Oral History Interview with Milton Harrison

John (formerly György/George) Sauber, was born August 14, 1926 in Budapest, Hungary. His family lived in Rakoskeresztur until 1936 when they moved back to Budapest. After 1942 or 1943 food shortages, persecution of Jews, wearing the yellow star, and deportations started. Non-Jewish Hungarians brought his family some food. His mother’s store was taken over by two Christian “partners”. He attended school with non-Jewish students, had religious instruction and attended the Dohany Temple. He experienced a few instances of discrimination while a student.

In 1944, when he was 17 years old, Mr. Sauber was drafted into a forced labor unit that went to the Russian front. He was wounded and put on a Red Cross train. Because he was Jewish, he received no medical treatment and was transferred to a deportation train for Hungarian Jews. He describes conditions on the train and his arrival and processing at Bergen-Belsen Concentration camp. He talks about conditions at Bergen-Belsen pre and post liberation and his activities in great detail, including removing hair and gold teeth from corpses and how he managed to survive. He witnessed brutal treatment of inmates. The Germans fled just before the camp was liberated by Allied troops. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) cared for the survivors.

Mr. Sauber returned to Budapest and was reunited with his father. His mother and sister had been deported and killed. He had gone to medical school in Hungary, resumed his education, then went to a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, run by UNRRA, and to a camp in Bamberg with a group planning to go to Palestine. He emigrated to Saskatoon, Canada with a group of Jewish orphans sponsored by the Canadian Jewish Congress, in January 1946, and was helped by Jewish community. He brought his father and stepmother to Canada. He is still haunted by his experiences and trying to cope with the loss of most of his family. He relates a touching episode when saying Kaddish for his stepmother brought him some peace.

Interviewee: SAUBER, John Date: October 21, 1999

Louie Mermelstein, the second oldest of 13 children, was born May 12, 1927 in Klascanovo1, Czechoslovakia, near Munkács. His father was a kosher butcher. He describes good relations between Jews and non-Jews before the war. Louie details changes during the Hungarian occupation in 1940: his father’s deportation to a slave labor camp, restrictions against the Jews, having to wear yellow star, and clandestine slaughtering and delivering of kosher meat to make a living.

Louie describes fleeing from a round-up in 1944. He hid in the forest about four weeks with two uncles. During this time he found out that the Jews were forced to a brick factory in the Munkács Ghetto and deported to concentration camps and Auschwitz among them most of his family. Louie mentions help by Gentiles who brought him food while in hiding. A gentile friend also gave him his nephew’s identity papers. Louie traveled to Uzhgorod with these false papers, went to the step-sister who helped him settle there with a job, and lived in their house. After some time, he returned to the forest to find his uncles and was denounced by a Gentile who knew him. He describes being beaten by police, thrown in jail and that his employer was also brought to jail for hiring a Jew.2

Louie was held in the jail for days and gives a detailed description of how the police rounded up more of the few Jews who were still hiding. Eventually his group of 30 people is deported to a transit camp called Sarvar where they join a group of about 2,000 to be deported to Auschwitz. Louie details his escape from the train in an area that happened to be under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg and how a decent Slovakian farmer and SS officer direct him to the Jewish Committee in Žilina about 13 miles away. He connects with an uncle and his family in Bratislava and secures a job as a plumber’s helper. In the fall of 1944, Louie’s uncle gathers the 10 family members in an attic hideout above the factory where he works. A middle-aged gentile friend takes over his position as superintendent of the factory and brings them food after dark. They hide there six months, surviving the Allied bombing, and are liberated by the Soviet army May 8, 1945.

After the war, Louie works for the Soviet army. Because he didn’t like how they treated the farmers, he went to the American liberated zone (Germany) and started looking for surviving relatives. He describes returning to Munkács, reuniting with his sisters in Neustadt-Holstein, Germany, finding a cousin in the U.S. Army and discovering that his father was killed the week before liberation in Flossenbürg, Germany. His G.I. cousin’s family in Long Island secures them affidavits to emigrate. Louie emigrates to the United States in June 1946.

See interviews with his siblings Lillian Taus and Shirley Don and brother-in-law, Sam Don.

Karessa Foldvary served as a nurse in the U.S. Army during World War II, in field and evacuation hospitals in France and Germany, from November, 1944 until spring, 1945. On May 2, 1945, she moved with the American 7th Army to Dachau Concentration camp, several days after liberation. She describes the emaciation of the thousands of living male prisoners and the dead bodies of women and children piled outside the crematorium. She mentions a typhus epidemic and the use of DDT powder on prisoners. Details of conditions in the boxcars that transported prisoners from Auschwitz to Dachau are related. She mentions loss of American property resulting from thievery by demented prisoners, and describes viewing and photographing 16 wagonloads of dead bodies. Neighboring German farmers were forced by the American military to load and drive the wagons into München (Munich) to show the local population what occurred at Dachau. She mentions hostility from some Germans in Limburg and relations with others in that city, with whom American nurses bartered soap and cigarettes for laundry service.

Ari Fuhrman was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, Romania. His father was a tailor. After living briefly in Vienna, the family returned to Czernowitz instead of going to Palestine. He talks about his family’s life, religious observance, his education, Communist and Zionist movements, and the cultural life of Jews in Czernowitz. He was apprenticed as a dental mechanic in 1938.

Germany invaded Czernowitz together with the Romanian army after a brief Russian occupation. Massacres of Jews began and a ghetto was established until most Jews had been deported. Ari, and 80 family members were deported to Transnistria in October 1941 by sealed train. He graphically describes the transport, how Romanians brutalized and robbed the deportees. Some Jews, including his family, managed to escape during a stop in Mogilev.

Ari and his family could live and work in the Mogilev ghetto because he was classified as a “useful Jew”. He describes cultural activities, religious observance, illness, starvation, and strategies his family used to survive. In 1943 the Jewish Federation of Bucharest tried to rescue Jewish orphans and the American Joint Distribution Committee sent aid. Kapos (Jewish Police) had to provide a certain number of Jews each day for transports. He describes conditions just before and after liberation by the Russians, when partisans briefly controlled the area. He was reunited with his parents in Czernowitz until, as part of an exchange between Russia and Romania, Ari went to Timisoara, Romania, in 1946. He stayed for 11 years, worked as a dentist, and joined Mishmar, a Zionist organization. He registered to go to Palestine but did not receive permission to leave until 1959. He joined the State Theater of Bucharest and later the TeatronHaolim (Theatre of the Newcomers) in Israel. He was reunited with his parents after emigrating to the United States in 1960.

Testimony of his wife, Chayale Ash-Fuhrman, a prominent Yiddish actress, is also in the Gratz College Holocaust Oral History Archive collection.

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.

Susan Faulkner, nee Neulaender, was born April 27, 1921 in Berlin. Her father was a banker and she grew up in an assimilated Jewish family. During the first year of the Nazi regime, she enjoyed Jewish religious instruction in her public school and was very favorably influenced by the ordained female rabbi, Regina Jonas. After 1933, she experienced antisemitism and traumatic discrimination at school. She describes the brief relaxation of anti-Jewish measures in Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games. After attending a private Jewish school for a year, she had a brief, unhappy experience in a Zionist agricultural school in Silesia in 1936 and then worked for relatives in Gleiwitz in Silesia, where she felt more protected in a traditional Jewish community than she had felt in Berlin. Upon her return to Berlin, she worked in Alltrue emigration processing agency. During Kristallnacht, on November 9, 1938, she witnessed destruction of Jewish property, burning of the Fasanenstrasse synagogue as onlookers cheered and the beating of an elderly Jewish man. Her father fled to Belgium, was later caught in Marseilles and died in Auschwitz.

Susan managed to travel with her mother and sister to Guatemala in 1938 on a German ship. She describes in detail their 4th class passage and how they were treated with disdain by the crew. Two years later, she reached the United States. In 1942, she married an Austrian refugee who converted to Protestantism and was divorced, following the adoption of two children. In 1958, she began college studies leading to a Ph.D. in English, with restitution money from Germany. She became a teacher and expresses her need to bear witness to the Holocaust. She discusses her psychological problems of survivor guilt and painful attempts to identify as a Jew, including compulsive writing of pro-Jewish and pro-Israel letters to editors.