Oral History Interview with Bess Freilich
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Date
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Summary
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.
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Hyman Blady
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Zina Farber
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Recorded at the 1985 American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia, PA.
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Raoul Harmelin
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Note: Collateral Material available through the Gratz College Tuttleman Library are photocopies of these German documents:
Certificate for Raoul
Harmelin
that he can walk in the street unaccompanied by an Aryan.
The same document for his father, Dr. Elkan
Harmelin
.
Work I.D. Card for Raoul
Harmelin
.
I.D. Card for Regina
Harmelin
, his mother.
Tags with letter "R" which indicated that Raoul
Harmelin
and his parents were assigned to a work detail.
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