Oral History Interview with Betty Grebenschikoff

Eli Rock shares his war-time experiences and his involvement helping refugees after the war. He drove an ambulance with the American Field Service and the First French Army until the end of World War II. In May 1945, he worked for the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in Paris. He processed claims from Warsaw Ghetto survivors who had lent money to fund the JDC’s program in the ghetto. In July he headed the JDC program in Bavaria, Germany and helped to establish Feldafing, the first all Jewish displaced persons camp. He describes his work, under the auspices of UNRRA, mainly to help survivors find relatives, the sad state of these survivors, as well as conditions at the camp. He escorted Generals Eisenhower and Patton - who had been ordered to tour Feldafing by President Harry S. Truman. His experiences at Feldafing affected him deeply. He also mentions work done by the Central Committee of Bavarian Survivors and chaplains helping survivors.

He discusses his work in Berlin from 1945 to 1947, again trying to help survivors and their relatives find each other. He explains the problems involved in this tracing process and the work of B’richa1, an organization consisting offormer members of the Jewish Brigade in the British army. B’richa transported survivors and hidden children to Camp Wittenau in the French sector, which was maintained by the JDC, for later transfer to either an UNRRA camp or to Palestine. He describes a Yizkor service held in Schlachtensee Displaced Persons Camp in October 1946. Mr. Rock returned to the United States in 1947 to work with the JDC to process claims from survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and to set up the Jewish Restitution Program for unclaimed Jewish property.

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.

Albert Miller was a sergeant in the 303rd Bomb Group, 358th Squadron of the U.S. First Air Force, stationed in England in 1944. On November 21st, serving his 35th mission as radio operator gunman, his B17 bomber was shot down near Frankfurt. Landing at Oberursel, he faced rock-throwing civilians until German soldiers took him to a Luftwaffe prison for interrogation. He refused to divulge military information, despite threatened transfer to the GESTAPO. After 11 days of solitary confinement, he was taken with other prisoners of war in crowded passenger train compartments, to STALAG #4 at Grossye-Tychow [phonetic spelling]. There, as a non-commissioned officer, he did not have to work and could join classes, play ball and write songs for theatricals. A meager camp diet was supplemented by Red Cross packages. About January 10, 1945, the prisoners were transported by freight train to Barth, and he details the indignities of standing with over 50 men in a cattle car for four days and five nights. At STALAG #1, some guards were friendly, others were vicious. Increased hunger led some Prisoners of War to salvage potato peelings from German officers’ garbage. Encouragement came from BBC news received on hidden radios and from a Red Cross visit. After the Russian liberation of the camp on May 1, 1945, Mr. Miller observed the deteriorated condition of survivors emerging from a concentration camp nearby in Barth. He left STALAG #1 on May 13, and returned to the United States on June 20 on the SS General Butner.

Interviewee: MILLER, Albert Date: October 14, 1994

Victor Cooper2 was born December 26, 1914 in Strzemieszyce, Poland, the youngest of four brothers. He was married and had a six-month old son when he was drafted into the Polish Army in 1939. His wife, son and all of his family perished during the war years.

Victor describes how he was captured by Germans in 1940and was segregated from non-Jewish POWs at Majdanek death camp in Lublin. He escaped with the help of a fellow Jewish prisoner, and fled back home where he was in Strzemieszyce Ghetto for a short time,subjected to forced labor and witnessed the liquidation of the ghetto and German atrocities. He was then deported to 10 labor and concentration camps, including Będzin, Markstadt, Gross Rosen, Flossenbürgand Buchenwald. He vividly describes his experiences, conditions, backbreaking cement work and digging tunnels and how he fought to stay alive. He details a month-long death march from Buchenwald to Dachau in April 1945, during which he escaped and was recaptured several times.

In May, 1945, he was found hiding in Bavarian woods by a Jewish doctor serving with the American 7th Army. He was taken, disoriented and ill, to a Catholic hospital in Straubing. After his recovery, he worked with an American lawyer, helping to regain possession of Jewish property in the area. In June 1949, he emigrated to the United States under the displaced persons quota. He held many jobs with the United Service for Young and New Americans and several trade unions. He remarried and fathered two children. His daughter became a lawyer and his son is a professor at Columbia University.

Former last name was Kupfer.

This was recorded at the 1985 American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia, Pa.

Eva Burns, nee Gerstl, was born in 1924 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where her father was a pediatrician and her mother a concert pianist. They lived a mostly secular life with some inter‌ marriages in her mother's family. The German takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1939 drastically affected their lives with her brother being sent to Kladno and the rest of the family to Theresienstadt. She refers to help from non-Jews. She was deported to Theresienstadt November 17, 1942. She describes Theresienstadt as a "show" camp with books, a coffee house and concerts. Eva was part of a chorus preparing Verdi's Requiem and observed religious activities and humor.

She was deported to Auschwitz in May 1944 and six weeks later to Christianstadt, a women's labor camp. There she helped sabotage grenades in the ammu‌nition factory. She refers to the cruelty of the women S.S. guards. In February 1945 she es‌caped from a death march. Assuming a German identification, she worked in the Sudetenland until the spring of 1945 when she went to Prague where she worked for the family of an S.S. officer serving at the front. In May 1945, with the Czechoslovakian liberation near, she revealed her Czech identity. She married in November 1947 in Prague and immigrated to the USA in June 1948.

Elizabeth Geggel1, nee Gutmann, was born on August 2, 1921 in Nuremberg, Germany. She was the older of two daughters born to Heinrich and Marie Guttman. She recalls a happy childhood. Thefamily belonged to a liberal synagogue and observed Jewish holidays. Elizabeth’s father a successful merchant, uneasy about the rise of antisemitism expanded the Swiss branch of his business. In 1931 the family left Germany and moved to St. Gallen, Switzerland. Elizabeth details her extended families’ experiences when Hitler came to power in 1933 (some of her uncles and their families moved to Italy and another unclewas sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht,but her father was able to secure his release.)

Elizabeth’s family became Swiss citizens. She relates that there were few Jews in St. Gallen,but she was active in Swiss and Jewish youth groups: scouts and Habonim. In 1939, when her parents decided to immigrate to the United States, they sent her to Englandto learn English and nursing. Her father took ill and she returned to Switzerland where she worked in a Jewish children’s home. He died in December 1939 but she, her mother and sister did come to the United States.

Mrs. Geggel discusses Mr. Sally Mayer, a Swiss businessman who lived in St. Gallen. Somewhat controversial, he was the head of the Jewish community in Switzerland and represented the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee from 1940 to 1945. Mayer was involved in a number of schemes to free Jews from concentration camps. Elizabeth looked on him very favorably and thought him very brave to negotiate face to face with Nazis as he did. She relates her mother’s request to Mayer to get an aunt out of Germany (which was successful) and reads a letter from her father-in-law, David Geggel, sent to the Swiss government thanking them for the hospitality extended to him in 1938 when he stayed in Switzerland for a short time until he could go to the United States. Shedescribes the Swiss refugee campswhich housed Austrian refugees until they could get visas to go elsewhere. Elizabeth remembers that the Swiss Jewish community, herself included, helped them with meals and other services. She believes that the Swiss government was also involved in the effort.

Even though they were in Switzerland, Mrs. Geggel recalls that they still felt at risk, especially with the early successes Germany achieved at the start of the war. Her family left Switzerland in 1941, went to Cuba for a short time and finally emigrated to the United States in January 1942.

Nickname: Lisa.