Oral History Interview with Alex Krasheninnikow

John B. Coulston served with the 602nd Tank Destroyer Battalion, Third U.S. Army during World War II. While attached to the 89th Division Fourth Armored Division, he entered Ohrdruf concentration camp. He briefly describes what he saw and how angry it made him. There were only three survivors. One of the survivors - Leo Laufer - told him that shortly before liberation all other inmates were killed on a forced march. He talks briefly how seeing Ohrdruf affected him. After the war, the only people who wanted to hear about Ohrdruf were his fellow service men.

Mr. Coulston was active in Christian-Jewish relations before the war. After the war, both he and his wife were very active in many organizations, including the Speakers Bureau of the Holocaust Memorial Committee of Morris-Sussex area, N. J. [NYWAJ] and the Jewish Christian Task Force of the Diocese of Newark, Episcopalian.

He talks about meeting a man, he considers the first Jewish victim of Hitler, in the United States in 1939. To illustrate why he believes it is so important that his story and the survivors’ stories be told, he relates two incidents - one involving a supposedly non-Nazi German, the other involving American soldiers during the war - to illustrate that prejudice still exists and must be eliminated.

Margot Freudenberg, born August 8, 1907 in Hanover, Germany, attended gymnasium and learned Jewish history, music and literature from her parents. She describes antisemitism after 1933 and later restrictions on her father’s medical practice.

In 1934, after marriage and birth of a son, she obtained permits for emigration to South Africa, but her parents refused to leave Germany. She mentions attending a service during Kristallnacht, when the synagogue was set on fire. The kindness of Gentiles is detailed in regard to her son’s surgery in a German hospital when Jews were refused entry. She and her family escaped to England in June 1939. After arrival in the United States in 1940, Margot became a physical therapist and was honored in 1967 for her work with the intellectually disabled.

Herbert Finder was born in Vienna on April 22, 1929 of a Polish father who was an Austrian citizen and a German mother. He mentions antisemitic acts experienced in school. He describes the Anschluss and his family’s flight to Breda, Belgium and Antwerp, where Herbert attended a Jewish school. They received American visas in April, 1940 but lack of funds and the German invasion trapped them. His father was sent to a camp near Toulouse, France. Herbert, his mother and his uncle fled to Southern France. Herbert lived with a Jewish farmer, who took in many refugees, for two years. His father joined them after his release, and they lived on a farm in Duvernay. His mother returned to Antwerp to salvage their visas, but was deported in September 1942. After the war, they learned she had been killed.

Herbert and his father remained on the farm until arrested as foreigners in August 1942 by French police. They were sent to a camp in Viviers, then to Drancy. On September 4, 1942 they were shipped east on the 28th convoy to work at Oberschlesienosten, near Katowice. Though underage, Herbert remained with his father at the labor camp of Tarnoviche (TarnoskyGura), which he describes. Internal affairs of the camp were run by Polish Jews who reported to the Germans.

In the spring of 1943, Herbert and other inmates were sent to Sosnowiec to work in Katowicz. In November 1943 they were shipped to Birkenau where they were tattooed, suffered brutal conditions and saw crematoria. They moved to Auschwitz for one night and then to the Warsaw Ghetto to clear rubble, until July 1944. He describes the ghetto, where non-Jewish German prisoners were in charge. Prisoners traded for food with Poles and a typhus epidemic killed many. He worked in a burial detail that burned corpses of victims shot in Paviak. In July 1944, as Russians approached, prisoners began a three-day forced march to Lodz, then went to Dachau in sealed cattle cars without food or water. While his father was recuperating from an injury, Herbert was sent to Allach, a camp where Jews and non-Jews built an underground factory. His father joined him after three weeks. In April 1945 prisoners were put on flat cars. After two days, German guards disappeared and prisoners were liberated by Americans on April 30th. In May 1945, Herbert and his father went to Antwerp via Stuttgart and France. He describes their survival strategies and faith in God. They came to the United States in December 1946, lived in New York City until 1950, and then settled in Vineland, NJ.

Harry Bass was born on October 10, 1920 in Bialystok, Poland. He talks about his life, Jewish life in general, educational facilities for Jewish children in Bialystok, and his Zionist activities prior to 1939. He briefly mentions the arrival of Polish Jews who were expelled from Germany.

After the German invasion in 1939, his family hid for a while, then were forced into the Bialystok Ghetto along with the entire Jewish population of Bialystok, as well as Jews from surrounding villages and towns. He describes conditions in the ghetto, how he traded goods for food and activities of the Judenrat.

In December 1942, Harry, his three brothers, a sister and an uncle, were deported to Auschwitz in closed cattle cars. He could have escaped and explains why he chose not to.

In Birkenau, his two little brothers were sent to the crematoriums. Harry and his other siblings were taken to the slave labor camp. He describes the daily routine in the camps, living conditions, how prisoners were branded, and briefly mentions attempts at religious observance. Prisoners who tried to escape were killed. Harry worked in the kitchen, later in a Straf Kommando (punishment detail) where a German soldier saved his life.

To evacuate Auschwitz, prisoners were forced on a Death March to Gleiwitz in deep snow, then to Mauthausen on an open train on January 18, 1945. Thousands died and survivors were treated brutally. In April 1945, surviving prisoners were brought to Magdeburg and put on ships in the Elbe. Most ships were sunk by the Germans, Harry’s boat was torpedoed by the British but he managed to survive.

After liberation by the British, Harry recuperated in a hospital in Neustadt Holstein, searched for family members, and was reunited with some of them. He immigrated to the United States on March 29, 1949, where he became very involved in every aspect of the Jewish community.

The transcript includes historical endnotes by Dr. Michael Steinlauf as well as several vignettes about helping fellow prisoners, help from German soldiers and slave labor.

Interviewee: BASS, Harry Date: August 22, 1983

Fred Kulick served with the 336th Engineer Combat Battalion (Amphibious), United States 9th Army. Near Gardelegen, Germany, in the Saar Valley, they found between 100 and 200 corpses of slave laborers who had been locked in a barn and burned to death, probably by SS guards. Their commander, Lt. Colonel Paul Bennett ordered German civilians to give the victims a decent burial. This atrocity was recorded in the battalion records. Mr. Kulick sent photographs of the victims’ bodies to Yad Vashem in Israel.

He explains why he believes German citizens knew about the atrocities and the camps but were psychologically unable to admit it. He mentions a brief encounter with a group of starving American Prisoners of War in Schleswig Holstein. He relates his battalion’s activities in Europe from the German surrender until he returned to the Unites States.

Agnes Adachi, nee Mandl, was born in l9l8 in Budapest. She was the only child in a minimally observant Jewish family. She attended a Reformed Church school, where she received some Hebrew instruction. In l943, prior to the German invasion, she was baptized by a Reformed Church pastor to save her from deportation. Her father was taken away by the Hungarian Arrow Cross and his Christian partner in a textile stored appropriated the business.

Agnes was given asylum in the Swedish Embassy together with many other refugees and helped in the distribution of Schutzpasseswith Raoul Wallenberg. She describes Wallenberg’s wit and daring in dealing with Arrow Cross and German officers. She credits the Swiss Red Cross as well as the Swedish Red Cross for their aid. In l945, after the war ended, she was in Sweden, where she worked with Count Bernadotte as a teacher of refugees.

Her memoir is Child of the Winds: My Mission with Raoul Wallenberg, Chicago: Adams Press, l989.