Oral History Interview with Samuel Perlman

Herbert Finder was born in Vienna on April 22, 1929 of a Polish father who was an Austrian citizen and a German mother. He mentions antisemitic acts experienced in school. He describes the Anschluss and his family’s flight to Breda, Belgium and Antwerp, where Herbert attended a Jewish school. They received American visas in April, 1940 but lack of funds and the German invasion trapped them. His father was sent to a camp near Toulouse, France. Herbert, his mother and his uncle fled to Southern France. Herbert lived with a Jewish farmer, who took in many refugees, for two years. His father joined them after his release, and they lived on a farm in Duvernay. His mother returned to Antwerp to salvage their visas, but was deported in September 1942. After the war, they learned she had been killed.

Herbert and his father remained on the farm until arrested as foreigners in August 1942 by French police. They were sent to a camp in Viviers, then to Drancy. On September 4, 1942 they were shipped east on the 28th convoy to work at Oberschlesienosten, near Katowice. Though underage, Herbert remained with his father at the labor camp of Tarnoviche (TarnoskyGura), which he describes. Internal affairs of the camp were run by Polish Jews who reported to the Germans.

In the spring of 1943, Herbert and other inmates were sent to Sosnowiec to work in Katowicz. In November 1943 they were shipped to Birkenau where they were tattooed, suffered brutal conditions and saw crematoria. They moved to Auschwitz for one night and then to the Warsaw Ghetto to clear rubble, until July 1944. He describes the ghetto, where non-Jewish German prisoners were in charge. Prisoners traded for food with Poles and a typhus epidemic killed many. He worked in a burial detail that burned corpses of victims shot in Paviak. In July 1944, as Russians approached, prisoners began a three-day forced march to Lodz, then went to Dachau in sealed cattle cars without food or water. While his father was recuperating from an injury, Herbert was sent to Allach, a camp where Jews and non-Jews built an underground factory. His father joined him after three weeks. In April 1945 prisoners were put on flat cars. After two days, German guards disappeared and prisoners were liberated by Americans on April 30th. In May 1945, Herbert and his father went to Antwerp via Stuttgart and France. He describes their survival strategies and faith in God. They came to the United States in December 1946, lived in New York City until 1950, and then settled in Vineland, NJ.

Adele Wertheimer, nee Rozenel, the eldest of eight children, was born February 5, l922 in Bendzin(also Będzin),Poland to a religious family. Her parents were merchants. She gives a detailed description of pre-war Bendzin, Zionist organizations, her attendance at a Bet Yaakov school2 and her family. She describes the effect of the German invasion on their town, the rounding up of men, the curfew, the violence against women and having to wear a star. She mentions the rape of her aunt by German soldiers. She gives a detailed explanation about how the Jews were forced into the ghetto gradually and describes how they would hide from the Germans in different bunkers during round ups. She recalls when her mother and other siblings were taken away in a roundup, and she and her father and some other relatives hid in a bunker where they stayed for six weeks. They were caught and were forced to clean up the town.

Adele describes her deportation to Auschwitz in 1943, the separation from her father, her work in an ammunition factory and that she met an aunt and uncle in Auschwitz. She recalls the shared pair of shoes given to her by her aunt that she and a friend used on the death march to Ravensbrück which helped them stay alive. She describes her short stay in Ravensbrück and subsequent deportation on cattle trains to Malchoff in Germany. She shares the vignette of bribing someone with bread to get vegetables to feed a friend who had typhus and thus saved her life. She details their deportation to Taucha, a subcamp of Buchenwald/Dora-Mittelbau near Leipzig and how the Germans left all the prisoners in the open cattle cars during the Allied bombing raid to kill them. Her car miraculously survived and they were then marched on to Nossen near Freiberg. She describes walking out to a German home to get food and receiving a beating when she got back. Shortly after, she and her friend decided to escape the death march. She details their escape to a town where the Soviets were approaching and how they obtained food and clothes there and ended up going back toward Katowice with the Soviets. After the war Adele emigrated to Israel and later to the United States in 19583. She was the only survivor of her family.