Oral History Interview with Paul Kurschner

Lilly Friedman, née Lax, was born in Zarica, Czechoslovakia on January 20, 125. Her father taught Hebrew. Lilly describes how Jewish life and her relations with non-Jews changed after the Hungarian occupation in 1939. In 1944, after the Germans rounded up all the Jews, Lilly and her family were sent to Auschwitz. She describes arrival in Auschwitz, the selections, and brutal murders of infants. After three days she was taken to Plaszow, Krakow with a group of girls for forced hard labor under brutal conditions. In September 1944 they returned to Auschwitz. As transports arrived, women and children were taken straight to the crematoria. After three weeks she was put in charge of 400 of the healthiest girls who were selected to work as weavers in a factory in Neustadt.

As the front came closer, the camp was evacuated. The girls were transported to Mauthausen and then marched to Bergen-Belsen. She gives a graphic description of the transport to Mauthausen by train under Allied bombardment, the casualties and their attempts to help each other. She describes terrible conditions in Bergen-Belsen and how the girls helped each other to survive. They were liberated by the English Second Army April 15, 1945. She slowly regained her health and met and married another survivor. The family came to the United States in March, 1948.

Her daughter, Miriam adds her insights about growing up as a child of survivors. Lilly mentions the impact living through the Holocaust still has on her and her sisters.

Interviewee: FRIEDMAN, Lilly Date: April 21, 1985

John Igoe was Assistant Supply Officer of the 392nd Field Artillery Battalion, 42nd Division of the United States 7th Army during World War II. On April 28, 1945, they entered Dachau, Germany, where many people in prison garb were in the streets, after liberation from a nearby camp some hours earlier. One man embraced Mr. Igoe and expressed his gratitude in broken English.

On April 29, Mr. Igoe spoke to a German couple living just outside the Dachau camp who claimed ignorance of prisoners inside. Sights and stench within the camp are described - boxcars filled with corpses who had been shot.

In May 1945, Mr. Igoe and other officers shared a house in Salzburg, whose owners were forced to move upstairs. He describes contacts between the Austrian civilians and his occupation army unit as being friendly. He returned to the United States in December 1945.

Interviewee: IGOE, John Date: October 22, 1990

Jack Arnel (previously YashaAronovitz) was born on May 23, 1929 in Vilna, Poland (now Vilna, Lithuania) to a well-to-do Jewish family. His father owned a furrier factory and his mother was a custom tailor. He shares his childhood memories of his war-time experiences. He describes their pre-war life, having a maid, and a governess and spending summers in the country. Jack was a member of Betar. Jack briefly describes how their lives changed under the Soviet Occupation in 1939.

Jack describes that in 1941, when the Germans occupied the area,his family was moved into the Vilna Ghetto and from there to a sub-camp for furriers (who were privileged prisoners called Keilis). There they made fur vests for German soldiers. Jack describes the family’s deportation in 1944 and the fear that they were being sent to their death since they were headed toward Ponary2, but eventually passed it. The women were forced off the trains in Stutthof and the men were sent to LagerKreisLandsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau. Jack was forced to work building underground facilities to manufacture weaponry for the German armies and describes Dachau in detail: beatings, starvation, killings and brutal labor. Later he and his father fled from a transport during an American air-raid and found an advancing American Army unit. They were cared for at St. Ottilien Hospital, an American camp set up in a church in Germany. His mother and sister, Sonia, survived as well and were liberated by the Russians. Jack describes how they were all reunited in Munich. They remained in a Displaced Persons Camp for four years and arrived in the United States in July 1949.

Philip G. Solomon served in the United States Army, in the 101st Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron Mechanized, which liberated the Landsberg concentration camp on April 28, 1945. He describes his unit’s arrival in Germany in February/March 1945, emphasizing their military mission and their lack of knowledge of concentration camps or the scale of mass murder. His first indication of Nazi horrors occurred after crossing the Rhine, heading east, when his unit captured small towns, liberating displaced persons from forced labor camps (mostly Eastern Europeans). His second indication came when liberating several prisoner of war camps. He details the ominous experience of finding sealed railroad cars on a siding filled with dead concentration camp victims. On April 28, 1945, his unit stopped near the city Landsberg, waiting for a bridge to be repaired and unaware of the camp 1000 yards away. A shift in the wind eventually alerted them to the smell, and sight of smoke from the camp where retreating S.S. had just massacred the inmates. The unit found about 20 starving and ill survivors. He details the conditions of the camp and his feelings upon seeing the massive piles of bodies, hangings and other atrocities. The unit had no food or medical supplies and could only radio for help. They were commanded to leave Landsberg after 20 minutes in order to seize and hold a causeway near Munich.

He describes in detail the reactions of prisoners to liberation, the response of the young soldiers to the dual experience of witnessing the atrocities in the midst of war, and his own complex and gradually evolving psychological reaction to this experience. He stresses his concern about ongoing genocides since World War II. And he affirms his faith and pride in his Jewish heritage.

Jenny Sommer describes her life, education, and Zionist activities in prewar Libau, Latvia in great detail, including some incidents of antisemitism and discrimination. In 1940 conditions for Jews started to get worse. Because her family was upper middle class they lived in fear of the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) and the Russians.

Jenny describes life under the German occupation of Libau in great detail: the execution of all able bodied Jewish men on July 22, 1941; a mass execution of Jews, including her relatives, and how her sister managed to rescue them just before they were to be executed during an Aktion. She witnessed a mass execution of Jews, including her relatives. The Christian superintendent of her uncle’s house hid Jenny and her remaining family in the attic until the round-up of Jews was over. Jenny, her mother and her sister, moved into the ghetto with about 600 other Jews and worked for the Germans as slave laborers. Her sister worked as a nurse in the ghetto. Some Christian Latvians smuggled food to them.

On Yom Kippur night they were taken to Kaiserwald concentration camp, near Riga. Jenny describes their arrival at Kaiserwald, where mothers were forcibly separated from their children. Some women committed suicide. Her sister carried a bottle of cyanide pills. While in Kaiserwald, Jenny did hard labor as part of a Kommando, at a work camp, and later inStutthof. She describes their horrible existence in Stutthof and how she managed to find the will to survive. Her husband worked at Stutthof as an electrician and managed to survive a typhoid epidemic.

As the Russian army approached, the inmates were shipped out of Stutthof on a designated typhoid boat. It was bombed, set on fire and capsized. She was rescued by a German fire boat after ten days without food or water, liberated two days later in Kiel, Germany by English forces. She stayed at a field Lazarett (hospital) in Itzehoe, near Hamburg for six months. She talks about her post-liberation experiences in a German hospital, and finding her husband in Neustadt.

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.