Oral History Interview with Alfred Waldner
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Contributor
Summary
Alfred Waldner was born August 20, 1913 in Cieszyn1, Poland into a religious Jewish family. He briefly describes pre-war life, education, joining his family in their restaurant business and in philanthropic work. He never experienced antisemitism until the German occupation on September 1, 1939. Their home and restaurant were taken and given to local Volksdeutsche. Alfred was forced to work for the Germans, cleaning streets and military barracks. In 1941, in Tarnopol, and in 1942, in Janówska, he wasa driver for Sturmführers. He describes witnessing atrocities. He also shares some incidents when he was able to help people to escape. He describes a narrow escape after being slated for death. In July, 1943, he was sent to Birkenau to work in Buna Monowitz in the IG Farben chemical plant where he describes a selection, sleeping on floors and being near starvation. He recalls that a gentile Polish neighbor from his hometown used to leave him food scraps from his rations.
Alfred survived a forced march in December 1943 to Gleiwitz and then sent to Dora-Nordhausen where he worked in an underground factory producing V-1 and V-2 rockets, together with Russian POWs and Poles. He describes rampant illness, near starvation and abominable conditions. He also describes Russian POWs being hung daily for sabotaging the equipment. Alfred was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where he describes the horrific conditions as the Germans tried to kill off as many Jews as possible. He gives a detailed description of contamination, typhus and dysentery and how they realized that this might be the end to the war. He was liberated in April 1945 by the British Army and then spentseveral months recuperating in a hospital in Celle. In Prague, he met and married a widow with a six-year-old son. Jailed for smuggling American dollars on the black market, he was freed by a sympathetic judge.
He emigrated to the United States in 1946 and worked as a farmer in New Jersey. He moved to Newark in the 1950s, where he acquired a high school diploma and an engineering degree. He became manager of the third largest toy factory in the United States. After retiring to Miami Beach, FL, he organized a small synagogue and helped needy Jews, commiting his life to the practice of Judaism.
See also interview with his sister, Elsa Turtletaub.
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Zina Farber
Zina Farber, nee Bass, one of six children, was born December 6, 1933 in Bialystok, Poland. Her father was a businessman. She shares her very early childhood memories of antisemitism (having been taught to always step off pavements when encountering Gentiles, at the risk of being beaten). She also recounts that the most vivid detail of her early life in Poland is her very warm family.
Having been separated from both parents very early in the war, her eldest brother took care of the family. In 1943, after confinement in Bialystok and PruzhanyGhettos, she and four brothers were sent to Auschwitz. She describes the round up of Jews in Pruzhany, the deportation in open cattle trucks, arrival, selection, and shaving. She describes the absolute miracle that she was not immediately gassed, being dragged out of her assigned truck and put instead with the group of women assigned to hard labor. She was 10 years old. She attributes this miracle to the fact that she was wearing her mother’s coat which made her look older than she was. She explains several times that it is too painful to recount the innumerable stories she could tell about her one and half year experience in Auschwitz. She is able to share descriptions of her constant hunger and fear. She describes fear of punishment – i. e. having her head pushed into a barrel of excrement– and relates the necessity of always wearing her soup bowl on a rope around her neck, even when sleeping. She also describes how the girls took care of each other, reddening cheeks before selections for example. She endured a two-week death march in mid-April 1945 to Ravensbrück and Neustadt-Gleiwitz (possibly Neustadt-Glewe).
Liberated by American soldiers, she travelled to Bialystok, where she was reunited with her father who had survived five years in Siberia. Mrs. Farber was separated several years earlier from her mother, who had been transported to Treblinka. After a failed attempt to emigrate to Palestine from the Landsberg displaced persons camp, Mrs. Farber left for the United States in 1949. Sponsored by an uncle in Philadelphia, she remained there, married and had two sons.
Recorded at the 1985 American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia, PA.
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Max Metzger
Max Metzger was born in 1903 in Gross-Reken, Westfalen, Germany. His family moved to Dorsten, Germany in 1911, where he attended school. In 1937, Max married HeldaNorger[phonetic] and they had a daughter. He went into business with his father.
His first experience with antisemitism was when his father’s cattle business was taken away in 1938. In 1939, Max was taken to forced labor in Burgsteinfurtdigging ditches until January 1942 when his family and others were given two hours to gather their belongings and were told they were being sent to the East. Max describes their journey with their four year old daughter, first being sent to Gelsenkirchen, Germany(a collection camp) where they were held for three days, followed by an ordeal on a frozen train for five or six days, without food, and finally arriving at the Riga Ghetto. Max describes the SS hitting them as they exited the trains and being forced to walk an hour to the ghetto. People who were weak or unable to walk were put on trucks and never seen again. Max describes the conditions in the ghetto and his forced labor in a slaughter house and on the docks. He recalls having to walk past victims who had been hung for smuggling items into the ghetto and witnessed the killing of three Latvian Jews by the Kommandant of the ghetto.
In 1944, Max reports, the ghetto was slowly evacuated. First the old people, then children, then those unfit for work. Max was sent to forced labor inLiebau(Latvia) where he worked for the Wermacht. It was at this time he was separated from his wife who was sent to Stutthof. In February 1945, he and other prisoners were evacuated by boat back to Hamburg, Germany where they were taken to prison. He witnessed the bombing of Hamburg and during the day worked clearing debris.
In April 1945,Max was in a group that was marched 100 km over four days from Hamburg to Kiel because there were not enough trucks to take the prisoners to Bergen-Belsen. Max’s group was sent to a small concentration camp called Hassel that had previously only had gentile prisoners. Max was among 31,000 concentration camp prisoners, Jews and non-Jews, who were freed due to negotiations between Heinrich Himmler and the Swedish diplomat, CountFolke Bernadotte. The Red Cross evacuated them on trucks and took them to Denmark, and from there by boat to Sweden. In Stockholm, through the Red Cross and HIAS, Max learned that his wife had perished during a forced march. One brother and two niecessurvived Auschwitz and one brother survived with Max(having also been sent to Kiel and rescued to Sweden). His parents and other family members perished in Auschwitz.
Max relates that while in Sweden, the king sent buses to the Displaced Persons camp and took the refugees to the opera and dinner.
Holocaust Jewish, 1933-1945, Personal narratives Jewish, Male
Count Folke Bernadotte
Death march from Hamburg
Dorsten, Westfalen, Germany.
Forced labor -- Burgsteinfurt (Germany)
Forced labor -- Liebau (Latvia)
GrossReken, Westfalen, Germany.
Jewish Ghettos -- Latvia - Riga Ghetto
Prison in Hamburg
Red Cross
World War, 1939-1945--Deportations from Germany to Latvia.
World War, 1939-1945--Concentration camps--Latvia-- Liebau.
World War, 1939-1945--Concentration camps--Germany-- Hassel.
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Moshe Moskowitz
Moshe Moskowitz was born in 1922 in Lespitz-Baya, Romania to a merchant family that was traditional but not deeply religious. He studied in a Jewish school, then in a vocational school. He planned to go to Palestine, joined a Zionist youth group and worked in an agricultural community. After the German occupation, Jews were transferred from the villages to the large cities, and many were sent to forced labor camps. His Zionist youth group became active in the resistance. Moshe took on Aryan identity, as did others who had contact with Zionist emissaries in Constantinople and Switzerland. Emissaries from England and the U.S. often attended the resistance meetings. The diplomatic courier who carried letters from the resistance betrayed them, and those who were arrested were sent to camps in Transnistria.
Moshe and his group smuggled children out of camps, gave them false identities, and set up cultural activities until they could be processed to go to Palestine on illegal immigration on ships. In 1944, British-trained parachutists from Palestine landed in Romania and Moshe’s Zionist group was among those who gave them identity papers, living quarters and maps to help them reach Bucharest. They also helped German, American and English prisoners-of- war in Brasov with money, clothing and medicine. After liberation, they rushed to the American and British zones to take Jewish prisoners out of the range of German bombings. Moshe was in charge of the funds through the Landsmanshuteyfor such operations. Groups who were involved in saving children maintained connections in Israel. Moshe emigrated to Israel post-war.
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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
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Herbert Broh
Herbert Broh was born in Berlin, Germany in 1930. He shares his childhood memories of his life in Germany and his family’s journey to Shanghai. Herbert relates several experiences of abusive antisemitism by his friends and his teacher, as well as his impressions of Kristallnacht.
His family left Germany for Shanghai in April of 1939 to join family members already living on Seward Road in the Hongkew section of Shanghai, under Japanese occupation. Herbert was enrolled in the Kadoorie School and later a cheder. He talks about his Jewish education at the cheder and the Yeshiva Katana in great detail, as well as the effect of his growing orthodoxy on his life and his family. He describes his family’s living conditions and life in Shanghai and states he was very happy there. He was only dimly aware that other refugees had a more difficult existence. His father worked for a Chinese factory managed by Japanese; his mother worked as a cook at the Komor Kindergarten.
After Pearl Harbor, his family was evacuated to the Kadoorie School. He mentions interaction between Japanese and refugees. He vividly describes the events during and after the Japanese capitulation and the arrival of Chinese Nationalist and later American troops. He witnessed the departure of the entire Mirrer Yeshiva to Canada in 1946. Herbert and his family went to the United States in 1947. He describes his life in the United States and his feelings about his years in Shanghai. He is now a Cantor in Sun City, California.
Interviewee: BROH, Herbert Date: October 15, 1999
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Elizabeth Geggel
Elizabeth Geggel1, nee Gutmann, was born on August 2, 1921 in Nuremberg, Germany. She was the older of two daughters born to Heinrich and Marie Guttman. She recalls a happy childhood. Thefamily belonged to a liberal synagogue and observed Jewish holidays. Elizabeth’s father a successful merchant, uneasy about the rise of antisemitism expanded the Swiss branch of his business. In 1931 the family left Germany and moved to St. Gallen, Switzerland. Elizabeth details her extended families’ experiences when Hitler came to power in 1933 (some of her uncles and their families moved to Italy and another unclewas sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht,but her father was able to secure his release.)
Elizabeth’s family became Swiss citizens. She relates that there were few Jews in St. Gallen,but she was active in Swiss and Jewish youth groups: scouts and Habonim. In 1939, when her parents decided to immigrate to the United States, they sent her to Englandto learn English and nursing. Her father took ill and she returned to Switzerland where she worked in a Jewish children’s home. He died in December 1939 but she, her mother and sister did come to the United States.
Mrs. Geggel discusses Mr. Sally Mayer, a Swiss businessman who lived in St. Gallen. Somewhat controversial, he was the head of the Jewish community in Switzerland and represented the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee from 1940 to 1945. Mayer was involved in a number of schemes to free Jews from concentration camps. Elizabeth looked on him very favorably and thought him very brave to negotiate face to face with Nazis as he did. She relates her mother’s request to Mayer to get an aunt out of Germany (which was successful) and reads a letter from her father-in-law, David Geggel, sent to the Swiss government thanking them for the hospitality extended to him in 1938 when he stayed in Switzerland for a short time until he could go to the United States. Shedescribes the Swiss refugee campswhich housed Austrian refugees until they could get visas to go elsewhere. Elizabeth remembers that the Swiss Jewish community, herself included, helped them with meals and other services. She believes that the Swiss government was also involved in the effort.
Even though they were in Switzerland, Mrs. Geggel recalls that they still felt at risk, especially with the early successes Germany achieved at the start of the war. Her family left Switzerland in 1941, went to Cuba for a short time and finally emigrated to the United States in January 1942.
Nickname: Lisa.