Oral History Interview with Anna Sultanik

Mr. Maas served in the 242nd Infantry Regiment of the 42nd Division, U.S. 7th Army. He was taken on a brief, partial tour of Dachau concentration camp short after it was liberated, and only glimpsed corpses and survivors.

Interviewee: MAAS, Thomas E. Date: December 3, 1990

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.

Rita Harmelin, nee Brauner, was born June 17, 1925 in Bucharest, Romania to Polish-born parents who returned to Poland in 1931. The family moved to Boryslaw an oil town. She describes her secular and religious education and interactions with local Poles and Ukrainians. Rita describes life under Russian occupation September 1939.

Rita's memories of the German invasion of Boryslaw, June 1941 include efforts of local Ukrainians to save Jews. She focuses on successive waves of pogroms encouraged by Germans and carried out by local Poles and Ukrainians. A Jewish quarter or ghetto was established in Boryslaw. There were periodic roundups leading to deportation. BertoldBeitz, a director in the local petrol industry and Mr. Siegemund rescued many Jews, including Rita from the deportations several times. Restrictions increased gradually. Many Jews worked in the Boryslaw petrol industry. A forced labor camp was established in 1943 for the Jewish workers guarded by Ukrainian volunteers. She mentions escape attempts by workers. Rita, her future husband Rolek, and 11 other people went into hiding in the home of a local Ukrainian from March to August 7, 1944 when Russian troops arrived and re-occupied Boryslaw. Her parents were deported before they could accept an offer to hide in a Polish woman’s house. Her mother was killed in Auschwitz, her father survived. Jews from Boryslaw were transported to Plaszow, Poland but the final transport, July 1944 went directly to Auschwitz.

Interviewee: HARMELIN, Rita Date: April 26, 1992

Klara Leizerowski, nee Felker, was born on October28, 1924 in Chovorow, Poland(in Galicia, near Lemberg). Her father was a merchant. Klara describes pre-war Jewish life: her schooling, Jewish observance, keeping kashrut and the various languages spoken by the Jewish intelligentsia. She describes initially disbelieving stories of German refugees regarding anti-Jewish restrictions. She describes the Soviet occupation and how her “capitalist” family was designated as an enemy of the state and were denied citizenship. Many families were deported to Siberia for this “crime” and she explains how they lived in fear during this period of 1939 -41 and slept away from their home many nights. They were permitted to practice their religion and Klara was able to attend pharmaceutical school during this time by traveling an hour to Lemberg.

Klara describes the German invasionin spring of 1941 and the increasing restrictions on Jews. She also describes severalAktions. During one of these, she was hidden with her sisters by a priest and his family for one night. Klara’s parents hid in their basement behind a wall with 10 others. Klara was hidden by a Christian family for two and a half years in Lemberg and other small towns. The rest of her family was shot. During her hiding she was hidden in a wardrobe in a room right next to German soldiers. She describes the stress, lack of food and physical ailments from staying in this wardrobe so many hours at a time.

After liberation by the Soviets, she was reunited with one sister who survived and together they went to Katowice to escape both the Germans and the Russians. She was helped by HIAS and the Joint. She was able to go to Switzerland with her uncle's help (Chief Rabbi in Zurich) and lived there for two and a half years. She later moved to Munich in 1946 to marry Rabbi Baruch Leizerowski. They emigrated to the United States in 1952 with their two sons.

See also the interview with her husband, Rabbi Baruch Leizerowski.

Elizabeth J. Levy, nee Dreifuss, was born in 1927 in Ludwigshafen am Rheim, Germany. She attended a local school as the only Jewish child in classes for Catholics, whom her parents believed were friendlier than the Protestants. She also studied Hebrew in Mannheim.

After the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, her family was ostracized and her father was dismissed as a language professor. She moved with her parents to Leipzig, where her father taught in a Jewish school until Kristallnacht, when he was arrested. He was held at Buchenwald until family visas and tickets to Peru were obtained.

In February, 1939, they left Germany with visitor visas for England where her father taught German language classes for British police and worked at Bloomsbury House, helping German Jews to emigrate. Personal connections enabled his family to avoid internment as German nationals. In February, 1940, they sailed to the United States. Mrs. Levy married in 1949, had three children and became a language teacher.

She believes her religious faith sustained her during her youth and maintains that Jewish people must remember the Holocaust by avoiding intermarriage and abortion, to compensate for those Jews who were killed.

Elizabeth’s granddaughter, Rebecca, age 12 at the time, did an interview with her great-grandmother Lina Dreifuss (Elizabeth Levy’s mother) about her experiences in Nazi Germany. Mrs. Dreifuss is age 102 at the time of this interview.: https://vimeo.com/201457472/5b06ce1456

Margaret Beer, nee Weiss, was born January 9, 1911 in Sighet, Hungary. She details the swift transfer of all the Jews of Sighet in the first month of the German invasion, describing howS.S. troops moved into many Jewish homes, including hers during the German occupation, and how Hungarian authorities identified prominent Jews whomthe S.S. forced to form a Jewish Council. The Germans then confiscated Jewish businesses and personal property. Once ghettoized, the Jews were helped by non-Jewish Hungarians who smuggled food into the ghetto. She describes the evacuation of all Jewish patients from the local hospital, the formation of a Jewish police force, the evacuation of the Jews from the ghetto and the transports to Auschwitz.

She describes in great detail life in Auschwitz including the initial selection, showers, barracks, Appells, work conditions, food allotment, wash barracks, and her selection by Mengele. In July 1944 she was transported to Gelsenkirchen, Germany to work in the Krupp armament industry. She describes the working conditions and Allied bombings. In September 1944 she was transferred to Sömmerda in Thuringia, Germany to work in another ammunition factory. As the Allies drew close in April 1945, the camp was evacuated; Margaret escaped during the death march and eventually found housing in a German village until liberation at the end of April 1945. She describes help from Russian POW’s and later American liberators. Her skills as a dressmaker helped sustain her until May 1946 when she could join her brother who had been living in Philadelphia.