Oral History Interview with Manya Perel

Dr. Leon Friedman was born February 17, 1902 in Warsaw, Poland. His parents owned a grocery store. He received his teacher’s diploma and Ph.D. from Warsaw University. He discusses pre-war antisemitism and his education. He joined HashomerHatzairand served in Palestine from 1922 to 1924 instead of serving in the Polish army. He describes life in Kibbutz Hashomer Hatzair. He returned to Poland where he taught for 14 years.

In 1939 he walked to Bialystock illegally with a group of Jews. He lived under Russian occupation until June 1940, when he was sent to the village of Mandacz in Komi, Siberia with his wife and daughter for refusing a Russian passport. He describes travel to, conditions in, and escape from Mandacz in detail. Dr. Friedman worked as the chief accountant in Murashi. He went to Sochi (Southern Russia) as part of a transfer of 3000 Jews, which he arranged. He describes life in Sochi whose population was predominantly Greek.

After the war, Dr. Friedman and his family returned to Warsaw and Lodz. They were smuggled into Berlin. He talks about conditions faced by refugees in the Russian zone. He mentions two brothers who experienced antisemitism after joining the Anders Army. In 1946 Dr. Friedman organized the escape of 9000 Jewish refugees from East Berlin to avoid transport to the Soviet Union. He describes an illegal border crossing from the French zone to the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp in the English zone, where he started a school for orphan’s preparing to go to Palestine on Aliyah Bet. He lived in Stuttgart, Germany for a few months where he founded a “Folk University” with help from the Jewish community.

Dr. Friedman and family arrived in Philadelphia March 3, 1947. He founded the Association of Jewish New Americans of Philadelphia. He talks about his life as a refugee, why he survived, the effects of hunger on human beings, and the treatment of Holocaust survivors.

L.I. born November 1923, lived in Bucharest, Romania before, during and after World War II. She relates her family history, her experiences growing up in Bucharest and her education at Catholic, public, and Medical schools. She cites several instances of discrimination against herself and other Jewish students.

She describes increasing antisemitism and restrictions against Jews, even those who converted, and their effect on the Jewish community and her own life. Her father lost his job. L.I. went to Onescu, a Jewish medical school staffed by Jewish teachers, and interned at Jewish hospitals. Both L.I. and her father worked at forced labor.

L.I. talks about conditions in the Jewish community, random killings of Jews, and brutality by the Iron Guard, but that many Jewish institutions continued to function. After the war, her family reclaimed their house which had been confiscated in December, 1941. She completed her medical education. Jewish students were allowed to attend schools but were not fully accepted. L.I. wasnot allowed to leaveRomania once she becameadoctor but she and her husband were able to leave as part of an exchange program in 1978 and came to the United States in 1979.

GeniaKlapholz, nee Flachs2, was born in 1912 in Wisnicz, near Krakow, Poland to a religious family. After the town was ghettoized, she witnessed her baby niece kicked to death by a German soldier. Genia and a younger sister escaped and paid a woman in a neighboring village who hid them for eight days. They had to return to Wisnicz and were then transported to the Bochnia Ghetto, where they worked in a uniform factory for one year, enduring terrible conditions. They moved next to the Szebnie transit camp, where they saw Jews from Tarnow burned alive. Genia reads aloud her Yiddish poem, “In Memory of My Sister, Serl, of Camp Szebnie.” (Included with the transcript are Yiddish transliteration and English translation of this poem. Also included are the Yiddish transliteration and English translation of another poem, “The Death March from Auschwitz.”)

Genia worked for three months as a cleaning woman in a factory at Szebnie before deportation to Auschwitz in 1942, which she describes in detail. She discusses the brutal treatment during her two years in Birkenau. She worked in the ammunition factory from which four youngwomen smuggled gunpowder for the attempted explosion of the crematoria and she witnessed their hanging. She describes in detail a delousing procedure, when she had to stand in the snow, naked, for hours. She also tells of her foot operation, performed without anesthesia. Forced to leave Auschwitz on a death march in January, 1945, she managed to escape with two other women and they found shelter with a Polish woman and her family in Silesia. This family was recognized as one of the “Righteous among the Nations” by YadVashem in 1991. Documentation from YadVashem accompanies the transcript.

Genia was liberated by the Russians, March 28, 1945, and returned to Krakow in search of her family. She was in Displaced Persons camps in Einring, Regensburg and Landsburg, where she met and married her cousin, Henry Klapholz. With their baby son, they immigrated in 1948 to the United States, where they bought a farm in Vineland, New Jersey. In 1955, they moved to Philadelphia.

Elizabeth J. Levy, nee Dreifuss, was born in 1927 in Ludwigshafen am Rheim, Germany. She attended a local school as the only Jewish child in classes for Catholics, whom her parents believed were friendlier than the Protestants. She also studied Hebrew in Mannheim.

After the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, her family was ostracized and her father was dismissed as a language professor. She moved with her parents to Leipzig, where her father taught in a Jewish school until Kristallnacht, when he was arrested. He was held at Buchenwald until family visas and tickets to Peru were obtained.

In February, 1939, they left Germany with visitor visas for England where her father taught German language classes for British police and worked at Bloomsbury House, helping German Jews to emigrate. Personal connections enabled his family to avoid internment as German nationals. In February, 1940, they sailed to the United States. Mrs. Levy married in 1949, had three children and became a language teacher.

She believes her religious faith sustained her during her youth and maintains that Jewish people must remember the Holocaust by avoiding intermarriage and abortion, to compensate for those Jews who were killed.

Elizabeth’s granddaughter, Rebecca, age 12 at the time, did an interview with her great-grandmother Lina Dreifuss (Elizabeth Levy’s mother) about her experiences in Nazi Germany. Mrs. Dreifuss is age 102 at the time of this interview.: https://vimeo.com/201457472/5b06ce1456

Armand Mednick, named “Avrum” by his Yiddish-speaking parents, was born in 1933 into a close, extended family in Brussels, Belgium. He grew up as a stranger in a non-Jewish neighborhood, often taunted by anti-Semites influenced by the fascist Rex Party. At age six, he was hospitalized with tuberculosis until May 1940, when his father, an active political leftist, fled with his family to France. His father was drafted into the French Army, deserted and placed his son, renamed “Armand”, in a sanitarium at Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne Mountains. Armand’s father, mother and baby sister hid nearby in Volvic, where they passed as Christians. When Armand recovered, he joined his family and attended Catholic school. At home, there was some Jewish observance and Armand recalls walking for seven miles with his father to attend a clandestine seder.

Armand’s father joined the French resistance in 1944 and the family returned to Brussels in 1945, where Armand was the first Bar Mitzvah celebrant after the war. The Mednick family moved to Philadelphia in 1947. Buchenwald death lists confirmed that most of their extended family of 55 relatives had been killed. Armand became a potter and teacher and produced a series of clay reliefs with symbolic Holocaust images, in an attempt to exorcise his painful childhood memories.

See also interview with his father, Bernard S. Mednicki.

Interviewee: MEDNICK, Armand Date: June 15, 1983