Oral History Interview with Sophie Roth

Lola Krause, née Miestschanimoff, was born March 1,1916, in Vitebsk, Belarus. Her father, a successful movie photographer, and her mother, an accomplished pianist from Latvia, were non-observant Soviet Jews. Lola studied music with her mother, learned German from her governess and attended public school in Vitebsk. Rejected by the local Soviet college because of her father’s upper-class status, she moved to Leningrad, studied engineering and worked in film and scientific instrument factories. She married in 1938 and a son was born in 1939.

She details the siege of Leningrad; German bombardment; disease; lack of food and all public services. Her husband died of starvation, her weight dropped to 60 pounds and at three years of age, her son weighed only seven-and-a-half pounds. When her factory was relocated to Samarkand in 1941, she traveled with her son in a cattle car for six weeks, stopping in Tashkent. There she met her uncle, a doctor, who insisted that the fragile child remain with him in the hospital. A year-and-a-half later, he joined her in Samarkand, where she worked until 1946. She married again and the family moved illicitly across European borders, living in Jewish Agency camps in Wroclaw (Breslau), Poland and at Waseralfinger, near Stuttgart, Germany. Another son was born and they survived with food packages from American relatives.

In 1949, Lola and her familyemigrated to the United States. Lola describes their adjustment in Bradley Beach, N.J. and in Philadelphia, working in factories and establishing their own cleaning business. She sold her valuable bracelet to buy a piano, suffering ridicule from poor neighbors, because she believed children had to learn to play an instrument. She had her sons circumcised, sent them to Hebrew school and began to observe Jewish holidays. A visit to Israel in 1972 further heightened her Jewish consciousness.

Suzanne Leibowitz, née Langer, was born May 27, 1928 in Prague and later lived in Novy Jičin, Moldavia. She and her parents were totally assimilated, patriotic Czechs. After the German occupation in 1938, the family fled to the Protectorate of Bohemia where Suzanne first experienced antisemitism. She mentions how the Nuremberg laws affected her. She was forced to quit school and had to work on a farm until 1942.

Suzanne and her parents were sent to Theresienstadt in 1942. She describes conditions in Theresienstadt in great detail. She mentions friction between Jews from different countries and that many Jews when they first arrived believed they were going to a rest home. Warnings about death camps scratched on many of the cattle cars were not believed. She managed to work outside the ghetto on a farm, to help people on the transports, and to trade for food. A Czech policeman - who also saved Suzanne and her parents from being sent to Birkenau - helped her do this.

Suzanne witnessed the charade Germans put on for the Red Cross in 1944. She explains how the concentration camp was transformed. She recalls how a baby born in the camp was hidden and kept alive for one year. She briefly refers to a Catholic prayer group, attempts to educate Jewish children, and plays and concerts performed by the prisoners. In October 1944, the Germans tricked all the men and later the women – including her parents – into going on a transport to Auschwitz, so that only young girls and children remained, to prevent an uprising. Suzanne never saw her parents again. Suzanne describes survivors from these transports, who returned in January 1945, as walking skeletons who had become cannibals.

Suzanne relates her post-liberation experiences. She was involved in a campaign to rid the town of Teplitz Schönau of Germans. She got married in 1947 and came to the United States in October 1948.

Note: Collateral Material available through the Gratz College Tuttleman Library:

Photocopy of first person memoir from Terezin survivor,"Making Moving Pictures" Jewish Exponent, Nov 21, 1988.

Interviewee: LEIBOWITZ, Suzanne Langer Date: April 18, 1981

Andrzej W. Jurkiewicz was born into a Christian family in 1931 in Torun, Poland. His family moved to Warsaw in 1934. His father, a band leader, played for German and Soviet soldiers and was a commander in ArmíaKrajowa, the Polish home army. Andrzej was a messenger, carrying information to underground units.

His father had been helped by Jews when he served in the Polish Army during World War I and during German bombardments in 1940. Later, Andrzej and his family aided Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, throwing food over the walls, giving bread and sheltering children who escaped the ghetto in the top of their apartment building. Andrzej witnessed the burning of the Warsaw Ghetto and machine gun killings in the streets.

In his testimony, Andrzej describes the Polish underground smuggling arms into the Warsaw Ghetto. He describes that some arms were obtained from Hungarian soldiers who were fighting with the Nazis and stationed in Warsaw. He related an incident in which a truckload of machine guns was given to the underground and he and other children helped to empty the truck and hide the guns.

In 1944, Andrzej, his family and other Poles were taken to a labor camp in Vienna, to build air-raid shelters. After the war, he was a music student in Poland, graduating in 1958 and became assistant opera conductor in Wroclaw in 1959. He describes difficulties with the Polish government because his father had stayed in Vienna and it was frowned upon to have family members in the west. In 1972, when he was already the permanent Music Director, he escaped from Poland and emigrated to the United States. He joined his parents, who had arrived in Philadelphia earlier. His sister, an opera singer, remained in Poland.

Fred Hammel was born on Friday, May 13, 1921 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His father was a successful leather goods manufacturer in Offenback. Fred had a very comfortable childhood living in a villa with maids in Sachsenhausen, southern Frankfurt am Main. He attended public school and though the family was a non- observant Jewish one, they belonged to a synagogue.

After 1929 and later in 1932 his situation changed drastically. The depression hit and Nazi storm troopers wearing brown coats arrived. Fred described the mass unemployment, and how the rise of the Nazi party and Nazi youth infiltrated German society. He described the growing isolation of the Jews, and the 1933 boycott of Jewish stores as Nazification grew. He also claimed that Henry Ford financed many of Hitler’s early programs. By 1935 Jews started to leave Germany and Fred was apprenticed to a tanner.

Fred lived through Kristallnacht and provided vivid details. His father was incarcerated by the local police and many of his relatives who were sent to Buchenwald suffered a great deal before being released. By 1938 his mother decided to get him out of Germany to the relatives in the United States via England. Fred was almost 18, the cutoff age. But just in time, his mother arranged for him to join the Kindertransport to England on April 19, 1939. He gives details about the Kindertransport journey. He traveled by train to Zevenaar and Cologne in Germany and to Hoek van in Holland, and by boat to Harwich, England and then by train to Victoria station in London.

Fred worked one year in a tannery in Northampton, England, and then in May 1940 he received his visa to the United States. He met the woman who would become his wife in Massachusetts shortly afterwards. In 1943 Fred was drafted; he served in the US army in the Pacific in Okinawa. After the war Fred and his wife were able to start a family; they have two children and currently three grandchildren.

Kurt Kupferberg was born September 1907 in Berlin, Germany to an observant, middle-class family from Galicia. After World War I, their citizenship was changed to Polish, resulting in their being part of the mass deportation to Zbąszyń, Poland, in 1938. A Nazi policeman had warned them to leave. Kurt describes his return to Germany in 1939, as well as his deportation and experiences in Sachsenhausen in 1939, Dachau in 1940, and Buchenwald in 1941. He details the selections of Dr. Mengele and medical experiments performed on him in Buchenwald, describing his suffering from typhus following an injection of the microorganism under his skin.

As Allied Forces approached Buchenwald, non-Jewish political prisoners sheltered Jews from the S.S. He was liberated by General Patton’s unit July 11, 1945. He married a survivor in Berlin in 1946 and emigrated with his wife and baby to the United States in 1947.

Also see testimony of his wife, Hardy W. Kupferberg.

Jenny Sommer describes her life, education, and Zionist activities in prewar Libau, Latvia in great detail, including some incidents of antisemitism and discrimination. In 1940 conditions for Jews started to get worse. Because her family was upper middle class they lived in fear of the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) and the Russians.

Jenny describes life under the German occupation of Libau in great detail: the execution of all able bodied Jewish men on July 22, 1941; a mass execution of Jews, including her relatives, and how her sister managed to rescue them just before they were to be executed during an Aktion. She witnessed a mass execution of Jews, including her relatives. The Christian superintendent of her uncle’s house hid Jenny and her remaining family in the attic until the round-up of Jews was over. Jenny, her mother and her sister, moved into the ghetto with about 600 other Jews and worked for the Germans as slave laborers. Her sister worked as a nurse in the ghetto. Some Christian Latvians smuggled food to them.

On Yom Kippur night they were taken to Kaiserwald concentration camp, near Riga. Jenny describes their arrival at Kaiserwald, where mothers were forcibly separated from their children. Some women committed suicide. Her sister carried a bottle of cyanide pills. While in Kaiserwald, Jenny did hard labor as part of a Kommando, at a work camp, and later inStutthof. She describes their horrible existence in Stutthof and how she managed to find the will to survive. Her husband worked at Stutthof as an electrician and managed to survive a typhoid epidemic.

As the Russian army approached, the inmates were shipped out of Stutthof on a designated typhoid boat. It was bombed, set on fire and capsized. She was rescued by a German fire boat after ten days without food or water, liberated two days later in Kiel, Germany by English forces. She stayed at a field Lazarett (hospital) in Itzehoe, near Hamburg for six months. She talks about her post-liberation experiences in a German hospital, and finding her husband in Neustadt.