jewish community for a hospital, kosher soup kitchen and the services of a rabbi. Willie worked as a musician in bars and night clubs and was also in charge of Jewish guards in the refugee camp. He describes interactions between Chinese and Japanese individuals and himself. His wife, Elsa, worked in an underwear factory owned by Austrian Jews who sold to Japanese buyers. The Nowak family emigrated to the United States in January 1948 on a collective affidavit for Shanghai refugees.