Oral History Interview with Willie Nowak

K. R. was born in Tarnopol, Poland, March 31, 1922. Her father was a businessman and her family was greatly influenced by Viennese culture. She briefly describes the start of overt antisemitism in her schools. She was a member of HanoarHatzioni and active in Zionist youth groups in Tarnopol and L’vov.

In 1940, under Russian Occupation, she and a group of HanoarHatzioni members were caught by some Ukrainian villagers—as they tried to cross the border illegally—and delivered to police. K. R. was sent to prison and later transferred to a labor camp near the North Pole. She describes the harsh conditions in the camp and why some of her fellow prisoners did not survive. She was released because she was Polish but given Soviet citizenship and sent by train to another part of Russia. Many strangers helped her during this time. She worked as a bookkeeper at a collective farm (kolkhoz) near the Russian village Devochki Gorki on the Volga River. When the German Army advanced, she was deported to Kazakhstan by train. She describes the conditions under which she lived. She worked as a bookkeeper in Kustanay. After the NKVD tried to recruit her as a spy, she fled to Alma Ata using documents she forged.

In 1945, after the war, she returned to Tarnopol and found it almost completely destroyed. She joined a kibbutz in Lodz and worked with HashomerHatzair to prepare young Russian refugees for life in Palestine. She also organized and led illegal border crossings to get them there. During this time she met and married her husband. They went to Palestine, from Cyprus, on a ship called The State of Israel in 1948, escorting a group of young Jewish children who had been hidden in monasteries or by Polish families. K. R. then reflects about how her experiences have shaped her outlook on life and her views about human behavior.

Rabbi Helmut Frank, born April 15, 1912 in Wiesbaden,Germany, talks about his early interest in Judaism, details pre-war Jewish life including religious education, relations with Gentiles and sporadic antisemitism. He describes education at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin from 1931 to 1937. He also studied at Berlin University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn in 1935. He gives his impression of Leo Baeck and his role in the Reichsvertretung. He explains why many Jews still felt they could survive in Germany.

He was ordained in 1937 and was appointed as a Rabbi in Worms. He provides a history of the synagogue. His vivid, detailed eye-witness account of Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938 includes several vignettes, the burning of his synagogue, damage to his apartment, and lack of reaction by the fire department. He was arrested, along with other Jews. They were compelled to clean the debris in the streets, then transported to Buchenwald. He describes brutality, organization of camp life, lack of medical treatment, effect of incarceration on prisoners’ physical and mental health and religious observance. He mentions Aktion Jews and Jehova’s Witnesses and that Nazis warned released prisoners never to talk about Buchenwald. He worked in a labor squad but was released after his parents got him a visa for China.

Rabbi Frank returned to Worms where he opened a House of Prayer and a school with permission from the German authorities. He describes the extent of the damage in Worms and the continued persecution of the Jewish community. He left for the United States in August, 1939. He discusses the immigration process, postwar conditions in Worms, and restoration of the Worms synagogue in 1961.

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.

Mr. Di Giorgio served in E Company, 232nd Regiment, 42nd Division of the Seventh Army during World War II. He briefly describes some of his combat experiences and the heavy losses his division took. His unit entered Dachau in April, 1945 shortly after it was liberated, under orders to clear all the buildings and tunnels and then to move on.

He saw some survivors and a few guards who tried to blend in with them, a lampshade made out of human skin, and many so-called "Forty and Eights"-- cattle cars stacked with bodies ready for cremation. He explains how what he saw at Dachau profoundly affected him, renewed his will to fight, and increased his religious observance. He was moved to testify because of his perception of widespread disbelief about the Holocaust.

Interviewee: DI GIORGIO, Philip Date: December 6, 1994

Born September 27, 1925 in Munich, Germany, HenryKahn was an only child in a wealthy Jewish family. His father was the major wholesaler of coal in Germany. His great-grandfather was a nobleman, with a title from Emperor Franz Joseph.

Henry describes his childhood memories of attendingpublic school until age eight. When ostracized by the gentile students, his parents sent him to a Jewish school, which was closed after Kristallnacht. His father was sent to Dachau but was released on the same day when he showed visa and steamship tickets to leave Germany. Henry describes their hurried exit and possessions that were confiscated by the Gestapo. The family sailed to the United States from London on January 26, 1939. They were sponsored by a prominent cousin in Philadelphia, Herman Obermayer, and were aided by HIAS.

In the 1960s, Henry’s father began to correspond with Albert Speer, the Nazi architect, and visited him at the German prison in Spandau. Henry also visited Speer, who became a successful writer and donated royalties to Israel and to Jewish old-age homes.

Pearl Herling was born in Budapest, Hungary August 24, 1924 to a religious upper middle class family. Her father was in the wholesale textile business. She describes her family history and pre-war life, antisemitism and discrimination against Jews which peaked in 1938. She also describes the increasingly harsh restrictions against Hungarian Jews between 1940 and 1944 and the creation of ghettos (“Yellow Star Houses”), labor battalions, and cruelty exhibited by Hungarian Nazis. Her father disappeared and never came back.

Pearl gives detailed descriptions of her many efforts to stay alive: she never wore the mandatory yellow star, avoided transport to a labor camp, posed as a Gentile using false papers she typed herself, through a bluff managed to get herself and all the people in her building into one of the Swedish “safe” houses established by Raoul Wallenberg and also obtain Schutzpasses. Just before this building was raided, she managed to join her sister at a labor camp in Kelenföld, run by Hungarian Nazis. She describes an incredible vignette of how she, her sister, and her sister’s two young children avoided a roundup, then got papers classifying them as refugees in Russian-occupied Hungary. Her mother and other family members survived under the protection of the head of a German labor camp. She describes her family’s continued struggle living in Budapest posing as non-Jews using false papers, starvation, and near escapes from detection. She refers to a special transport of Hungarian Jews from Bergen-Belsen to Switzerland and a failed attempt to exchange Jews for trucks. She witnessed a death march from Buda. She met and married her second husband while both were posing as non-Jews, and relates how difficult it was for him to get his son back from a Catholic family that sheltered him.

Pearl was liberated by the Russians in January 1945. She gives a very extensive and graphic account of her experiences in Hungary under Russian occupation, and many attempts to flee. She also mentions Russian soldiers raping women. Pearl details her husband’s flight from Soviet authorities while she was running two businesses. She describes her own harrowing attempted escapes from Budapest-- one with her sedated infant, another when she was separated from her seven-year old step-son and got arrested, and her final escape to Vienna using an Israeli passport. Pearl and her husband survived in Vienna for two years but experienced discrimination. They emigrated to the United States in 1950.