Oral History Interview with Judith Leifer

Adam Tems was born in Lódz, Poland on July 18, 1911. He describes his upbringing and education before World War II. He discusses how antisemitism affected the lives of Polish Jews. He details the rule numerus clausus which was used in Europe to restrict Jewish students from study. He managed to get dual degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering even though the University of Warsaw would not admit him because he was Jewish. He was inducted into the Polish Army, felt he was held back from leadership roles because of his religion and after refusing to sing anti-Jewish songs with his troop was punished by being sent to court and jail on 16 different occasions after having been threatened with death for not following orders. The Germans took him prisoner September 3, 1939. He escaped. In Lódz he was arrested by the GESTAPO and interned in a camp at Radogost (Radogoszcz).

After his release, he was reunited with his family in the Lódz Ghetto. He describes life in the ghetto, which was established in 1940, including food supplies, how the ghetto was organized, schools for the children. His only contact with the outside was listening to the BBC on the radio. He mentions an attempt by the Polish Socialist Party to start a resistance movement. Mr. Tems explains in great detail why Rumkowski, the head of the ghetto, was not an evil man. Mr. Tems was very involved in the administration of the ghetto and describes his many activities. He managed to protect many of the children until the ghetto was liquidated and the children were sent to Auschwitz.

Mr. Tems was deported to Auschwitz Birkenau October 27, 1944, then to Dachau, later to a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp system, where he worked in a maintenance crew. He then worked in a manufacturing compound in Vechelde, south of Braunschweig and in December 1944 was sent to [possibly] Wöbbelin1, as the Germans were trying to stay away from the approaching American soldiers. His entire family perished in Auschwitz.

Mr. Tems explains how he managed to survive, details his liberation by the 9th Airborne Division, and why he decided not to go back to Lódz. He stayed in the American compound, then in a transient camp. He lived in Belgium for five years and after he finally received his papers, emigrated to the United States on October 24, 1950.

Henry (formerly Hans Arnold) Froehlich was born in August 7, 1922 in Rottweil, Germany. In 1935, the Nazi boycott forced his father to close his shoe store, Henry had to leave school, and the family moved to Stuttgart. Henry describes how the family’s life changed. He talks about Kristallnacht, his efforts to warn Jews to flee and how he avoided arrest. His father was arrested, sent to Dachau, and was killed there one month later. The family had to pay 500 Marks to claim his body.

Henry worked for the Oberrat (the Jewish community office in Stuttgart that processed immigration) for two years. He describes his activities and contacts with the American Consulate, Gestapo and S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst German Security Service).

In 1940, Henry, his younger brother and their mother emigrated separately to the United States. An older brother, crippled since birth, had been placed in a Catholic Home for crippled children and there is some evidence he was killed in a Nazi euthanasia program. In the United States, Henry worked in a CCC program in Berlin, New Hampshire until he was suspected of being a German spy. He was reunited with his family in Philadelphia, where he married, had two children, and became a successful businessman.

Sonja Samson was born in Aurich, Germany in 1931, into an assimilated but observant Jewish family. In 1936 she lived with her grandparents in Luxembourg until she joined her parents who had moved to France earlier. She talks about her family history and her childhood, and speculates about her parents’ reasons for staying in France instead of emigrating to the United States. Her father volunteered for the French army but was interned in 1939.

Sonja and her parents were in Gurs briefly, then lived in Garlin, a village near Gurs until August 26, 1942 when they were rounded up by French police, sent to Gurs and then transported to Rivesaltes in September, 1942. Her parents were deported and her mother managed to keep Sonja from going on this transport with the help of Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE). She never saw her parents again and still profoundly resents this separation. She briefly describes conditions in the two camps and her life and schooling in the villages of Garlin and Gurs, including pressure on a teacher to rescind an honor Sonja had earned.

Sonja stayed in a convent and then an orphanage at Palavas-les-Flots with other Jewish children, under the auspices of the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF) and OSE, then with distant relatives who were in hiding, later in a boarding school in Chambéry, constantly on guard. She mentions a failed attempt to cross the border into Switzerland.

Later Sonja worked as a maid at an inn that was a substation of the ArmeéSecréte (the French underground). She invented a new identity for herself as a non-Jewish war orphan, and participated in Catholic rites to avoid discovery. After she earned their trust, Sonja became a messenger. She relates how her presence of mind foiled a plot by the so-called “Butcher of Grenoble” to blow up the Underground headquarters just after liberation in August 1944. Sonja describes post-war life at the Chambéry boarding school, with her cousins, as well as her search for her parents, and was an active member of Hashomer Hatzair in Paris. She describes how she learned what she needed to do to survive, how the loss of her parents affects her to this day, and how her outlook about religion, Jewishness, and Zionism changed as she matured.

Sonja went to the United States from Sweden on the Gripsholm as a war-orphan in 1947, instead of making aliyah with her friends. She talks about the difficult adjustment to life in the United States, how she managed to get the higher education she wanted, and post-war trips to Israel in great detail.

Interviewee: SAMSON, Sonja Date: June 3, 1985

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.

Albert (Abraham) Ferleger was born in Chmielnik, Poland, June 15, 1919. He was one of six children from a very Orthodox family and had a public school as well as a yeshiva education. He describes the customs of the Jewish Kehillahin histown, relates the Polish antisemitism before the war and describes what occurred after the Germans took over the town. He describes the influx of populations from several different towns being forced into their ghetto and describes atrocities (people being killed on the spot and burying them) and deportations. Albert was sent tozwangsarbeit, forced labor, where he shoveled snow and worked in the ghetto community kitchen.

Albert fled from the Germans and was hidden by a Polish farmer for two years: he was buried in a hole, naked, under the farmers stable, along with another Jewish man. They subsisted on bread and potatoes. He details their horrid conditions.

With the Russian victory and the help of the Briha1 (underground Zionist organization helping Jews get to Palestine) he became the leader of a group of Jews that was smuggled across the Polish and Czechoslovakian borders to Germany pretending to be Greek and later as German Jews.

He met his wife (who was liberated from Theresienstadt) through the Briha, as well. They were sent to Munich and then to a displaced persons camp in Regensdorf, Germany for seven months. With the help of HIAS and President Truman’s aid to refugees they went to relatives in Philadelphia. He relates in great detail how he was able to survive during and after the war, how his experiences challenged his religious beliefs and his bitterness that not more was not done to help the Jews.

Liesl Joseph Loeb was born on June 17, 1928 in Rheydt, Rhineland, Germany. Liesl, together with her father, Josef Joseph, an attorney, and her mother, Lilly Salmon Joseph, was a passenger on the S.S. St. Louis. This German luxury Liner sailed on May 13, 1939, from Hamburg toward Havana, Cuba, with 937 Jewish refugees on board.

Liesl speaks about her family background and life leading up to Kristallnacht which she experienced, hiding in her own home while Nazi hoodlums were vandalizing it. She describes the months leading up to embarkation and conditions which had to be met before leaving Germany and immigration into Cuba, which was to be temporary until the family’s quota number was called for the United States.

She describes the trip and its complications from a child’s perspective. She speaks of her father’s sense of duty as the chairman of the passenger committee and the commitment and devotion of all its members. The desperate situation of the hapless passengers to whom no country offered a haven, especially not the United States, is emphasized. After 40 days at sea, the passengers are rescued through the efforts of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), by four countries - England, Holland, France, and Belgium.

Finally the Joseph family lands in England, and their life as World War II began is described. The destiny of most of the passengers who were taken in by Holland, France and Belgium ended in tragedy when these countries were invaded by the Nazis.

She describes attending school as an “evacuee”, the internment of her father on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien and arrival in New York on September 10, 1940. She concludes with her graduation from high school, and her immediate marriage thereafter. Several footnotes pursuant to the St. Louis story are added at the end of this memoir.

Self-taped oral memoir: LOEB, Liesl Joseph Date: Nov. 17, 1998