Oral History Interview with Minna Perlberger

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English
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Title

Oral History Interview with Minna Perlberger

Date

March 26, 1987

Contributor

Interviewee:
Minna Perlberger
Interviewer:
Selma Brothman

Summary

Minna Perlberger, nee Glücksmann, was born December 25, 1918 to a very religious family in Tyczyn, a small town in Poland. She briefly discusses her pre-war experiences, extra taxes on the Jews, attending public school and synagogues that existed in her town. She was active in the Zionist youth group Akiba. She discusses violence and anti-Jewish restrictions put in place in 1939 during the German Occupation (closing of Jewish stores, expulsion of Jewish children from public school and young men taken for slave labor). She discusses the fact that Jews were allowed to go to the Russian-occupied part of Poland, but that her family decided to remain in their house.

In 1942 her family was sent to the Rzeszów Ghetto where 2000 people were concentrated in six streets. There while she and her siblings were at work her parents were sent to Auschwitz from which they did not return. Her oldest brother was shipped to a work camp, was transferred back to the ghetto only to be sent to Treblinka where he perished. With her remaining brother they decided that the three last siblings should go into hiding. He and a friend took two weeks to find a farm where they dug an underground shelter near a barn. There the two sisters hid for 20 months in an airless, lightless shelter during the day, then slept on the straw in the barn with the cows at night. Her brother who hid in a nearby farm visited them once in a while. During one such trip he was found, tortured to reveal the whereabouts of his sisters and killed. She and her sister survived until 1944 when the Russians liberated the area.

After liberation, Minna met her future husband who was in the Russian Army. They married and he left Rzeszów with the army. After some violent pogroms she and her sister fled to Kraków where Minna gave birth to a boy in 1945. Fleeing more violence, the sisters fled to Lenau [phonetic] in the German Zone where they ran a bakery. Finally in 1946 they left for Czechoslovakia then smuggled themselves to Vienna and then to American Zone in Germany. They waited for three years to receive a United States visa to join her father’s family. In 1949 before leaving for the United States she gave birth to another boy who died two months later from a serious kidney problem. In the United States they struggled to make a new and successful life.

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Publisher:
Gratz College
Number of Tapes:
3
Language:
English
Identifier:
HOHAGC00394
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Copyright date:
2014
Cite this item
Oral History Interview with Minna Perlberger. 1987. InterviewInterview by Selma Brothman. Audio. Oral History Interview With Minna Perlberger. Holocaust Oral History Archive. Gratz College. https://grayzel.gratz.edu/hoha/oral-history-interview-minna-perlberger.

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