Oral History Interview with Andrzej W. Jurkiewicz
Title
Date
Contributor
Summary
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.
none
More Sources Like This
of
Ilse Awin
This is a second interview with Ilse Awin, nee Mechlowitz,eight years after the original - both at a ‘Rickshaw Reunion” of Shanghai survivors in Philadelphia. Ilse Awin was born December 31, 1925 in Munich, Germany to a family who held Polish passports. She describes her early education, the effect of the Nuremberg laws on her family and also details her family’s experiences during roundups after Kristallnacht.Ilse describes her childhood memories of the journey to Shanghai and details their living conditionsin the Hongkew Ghetto as well as her education and need to work. Ilse married Leo Awin, an Austrian refugee, in Shanghai in 1947 and together they emigrated to Canada in 1949.1
The two interviews share the same essential details, with the following additional information:
Ilse describes an incident after Kristallnacht when she was jailed overnight at 12 years old during a roundup of Jews with Polish passports. A Jewish organization intervened to secure her release, but other Polish families were deported, including some of her aunts and uncles.
She describes their Polish passports enabling them to disembark and visit ports during their voyage to Shanghai.
While attending the Kadoorieschool for refugees in the Hongkew Ghetto, Ilse joined a Zionist youth group, preparing for aliyah.
Both of her parents died of dysentery in the ghetto and she was also ill and hospitalized.
See also her 1991 interview #GC00032a and her husband, Leo Awin’s testimony #GC00033.
of
Fred L. Hammel
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.
of
Sonja Samson
Sonja Samson was born in Aurich, Germany in 1931, into an assimilated but observant Jewish family. In 1936 she lived with her grandparents in Luxembourg until she joined her parents who had moved to France earlier. She talks about her family history and her childhood, and speculates about her parents’ reasons for staying in France instead of emigrating to the United States. Her father volunteered for the French army but was interned in 1939.
Sonja and her parents were in Gurs briefly, then lived in Garlin, a village near Gurs until August 26, 1942 when they were rounded up by French police, sent to Gurs and then transported to Rivesaltes in September, 1942. Her parents were deported and her mother managed to keep Sonja from going on this transport with the help of Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE). She never saw her parents again and still profoundly resents this separation. She briefly describes conditions in the two camps and her life and schooling in the villages of Garlin and Gurs, including pressure on a teacher to rescind an honor Sonja had earned.
Sonja stayed in a convent and then an orphanage at Palavas-les-Flots with other Jewish children, under the auspices of the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF) and OSE, then with distant relatives who were in hiding, later in a boarding school in Chambéry, constantly on guard. She mentions a failed attempt to cross the border into Switzerland.
Later Sonja worked as a maid at an inn that was a substation of the ArmeéSecréte (the French underground). She invented a new identity for herself as a non-Jewish war orphan, and participated in Catholic rites to avoid discovery. After she earned their trust, Sonja became a messenger. She relates how her presence of mind foiled a plot by the so-called “Butcher of Grenoble” to blow up the Underground headquarters just after liberation in August 1944. Sonja describes post-war life at the Chambéry boarding school, with her cousins, as well as her search for her parents, and was an active member of Hashomer Hatzair in Paris. She describes how she learned what she needed to do to survive, how the loss of her parents affects her to this day, and how her outlook about religion, Jewishness, and Zionism changed as she matured.
Sonja went to the United States from Sweden on the Gripsholm as a war-orphan in 1947, instead of making aliyah with her friends. She talks about the difficult adjustment to life in the United States, how she managed to get the higher education she wanted, and post-war trips to Israel in great detail.
Interviewee: SAMSON, Sonja Date: June 3, 1985
of
Sara Adler
Sara Adler, nee Apel, was born in Radom, Poland in 1927. Her family was close-knit, religious, well-to-do and involved in community welfare. They had non-Jewish contacts through their lumber business, but Sara attended Jewish school and had primarily Jewish friends.The family fled Radom in 1939 under German bombardment but returned and were put into the Radom Ghetto soon after. Through bribing Polish contacts, her father, her uncle and she were able to live and work in Szydlowiec (Kielce area), a munitions factory outside the ghetto. In late summer 1942, the ghetto was liquidated and the rest of her family was sent to Treblinka. Her father, her uncle and she continued working in the munitions factory until 1944.
With the Russian approach in July 1944 the Germans marched the prisoners 100 miles to Tomaszow under horrible conditions and from there shipped them to Auschwitz. She describes the cattle cars, arrival, selection, unsanitary conditions and Appells. She recounts how she was helped by a fellow inmate. She was sent to work in a string factory in Lichtewerden, Czechoslovakia in the Sudetenland. She describes some of the brutality and also kindnesses of some Germans and others. After the liberation by the Russians, Sara managed to return totally destitute to Radom. Though helped by some Polish locals upon her return, other former Polish friends refused to return the family’s belongings to her. She left with some friends for Stuttgart, Germany, and got married. She emigrated to the United States in January 1949.
Recorded at the 1985 American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia, PA.
of
Diane G. Weinstock
Diane Weinstock, nee Gottlieb, was born in Radom Poland in 1923 into a modern religious family. Her mother was a member of WIZO and Diane attended Zionist youth activities. She describes pre-war antisemitism, the German Occupation, the establishment of the Radom Ghetto in 1941 and her family’s living conditions there until 1942. She also details clandestine education and religious observances that happened in the ghetto.
She and her mother were able to obtain false papers and hide posing as non-Jews in Warsaw from November 1943 until October 1944. Diane describes how after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising she, her mother and several others hid out in a bunker in the demolished Warsaw Ghetto until January 1945. She gives a detailed description of how they managed to survive including being warned by a Jewish father and son that the Germans were scouting the area. They were liberated by the Soviets in January 1945. She returned to her hometown of Radom but encountered severe antisemitism. She then fled to Regensburg, Germany to reunite with a brother and an uncle who survived. Her father perished in the same camp three weeks before liberation. Diane worked as an interpreter for UNRRA, then married and emigrated to United States after the war.
of
Nina Frisch
Nina Frisch, née Dannenberg, was born July 25, 1935 in Stanislawa (Stanisławów), Poland to an orthodox family. The family was moved into a ghetto when she was six years old. She remembers hiding in nearby woods in 1943, surviving on hazelnuts, periodically running from German troops, and that her mother was shot to death and buried there.
Staszek Jaczkowski, a Polish man, who was honored by Yad VaShem for saving 31 Jews, hid Nina and her father in a bunker in the cellar of his house from September 1943 to July, 1944, along with many other Jews, until they were liberated by the Russians. She describes in great detail how the Jewish families hiding in this bunker survived, established daily routines, and tried to keep some degree of normalcy. Mr. Jaczkowski treated the group very humanely and tried to establish an escape route for them after it became extremely dangerous to stay in the bunker. Nina and her father came to the United States in May 1949, because they could not go to Israel.
She explains how she came to terms with surviving when so many others were killed, why she is willing to talk about her experiences, and that she cannot understand how Germans could commit such atrocities and still have a normal family life.
Interviewee: FRISCH, Nina Date: April 22, 1985