Oral History Interview with Samuel Greenberg

Anna Berenholz, nee Bohorochaner, one of six children was born on June 28, 1924 in Yasin(a), Czechoslovakia into a very observant Orthodox family. They were farmers. Anna describes pre-war Yasin, a small town of 15,000 of whom about 900 were Jews. Two of Anna’s brothers were in the Czech army but they crossed the border (1938) and joined the Russian army and survived. At 16, Anna was sent to a Hungarian military prison in Uzhgorod. After she was freed her parents sent her to Budapest, Hungary to work as a maid for a Jewish doctor, Dr. Rosenau.

In 1944 when Adolf Eichman came to Budapest conditions for Jews worsened. In April 1944 Anna’s parents were taken to a ghetto. Later, they along with her two other brothers died in Auschwitz, and her sister was shot in a protest in Bergen-Belsen. In the summer of 1944, Dr. Rosenau got her a passport to a Swedish house run by Raoul Wallenberg. But in December (1944) she was caught by the Germans and put on a death march. She was pulled out of the march along with other young Jews by orders of Raoul Wallenberg. She never met him but owes him her life. The Soviets freed Budapest on January 20, 1945 and since Anna spoke Russian, German, Czech, Hungarian and Yiddish, she worked for the Russian commandant as translator.

After the war she went back to Brno in Czechoslovakia to finish high school and study nursing. She volunteered for the Haganah (Zionist underground group), working to rescue Jewish orphans who had been hidden with Christian families. The Jewish Agency was offering $1,000 for each child and Anna was able to rescue 18. In May 1949, she took the orphans to Prague, then to Austria and Italy and then onto a freighter ship to Haifa. She stayed in Israel, marrying the boats’ engineer and several years later moved to the United States. Anna tried to contact Raoul Wallenberg to thank him but was unable to do so.

Hanna Silver, née Bornowski, was born in Berlin Germany February 14, 1910. She lived and worked in Berlin, with her mother, during the Nazi period, World War II, and the allied occupation. This interview was done in conjunction with a series of photographs from Mrs. Silver's personal collection, which she explains. These pictures show how areas of Berlin, including her apartment house, were devastated during an air raid on February 3, 1945, and also include pictures of both dead and surviving members of her family. Her mother died during an air raid and was buried in a mass grave, location unknown.

She vividly describes life in Berlin during and after World War II, deprived of the bare necessities of life. She explains in detail how she was able to live and work in Berlin during World War II without posing as an Aryan, due to her determination, some luck, and help and protection from her neighbors and other non-Jews. She relates how a German policeman helped her to get an Identification Card not stamped with a "J". She describes the effect of air raids on the general population, the total devastation in Berlin and how she and other survivors tried to cope during days and nights spent in air raid shelters, completely cut off from the outside world. She cites heinous acts committed by Germans against their own people near the end of the war. Mrs. Silver describes how she felt after the final air raid, and still managed to go on, after her mother was gone, her home was gone, and everything she owned was gone.

She relates in great detail what life was like in Berlin under joint occupation by allied forces, the behaviour of Russian troops, including an interesting vignette of why the people in her building were not molested by the Russians. Hanna was in the American sector, spoke English, worked for the Red Cross as a photographer and also had her own shop. She married an American officer she met during this time.

Mrs. Silver closes by reciting the names and fates of relatives who were killed or survived. She discusses why she was able to cope and how her experiences in Berlin affected her outlook on life and how she tried to pay back America through her volunteer work.

Note: Copies of the above mentioned photographs are included with the transcript. Verification of how her mother died can be found on pages 122 and 123, in The Berliners: Their Saga and Their City by Walter Henry Nelson. David McKay Co., Inc. N.Y. 1969. A photocopy of these pages is in the collection of Holocaust Oral History Archives, together with the following items:

An audiotape of Hanna Silver speaking to students in their classroom-1978.

An audio taped interview of Hanna Silver, done in 1983 by Ellen Rofman, for a research

paper pertaining to Righteous Christians helping Jews.

Personal photographs of postwar Berlin after the Allied bombing, taken by Hanna Silver

An audiotape of a broadcast by KYW radio station pertaining to an exhibit of

needlework created

by Hanna Silver.

Post war memoir written by Hanna Silver at an unspecified time.

Interviewee: SILVER, Hanna B. Date: April 25, 1995

Henry Altschuler was born March 28, 1923 in Jaroslaw, Poland. He was educated at both cheder and public school where he experienced some antisemitism. He talks about Jewish life in pre-war Poland and resistance to local pogroms. He describes his flight to Rovno in the Ukraine with his father because a policemen warned him to escape the invading Germans. After a brief return to Jaroslaw, he escaped to Chrobieszuw. He describes life in the Russian occupied zone and after the German invasion in June 1941.

He was in Jaktorów concentration camp from 1941 to 1942. His mother ransomed him helped by the Judenrat but he was caught and rearrested later. Together with his family he was moved into the Lubaczów Ghetto. His family perished but he escaped and went into hiding with a Polish family until he was caught and sent to a work camp in Lemberg. He escaped, was caught again and put into a death cell at Locki prison with two former “Kommando 1008” Jews where he witnessed many murders. About to be executed, he was reprieved and was transferred to the destroyed Lemberg labor camp where all incoming Jews were executed and he was almost beaten to death. He also was in Plaszow camp (near Krakow) for six months. He talks about all of these experiences in great detail with many vignettes.

He was liberated by Russians in 1945, returned to Lemberg and emigrated to the United States from Germany, in September, 1949.

He describes lasting emotional and physical effects of his experiences. Throughout the interview he cites many instances of brutality, of Polish and Ukrainian co-operation with the Germans, as well as several times when he was helped by non-Jews, and some attempts at resistance.

Samuel Yassi1 was born in Ostrow, Poland on April 28, 1924. He was the oldest of five children in a modestly middle class family. Sam and his family fled to the town of Poprusch [phonetic] when the Germans occupied Poland. When that area came under Soviet occupation all refugees, including the Yassi family were loaded into box cars and relocated to Siberia -a journey of six weeks duration. The Yassi’s were deported even though they had passports.The family settled in an apartment in Siberia. Sam (15 years old) and his parents were put to work in the forest felling trees;the younger siblings were not. He describes his attempt to get an education instead of working, but after hisfather’s death at age 43 from pneumonia shortly after their arrival, Sam had to return to work in order to receive food rations for the family. He describes the difficult living conditions, bitter weather and restrictions under the Soviet government.

Eventually the family was allowed to move to the south, to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and Sam tells of this journey on the chaotic Russian trains. He describes the next several years as the family tries to survive: being placed on a cooperative farm where they picked tobacco, being moved once again to the White Mountainsto make room for Russian refugees, moving back to the Tashkent area where thefound work building a factory. The family stayed in this last area for about two years during which time Sam managed to get his younger siblings into a Polish Jewish home for children run by ORT, where they were schooled, clothed and fed. Sam details this period of time tells of the death of his mother and brother. Sam then went to the city of Fergana to seek work. He tells of being sent on a huge canal building project which was very hard labor. Leaving there, he went back to Tashkent without a job. He was caught "speculating" but through his ingenuity and luck was not sent to the coal mines, but ended up first learning to be a shoemaker and then to make salt and he became a salt maker.

Sam met his wife, Sylvia in 1946, after the war had ended and were married. They went back to Poland and eventually found his brother and sister. He relates that his brother and sister stayed in Poland and how he and his pregnant wife ultimately made their way to the United States, first being smuggled out of Poland to Austria and then over the Alps to Italy. In Italy they lived in a Displaced Person’s camp where they stayed for three years until they could arrange for the papers to get them to the United States arriving November 21, 1947.

Mr. Yassi indicates in his interview that his former name was SholomYashenofsky.

Nadia Frey, nee Tomaszek, a Catholic, was born October 8, 1916 and lived in Sambor, at that time in the Polish part of Ukraine. She decided to help Jews when the German Aktions began. She describes in great detail what she did, how she managed to do it, and why she decided to get involved when she was only 22 years old. She was arrested once. Nadia also witnessed atrocities committed by Russians and Germans against Jews and Ukrainians.

Nadia hid her future husband, Dolek, and his extended family in her small house, with no running water or electricity. At first, she housed his family only when it was dangerous in the ghetto, until it was safe to return. She explains how the families she hid managed to get in and out of the ghetto whenever they were in danger. After the ghetto was liquidated, she sheltered them continuously for one and a half years. At great risk and with her father’s help, she managed to get enough food and wood. Water for drinking and personal hygiene were a problem as were suspicious neighbors. Seven people lived in a hole below the house. Many times Nadia was afraid that the Jews she hid would be discovered, but was ready to die with Dolek, her future husband.

After the war, Nadia and Dolek went to Breslau (Wroclaw), Poland and were married in a civil ceremony. They had a Jewish wedding after they came to the United States in 1945 or ’46 from a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany. Her children were raised as Jews. She told them her story once they were old enough and explains their reaction. She also mentions how the Ukrainians’ feelings toward those who sheltered Jews changed from hatred to pride after the war.

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.