Oral History Interview with Albert Shalet

Alexandra Gorko, nee Paley, was born in Kiev, Russia in 1916. In this follow-up interview she briefly describes conditions in Bergen-Belsen: clothing, food, and her work in an ammunition factory. She reflects on the issue of resistance and her decision to disobey Mengele’s order to inject pregnant women with a gasoline-type substance. She also acknowledges that she refused to cooperate in the act of throwing babies from the windows of the Lodz Ghetto hospital where she was a supervisor and nurse. She refers to her brother’s involvement with a group of 12 men who built a secret radio and dissem‌in‌ated BBC news March 1940 until January 1942 when they were exposed and sent to Chelmno for gassing. In referring to her knowledge of what was transpiring under the Nazis, she discusses the de‌cep‌tion perpetrated by the Nazis as well as the inability of people to believe the reports that circulated even when clothes resembling those of friends and relatives were delivered to the ghetto.

For additional information on Mrs. Gorko's experiences, see the original interview by Eileen Steinberg on August 19, 1985. See also the interview with her husband Anatole Gorko.

John B. Coulston served with the 602nd Tank Destroyer Battalion, Third U.S. Army during World War II. While attached to the 89th Division Fourth Armored Division, he entered Ohrdruf concentration camp. He briefly describes what he saw and how angry it made him. There were only three survivors. One of the survivors - Leo Laufer - told him that shortly before liberation all other inmates were killed on a forced march. He talks briefly how seeing Ohrdruf affected him. After the war, the only people who wanted to hear about Ohrdruf were his fellow service men.

Mr. Coulston was active in Christian-Jewish relations before the war. After the war, both he and his wife were very active in many organizations, including the Speakers Bureau of the Holocaust Memorial Committee of Morris-Sussex area, N. J. [NYWAJ] and the Jewish Christian Task Force of the Diocese of Newark, Episcopalian.

He talks about meeting a man, he considers the first Jewish victim of Hitler, in the United States in 1939. To illustrate why he believes it is so important that his story and the survivors’ stories be told, he relates two incidents - one involving a supposedly non-Nazi German, the other involving American soldiers during the war - to illustrate that prejudice still exists and must be eliminated.