Oral History Interview with Fredy K. Seidel

Dr. Nino deProphetis served with the U.S. Army in Europe from November, 1944 to December, 1945. He became the commanding officer of the 81st Armored Medical Battalion, part of the 11th Armored Division of General Patton’s Third Army. In April1945, he led a contingent of 30 men to Mauthausen concentration camp after the Nazis had left. He describes in detail his entry and the sight of a pyramid of approximately 6000 naked bodies in the main yard. He viewed an additional number of thousands of bodies in smaller piles in other parts of the camp and also saw two gas chambers. His unit, equipped to treat only battle casualties, was quickly reinforced with troops that brought an abundance of food. He believes that many of the subsequent deaths of surviving prisoners were caused by overfeeding. He describes in detail the terrible malnutrition and gastrointestinal disease of most prisoners, as well as the immediate disposal of dead bodies into a trench. Soon afterwards, General Patton ordered that local citizens were made to exhume the bodies and rebury them in individual graves.

Dr. deProphetis also supervised the evacuation of patients for the next two weeks until he was transferred to the Gmunden area, near Salzburg. There, he was placed in charge, as Burgermeister of Attensee. He remained with the Army of Occupation for six months, in charge of all battalion vehicles until his return to the United States.

This file includes photos taken at the time of liberation.

Walter Cahn, a Jewish youth of 14, came to the United States from Germany with his parents in 1937. He saw combat in Europe with Patton’s Third Army as an interpreter. Already at the Battle of the Bulge he witnessed atrocities of Germans against Americans and civilians. In May 1945 he came on Dachau, Mauthausen and Wels concentration camps in Germany and Austria. He describes the prisoners’ condition and American efforts to save them. Even food killed many of them. Hungarian guards had stayed at Wels guarding mostly Hungarian Jewish prisoners.

Walter met his future wife, a former inmate of Bergen-Belsen, and returned to the United States in 1946. He expressed his gratitude for being able to help survivors. He speculated on why German culture and industrial know how produced such hatred and killing machinery. The need to fight today’s revisionists made it paramount to bear witness.

Sylvia Schneider, née Balbierer, was born in Cologne, Germany on May 4, 1928 to an Orthodox Jewish family. Her father, a language teacher was born in Belgium of Russian ancestry. Her mother was from Krakow, Poland. A happy childhood ended for Sylvia in 1935-36, when her sister Ruth was beaten by Hitler youth. Years later, while studying nursing in England, Ruth died in 1943 of a brain aneurysm presumably caused by that injury.

On October 28, 1938, the Gestapo deported Sylvia, Ruth and their mother, along with many others with Polish passports to Zbaszyn. She described freezing living conditions in 1938-39 in the no man's land between the German and Polish borders. In May 1939 her family joined an aunt in Krakow and then went to Otwock, near Warsaw for the girls to await a Kindertransport ship to England. They were parted from their mother and experienced unhappy stays in private homes and a children's hostel, but Sylvia names several caring women who befriended her. In 1947, she immigrated to the United States, where she married and had a daughter. She gave up her Orthodox religious faith when she learned that her mother was gassed at Auschwitz and her father died in another camp, but she continued to identify herself as a traditional Jew.

Piera Solender, née DelloStrologo, was born in Livorno, Italy, a town with a large Jewish population. As a child she experienced little if any antisemitism. During the war, she relocated to Milan, where with the help of a Mother Superior from Livorno, she worked as a tutor to a gentile family. In 1942, along with her mother and sister, she moved to Rimini and then Senigallia, where she spent over a year in hiding. Her father and other siblings fled to Switzerland.

By 1943, the German army were throughout Italy. In Senigallia, the women were befriended by Luigi Corleoni. They attempted to pass as Christians, only to later learn the townspeople knew the truth. Piera and her sister ran a local school. In October or November 1943, along with approximately 200 others, Christians and Jews, Piera hid in a tunnel for a month, hiding from Polish troops. Villagers brought water to those in hiding.

After the war, she returned to Milan where she learned her family members who had fled to Switzerland survived. She met her husband, a Polish Jew who survived five different concentration camps. They emigrated to the United States (year unknown).

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.

Born in Wrexen, Germany, in 1919, Fred Stamm was one of four children. Their father was a poor cattle dealer. Fred describes his limited early education in a Jewish school in Warburg and in the local Gymnasium, from 1930 until 1933, when a Nazi decree forced Jewish students out. His two sisters were transferred from Jewish to Catholic school, protected by the nuns.

He illustrates the effect of pre-war Nazi influence in Wrexen. His grandmother befriended villagers with clothing and bedding after a disastrous flood, but at her funeral in 1934 her casket was stoned by village youths. Fred served as an apprentice with a cabinet maker until 1938, when he was forced into a Jewish labor unit.

During the night of November 9, 1938, strangers broke into the Stamm house, ransacking the ground floor while the family, in bed upstairs, was unmolested. The next morning, Fred and his brother were advised to leave town and ride the railroads for several days. When they returned they found all the males in the town, except their ill father, were taken to a concentration camp. Most of them later returned home.

Within the next few months, both brothers left Germany for the United States, sponsored by their cousin, a gynecologist in Philadelphia where Fred quickly found work repairing furniture.

In 1942, Fred and his brother served in the United States Army even though they were considered German enemy aliens. He served in the Air Force as an aircraft mechanic, and refused European duty until granted American citizenship. He was sent to China with a fighter squadron to bomb Japanese-occupied territories. Fred returned to Philadelphia, married, raised two children and became a student of Jewish history at Gratz College.

See also the testimony of his wife, Ilse Stamm.

Interviewee: Fred Stamm Dater: June 1980