Oral History Interview with Piera Solender

Genya Yetz Kinegal, nee Goldfisher was born December 24, 1925 in Skolne, Poland (Galicia), a small village with 3,000 Jews. The town was occupied by Germans in 1939, then by Russians until 1941. Genya briefly describes the Russian Occupation. When the Germans took over, Genya took on a Polish identity and rented an apartment for a time but eventually was captured by the Germans in the fall of 1942, deported to the Przysucha Ghetto, and then to Plaszow where she did forced labor for a year sewing uniforms. In 1943 she was sent to Skarzysko-Kamienna, in Poland where she worked in a munitions factory making launchers for grenades. In August 1944, she was sent in cattle cars to a women’s camp connected to Buchenwald to work in another munitions factory. All the prisoners in these camps were Jews.

Genya describes the daily routine in the camps, hunger, living and working conditions, as well as clandestine attempts to celebrate Jewish holidays. An attempt to save a newborn baby led to dire consequences for all the women in the camp. She explains the “selections” that determined who would live and who would die. The prisoners formed small groups of four or five to support and protect each other.

Genya along with the other prisoners were driven out of the Buchenwald satellite camp in March 1945. They wandered about on foot until they encountered American soldiers on May 5, 1945. The Americans provided food, clothing and shelter. Jewish soldiers obtained certificates that enabled survivors to go to Palestine legally. Genya found out that her entire family perished. She explains how what she went through still affects her psychologically and physically, and how much was taken away from her during the Holocaust.

Ute Sarah Seiler (Sora Seiler Vigorito) was born in October 1942 in Berlin, Germany. She underwent experimentation as a twin in Auschwitz. Her earliest memory is hiding with her twin sister, Anna, and their grandmother in a dark cellar. When found, they were sent to Auschwitz, where the girls were separated from their grandmother, a most vivid and terrible memory for Ute Sarah. Ute Sarah recalls clinging to her sister and screaming when they were put in a crib in the Children’s Block. A doctor gave them injections in their arms and spinal columns. Anna became very sick, had convulsions throughout one night and never awoke. The next day, she was taken from the crib and Ute Sarah never saw her again. The injections continued for Ute Sarah, who fell ill with tuberculosis and suffered with convulsions for many years afterward.

In 1944, she was liberated by Russian soldiers and in 1945, she was reunited with her grandmother. They lived in Dessau, East Germany until 1948, when she was sent to Wanne-Eickel, West Germany to live with her father. She recalls a long, unsettling and emotionally difficult trip, being separated again from her grandmother. In 1952, she and her father emigrated to Canada. Ute Sarah learned that her mother and older sister, Heidi, had been taken away shortly after her birth. Ute Sarah married and her husband took her to the Cleveland Clinic, where she was finally cured of the convulsions and she has been able to have a normal life. She has recognized Dr. Mengele in photographs as the man who gave her the injections at Auschwitz.

Steffi Schwarcz, néeBirnbaum, was born March 17, 1928 in Berlin, Germany. She was sent to England on March 15, 1939as part of the Kindertransport, with her younger sister and 11 other children. This group was sponsored by Dr. Schlesinger, an English Jew. She briefly mentions her early life, Kristallnacht, and thegeneral atmosphere in Berlin.

Steffi describes leaving her parents and the journey to England. The children were put up in a hostel in Shepherd's Hill, Highgate. In September 1939, thechildren were evacuated and dispersed. Steffi and her sister were sent to the home of a young Christian couple in Cuffley, Middlesex. She contrasts the respectful attitude of the foster parents with the pressure to convert put on the Jewish children by the headmistress of the KingsleyBoarding School in Cornwall, run by the Church of England, where the sisters were sent in January 1940, by the Jewish Refugee Committee. A local woman intervened on behalf of Jewish children in boarding schools. She enabled them to remain Jewish, observe the Jewish holidays in her home, and to get a Jewish education. Steffi mentions that Jewish girls older than 16 were sent to the Isle of Man as enemy aliens. Steffi discusses in detail the long-term emotional effects of the Nazi era and the stay in English boarding schools on herself and her sister. She now lives in Israel with her husband and daughter.

Henry (formerly Hans Arnold) Froehlich was born in August 7, 1922 in Rottweil, Germany. In 1935, the Nazi boycott forced his father to close his shoe store, Henry had to leave school, and the family moved to Stuttgart. Henry describes how the family’s life changed. He talks about Kristallnacht, his efforts to warn Jews to flee and how he avoided arrest. His father was arrested, sent to Dachau, and was killed there one month later. The family had to pay 500 Marks to claim his body.

Henry worked for the Oberrat (the Jewish community office in Stuttgart that processed immigration) for two years. He describes his activities and contacts with the American Consulate, Gestapo and S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst German Security Service).

In 1940, Henry, his younger brother and their mother emigrated separately to the United States. An older brother, crippled since birth, had been placed in a Catholic Home for crippled children and there is some evidence he was killed in a Nazi euthanasia program. In the United States, Henry worked in a CCC program in Berlin, New Hampshire until he was suspected of being a German spy. He was reunited with his family in Philadelphia, where he married, had two children, and became a successful businessman.

Elizabeth Bleiman, née Zuckerman, was born July 10, 1921 into a modern Orthodox family in Ófehértó, Hungary and completed elementary school there. She attended Jewish high school in Debrecen until 1937 and returned home, where all of her family suffered from antisemitic government restrictions. After German occupation in March 1944, they were deported to the Kisvarda Ghetto. She details their transport to Auschwitz in July 1944, her separation from her parents during selection by Dr. Mengele, and the harsh conditions in thecamp, starvation rations and being advised by an elderly German prisoner to try to escape via transport. She describes how she and a friend got into a transport and were moved to Stutthof, the terribly crowded conditions and prisoners getting burned from standing in the sun all day during Appells. She again escaped via transport with a friend, this time to Praust, where they were forced to install cables for a new airport. She describes that French prisoners would write them uplifting notes indicating that the Russians were advancing and to hold on to life. She details cruel conditions of a forced march to Danzig.

Liberated by Russians in February 1945, she was hospitalized for two months with typhus. After recovery, she and a friend foraged for food, shelter and clothing in abandoned houses as they traveled from Danzig to Hungary. In Ófehértóshe found her family home was occupied by non-Jewish refugees but she recovered some gold and other valuablesburied by her father before his deportation. In 1946 she moved to Germany to live in an American displaced persons camp, where she married a Lithuanian Jew in 1947 and they emigrated to the United States in 1949. Elizabeth refers to continuing antisemitism in Hungary despite a new liberal constitution.

Myra Davis, nee Miki Heller, was born July 12, 1936 in Kovno, Lithuania, the only child in an affluent Jewish family. Her parents were Franz and Fanny Heller. After the Russian invasion in 1940, her family was forced to move from their large home to much smaller quarters. In 1940, they immigrated to Japan with transit visas and visas for Curacao, which were not used. Instead, they went to Shanghai, in 1941, after a year in Kobe, Japan, where Myra attended a French Catholic school.

In the French quarter of Shanghai, they lived comfortably until the Japanese occupation forced them into the Hongkew Ghetto. Her father, despondent about their impoverishment, committed suicide. When the war ended, her mother worked for the American Army and met a Jewish colonel, David Bare (phonetic), whom she married in 1947. The family lived in Beijing, China, Linz, Austria and South Carolina, United States. Myra became a translator for the American government, married Arnold Davis and they live with their two children in Boca Raton, Florida.

Recorded at the Rickshaw Reunion - a meeting in October 1999 at the Holiday Inn in Philadelphia of refugees who found refuge in Shanghai during World War II.