Oral History Interview with Yehuda L. Mandel

Meyer Levin served in Europe, as a cannoneer with the 25th Tank Battalion, 14th Armored Division during World War II. About two weeks after the war ended, his tank crew was ordered to proceed to a labor camp near Munich, Germany. He never found out the name of this camp.

He relates how he disobeyed orders of an American officer during an encounter with survivors who found a warehouse full of food and clothing. He describes the pitiful condition of the surviving inmates and the reaction to and interaction with the prisoners and the American soldiers. His unit tried to help as much as they could. In Meyer's opinion, the inmates were Slavs not Jews. His unit stayed in the labor camp for less than a day but the experience lingers with him to this day and made him glad he was fighting Germans.

He was stationed in Berlin as part of the Army of Occupation and had a lot of contact with German civilians. The Germans he talked to denied the existence of the camps, even the German civilians from surrounding villages who were forced to march through the camp he liberated. He explains why he did not believe their protestations of ignorance and innocence and why he is convinced Germans and Austrians he encountered all lied about their actions during the war.

He was also involved in the repatriation of displaced persons under American control who were afraid to go home. Jewish survivors he met during High Holiday services in Austria told him that Poles were worse than the Germans.

Interviewee: LEVIN, Meyer Date: December 9, 1998

Charlotte Sonnenberg, nee Lichtendorf, was born in Bad Neuenahr, Germany January 22, 1910 into a middle class family. The Nazi boycott in 1932 and the Nurenberg Laws affected her life and her family adversely. Charlotte met and married her husband Doctor Herbert Alexander in Leipzig. On November 10, 1938 (Kristallnacht) Charlotte and her husband were driven out of their apartment and her husband was sent to Buchenwald. He was released because Charlotte obtained tickets to go to Shanghai. They sailed to Shanghai on the SS Conte Biancamano in March 1939.

On arrival in Shanghai they were taken to a camp in Hongkew. They found work at the American Presbyterian Mission in Tenghsien in a hospital run by the mission. Charlotte describes in great detail their pleasant life in the mission, their relationship with other Jews and the patients. On December 7, 1941 the Japanese took over the hospital. All the missionaries were either deported or sent to concentration camps. Her husband was put in charge of the hospital. Civilians were trapped once the war ended, the Japanese left, and fighting erupted between the Chinese National Army and the Communists.

Charlotte relates many riveting details about their escape to Hsuchowfu and the death of her husband. She continued alone to Tsingtao and worked as a teacher at an American Catholic Middle School. She left China in 1947 – on a troop transport – to Philadelphia. Later she met and married her husband Henry Sonnenberg there. She talks about her impression of and life in the United States as well as her love of China.

Ellen Tarlow, née Meinberg, was born in 1927 in Gütersloh, Westphalia, Germany, where her family had lived since the 17th century. Her father, Paul Meinberg, an importer of cattle, was dec‌orated with the Iron Cross in WWI. She describes her early childhood in public school and then a Lyceum for girls. She first felt antisemitism at age of eight and was expelled from school in 1938. She studied Hebrew and Bible once a week. She details Nazi atrocities during and after Crystal Night (Kristallnacht): social ostra‌cism, burning of their home and synagogue, her father’s deportation to and flight from Buchenwald. Remaining family found shelter in a local cloister then fled to Bielefeld. She describes subsequent life in a Judenhaus in Gütersloh, including attempts to educate the children there. HIAS helped the family many times; there was also aid from several Germans in Gütersloh. She briefly mentions a failed attempt to emigrate to Haiti. After many disappointments and a difficult experience at the American Consulate in Stuttgart, the family left Germany for the United States, via Lisbon, Portugal, on the SS Mouzinho, in August 1941. She describes the journey from Berlin to Lisbon in a sealed train, and her stay in Lisbon in a group home run by HIAS. She describes how refugees organized to cope with primitive conditions on the ship, her arrival and processing in Staten Island, NY, and her life in New York in a group home for refugees sponsored by HIAS. She reflects at length on the family’s adjustment in the United States and the survivor’s guilt she feels. She talks about her return to Germany, by invitation, in 1985, accompanied by her husband and daughter.

RachelaFrydmanwas born on November 26, 1914 in Zloczew, Poland (near Lodz). She came from a large observant Zionist family. Her father was a wood merchant. Rachela belonged to Shomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth movement. One of her brothers was able to get to Palestine in 1928. Before 1930 Rachela had experienced antisemitism in the form of two pogroms and a robbery.

In the 1930s the family moved to Piotrkow, Poland, a mill town. By 1933 the Polish Jews who lived in Germany had been forced back into Poland. Rachela details how the PiotrkowGhetto was created and describes conditions there, overcrowding, starvation, laborbatallions.She describes treatment by the S.S. and many shootings. Rachela and her sister taught Jewish history and culture from their apartment until 1941. Rachela married while in the ghetto. Her husband was sent out for forced labor and did not return. Rachela recounts being terrorized by Ukrainian guards in the ghetto, witnessing murders and contracting typhus. Her mother and one sister died in the typhus epidemic. She was nursed by nuns in a hospital and one offered to hide her in their convent.

From 1942 - 1944 Rachela was in Skarzysko-Kamienna, a forced labor camp which was an ammunition factory. She describes her beatings by guards. In 1944, Rachela and many inmates were sent to Buchenwald’s sub-camp, Leipzig-Schoenfeld, in cattle cars. There Rachela along with 600 inmates lived in one large room.Rachela recounts their attempts to observe Jewish holidays by lighting candles with wicks made from stolen rope and saving crumbs for symbolizing matza.

In April 1945 they were marched toward Dresden. They were liberated at the River Elbe by the Soviet army. By then Rachela could no longer walk. She was hospitalized and later sent to a displaced person’s camp. There she met and married her second husband and gave birth to a daughter. They came to the United States on April 19, 1951. Rachela states that she’s alive because she willed herself to see the defeat of the Germans.

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.

Bernard Freilich was born April 17, 1924, in Drohobycz, Poland. He attended public school, Tarbut School and heder. His family had a shoe store. Pre-war, he experienced antisemitism from his very early childhood. He describes worsening conditions for Jews under both German and Russian occupations: pogroms (some started by Ukrainians), Aktions, liquidation of the Jewish quarter, establishment of the Drohobycz Ghetto, and the role of the Judenrat. Bernard narrowly escaped death in the ghetto when over 200 Jews were killed. He gives vivid accounts of atrocities, slave labor, and incidents of retribution. His entire family, except one brother, perished and he explains how and where they were killed. He describes Jewish slave labor in Boryslaw, deportations from the ghetto to Belzec, and executions of Jews in the Bronica forest.

Several vignettes describe his father’s interactions with the Gestapo and other Germans while working as their official boot maker. Later, after enduring forced labor under horrible conditions, Bernard worked with his father making boots.

When about 800 Jews managed to escape into the Bronica forest, Bernard joined a group of boys who hid in a bunker. He explains how he managed to survive for three and a half months and then to escape once the Germans discovered the bunker in May 1944.

Bernard describes the transport to, arrival at and processing at the Plaszow concentration camp on June 22, 1944. He witnessed brutal treatment and killing of the prisoners before and during this transport. He and his father worked as shoemakers for the Wehrmacht. Inmates were executed 24 hours a day. Bernard talks about the reaction of Jewish prisoners when 12,000 non-Jewish Poles arrived at the camp.

Bernard’s testimony includes graphic descriptions of the horrible conditions at Mauthausen, gruesome atrocities and torture, including a father’s futile attempt to save his son’s life. He worked as a slave laborer at Gusen II building tunnels for Messerschmitt and Steyrwerke under conditions that guaranteed a life span of four to six weeks. He explains the complicated series of events that enabled him and his brother to work as shoemakers. Because he was hospitalized for a groin infection, he saw various terrible ways in which prisoners and patients were killed in January 1945. He describes worsening conditions at Gusen as the Allied forces approached on April 22, 1945. He survived a death march to Mauthausen and then Gunskirchen, where the prisoners received Red Cross packages for the first time. He relates the chaotic conditions after the guards fled, and how he saved a friend’s life.

Bernard describes his post-liberation experiences vividly and in great detail. These include encounters with American soldiers, sick and dying survivors in hospitals, Germans who had used slave laborers, and living in an apartment they confiscated from an SS member, with 10 other survivors. The American Military Police moved Bernard and his brother to a Displaced Person Camp.

In June 1945, Bernard and his brother tried to return to Drohobycz. They were conscripted into the Russian army as mine sweepers with 22 other Jews, but managed to work as shoemakers for the Russian General Staff in Vienna, Austria instead. Before Bernard could execute a plan he had devised to escape, his unit was marched back to Poland. He got himself transferred into the Polish army, searched for his father in Lodz, where he met and married his wife. After living in Schlachtensee and then later Feldafing Displaced Persons Camps, they emigrated to the United States in March 1949.