Oral History Interview with Dora Freilich

Joel C. Nichols served as a sergeant in the 327th Fighter Control Squadron during World War II.

He relates his experiences both before and after the Battle of the Bulge, September 16, 1944 in both the interview and a handwritten addendum.

Mr. Nichols was taken to Buchenwald concentration camp with his unit after it had already been liberated and disinfected. They still encountered a terrible stench several miles before they actually arrived at Buchenwald. He describes evidence of dreadful atrocities, including artifacts such as lamp shades made of human skin, and the gas chambers, that still haunt him today. He is convinced that German civilians living near Buchenwald had to know what happened there. Seeing Buchenwald affected not only his feelings about the war but his entire life from then on.

Mr. Nichols explains why, as a Christian, he does not accept that Jews were "Christ Killers"; why he decided after all this time to go public about what he witnessed at Buchenwald; and that he objects to people who deny the Holocaust ever happened.

Interviewee: NICHOLS, Joel C. Date: November 20, 2000

Sam Don (formerly Zalman Domb) was born on January 15, 1927 in Ostrykół, a Polish village. He describes pre-war life: schooling, farming and family history, antisemitism exhibited from non-Jewish children, religious life. His family and the six other Jewish families in the town were farmers. Sam describes the German occupation in 1939, restrictions put on Jews, and forced labor in forests. He describes their deportation to the Makow Ghetto and describes Polish townspeople looting Jewish homes.

Sam was caught smuggling food for the Polish underground and imprisoned in Plotsk for nearly a year. In December, 1942 he was sent to Birkenau /Auschwitz and was there until early autumn 1943. Sam details his many experiences in Auschwitz including the hierarchy and relationship of Kapos, Stubenältesters and Blockführers, the Sonderkommando and daily routines. Sam was saved when a Jewish guard exchanged him for a dead body, when he was designated as a Muselmann. He worked in an excavation kommando distributing tools, but through his connections with the Jewish guard—who had saved him—smuggled lots of goods back and forth from “Canada” (the group sorting clothes from the bodies of dead Jews) to bribe Kapos and Blockführers. He describes his brother’s electrocution on a fence in Auschwitz in 1943 during one of these smuggling operations and also shares a gruesome story about Christmas Day in Auschwitz and how the Germans shot and tortured inmates for fun. He explains why the Polish townspeople had to have known what was happening because of their proximity to the camp; the chimneys, flames, smoke and the smell. He describes an attempted escape of three Jews from Auschwitz and the Polish civilians returning them to the Germans. He also describes one instance of kindness from a German guard who threw him a piece of bread.

Sam was later sent as a political prisoner to the coal mine, Jaworzno. In January 1944 he witnessed the massacre of hundreds of Jews there. He describes a forced march to Jawiszowice in spring of 1944 and describes the elderly or infirm being shot before the march started. He describes three months of hard labor and another forced marched to Ohrdruf where he describes improved conditions. Sam was later sent to several slave labor camps in East Germany, then to Buchenwald and later to Terezin (Theresienstadt), Czechoslovakia, where he was liberated by the Russians on May 8, 1945.

Sam met his wife in 1946 in the German displaced persons camp, Heidenheim. They came to the United States in June, 1949 and were married in a synagogue in Philadelphia on October 23, 1949. The rest of Sam’s family perished in Majdanek, Chekonoff (slave labor camp) and Auschwitz.

In 1988, Sam added to his testimony with another interview, describing a return trip to Poland with his son and daughter.

See also Sam Don’s 1988 interivew in which he discusses his experiences on his trip back to Poland, and his wife, Shirley Don’s interview.

K. R. was born in Tarnopol, Poland, March 31, 1922. Her father was a businessman and her family was greatly influenced by Viennese culture. She briefly describes the start of overt antisemitism in her schools. She was a member of HanoarHatzioni and active in Zionist youth groups in Tarnopol and L’vov.

In 1940, under Russian Occupation, she and a group of HanoarHatzioni members were caught by some Ukrainian villagers—as they tried to cross the border illegally—and delivered to police. K. R. was sent to prison and later transferred to a labor camp near the North Pole. She describes the harsh conditions in the camp and why some of her fellow prisoners did not survive. She was released because she was Polish but given Soviet citizenship and sent by train to another part of Russia. Many strangers helped her during this time. She worked as a bookkeeper at a collective farm (kolkhoz) near the Russian village Devochki Gorki on the Volga River. When the German Army advanced, she was deported to Kazakhstan by train. She describes the conditions under which she lived. She worked as a bookkeeper in Kustanay. After the NKVD tried to recruit her as a spy, she fled to Alma Ata using documents she forged.

In 1945, after the war, she returned to Tarnopol and found it almost completely destroyed. She joined a kibbutz in Lodz and worked with HashomerHatzair to prepare young Russian refugees for life in Palestine. She also organized and led illegal border crossings to get them there. During this time she met and married her husband. They went to Palestine, from Cyprus, on a ship called The State of Israel in 1948, escorting a group of young Jewish children who had been hidden in monasteries or by Polish families. K. R. then reflects about how her experiences have shaped her outlook on life and her views about human behavior.

Born September 27, 1925 in Munich, Germany, HenryKahn was an only child in a wealthy Jewish family. His father was the major wholesaler of coal in Germany. His great-grandfather was a nobleman, with a title from Emperor Franz Joseph.

Henry describes his childhood memories of attendingpublic school until age eight. When ostracized by the gentile students, his parents sent him to a Jewish school, which was closed after Kristallnacht. His father was sent to Dachau but was released on the same day when he showed visa and steamship tickets to leave Germany. Henry describes their hurried exit and possessions that were confiscated by the Gestapo. The family sailed to the United States from London on January 26, 1939. They were sponsored by a prominent cousin in Philadelphia, Herman Obermayer, and were aided by HIAS.

In the 1960s, Henry’s father began to correspond with Albert Speer, the Nazi architect, and visited him at the German prison in Spandau. Henry also visited Speer, who became a successful writer and donated royalties to Israel and to Jewish old-age homes.

Judy Freeman, nee Beitscher, was born in Uzhgorod (also known as Ungwar) in the Hungarian part of Czechoslovakia, March 2, 1929. Her father was a baker and she was educated in public school. She describes changes in Jewish life after the German occupation in August 1944. Jews were herded into two temporary ghettos and then transported to Auschwitz in cattle cars. During a selection by Dr. Mengele, she was separated from her family, processed, and taken to Jewish Lager C in Birkenau with 1000 young Jewish girls. She vividly describes the daily routine, roll calls, selections and terrible conditions at Birkenau. She devised several survival skills to keep her sanity and promised herself she would live to tell about her experiences. She was sent to a gas chamber once, survived, and later selected to go to Guben, a small labor camp near Berlin, to work in an electronics component factory, in November 1944. She mentions attempts at sabotage by the slave laborers.

She describes a Death march from Guben to Bergen-Belsen in January 1945, horrible conditions, treatment of prisoners and brutality by a Blockälteste at Bergen-Belsen extensively. She lost her will to live for the first time even though some hoarded jewelry saved her life at Bergen-Belsen during a typhus epidemic.

She was liberated by the British Army April 15, 1945. She recalls actions taken by Brigadier General Grimm Hughes and British liberators vis -a- vis the survivors and the Germans. After liberation, she was hospitalized, returned to her home town, and was smuggled into Munich with her new husband, also a survivor, from Czechoslovakia. They lived and worked in two Displaced Persons camps: Gabersee and Wasserburg for almost two years. They came to the United States September 21, 1947. She explains how they built a life and started a family, after a difficult beginning in New York, assisted by HIAS.

Werner Glass, born in 1927, the youngest child of a Berlin pediatrician, emigrated to Shanghai in 1933 with his family and governess. His father, a founder of the Shanghai Doctors Association, practiced medicine in the family’s apartment in the International Settlement. A comfortable life, with many Chinese servants, is described. Werner attended German and English schools, technical college and a French-Jewish university. A vignette relates student resistance to Japanese occupation.

In 1938, his father’s passport was not renewed and the family became stateless. An influx of German refugees, including his grandparents, led to the formation of the JüdischeGemeinde; he details refugee support by the “Joint” and the Sephardic community. He describes his religious education, his Bar Mitzvah in 1940, and his activity in a Jewish Boy Scout troop.

After Pearl Harbor, enemy nationals were interned in a Japanese POW camp, and a ghetto was established in Hongkew for all post-1937 refugees, both Jews and non-Jews. The Glass family, as stateless immigrants who arrived in 1933, were unaffected. In 1942, they were dispossessed by a Japanese officer and moved into one room in a hotel occupied by Chinese and Russian prostitutes. Difficult living conditions, Japanese rules of conduct and penalties for infractions are depicted.

Werner emigrated to the United States in 1947, sponsored by his sister Helga who married an American-Jewish soldier. He completed graduate studies in Chemical Engineering at Syracuse University, married and fathered several sons.