Oral History Interview with Harry Zaslow

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.

D.S. son of a Jewish banker and a Protestant mother, was born in Berlin, Germany in 1928. He stayed in Berlin until 1948. He discusses his family’s history, his education and how their life as Jews changed and became increasingly restricted after 1935. Non-Jewish relatives broke off contact until after the war ended.

He briefly describes Kristallnacht. His father’s business and property were confiscated. D.S. and his father were arrested and detained at Rosenstrasse for one week and saw the Rosenstrasse Action by non-Jewish spouses of the prisoners. His family was forced to move into rooms shared with two other families. After the Jewish schools were closed, D.S. worked for the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland for several months until the entire staff was deported in vans. He was spared because of his non-Jewish mother and believes that this is why his father survived. He became Bar Mitzvah in 1941. D.S. and his father were assigned to a labor camp in Berlin in 1942. D.S. resisted the Germans through sabotage while in the labor unit and as a member of a small resistance group composed of young men from mixed marriages. He describes life during the Battle of Berlin and postwar under Russian occupation.

D.S. completed his education in a German high school. He could no longer endure life in Germany and came to the United States in 1948, helped by HIAS. His parents remained in Germany, but his mother joined him after his father’s death.

D.S. cites personal encounters to prove Germans knew what happened to Jews in the camps as well as a few incidents of help from non-Jews. He talks about his feelings about Germans and his determination to fight antisemitism.

Betty Grebenschikoff was born in 1929 in Berlin, Germany and shares her childhood memories of life in Germany and their relocation to Shanghai. She recalls fond memories of family and synagogue life during her childhood. She describes changes that started in the mid-1930s: former friends, now Hitler Youth members attacking her and her sister, having to change schools, and decreased freedom to travel. She describes the difficulty her father had finding a country of refuge and also describes some family members staying behind because they thought things would not get worse.

In 1939, her family, and an aunt and uncle left for Shanghai. Betty details the long voyage. She describes Hongkew, a very poor section of Shanghai where they lived in a one room apartment. Aided by ORT, the American Joint Distribution Committee and the Sassoon and Kadoorie families, they attended Jewish services and enjoyed Yiddish cabarets. Betty attended a Kadoorie school and the Shanghai Jewish School. She details the wartime difficulties, when she was ill with hepatitis and her father suffered from malaria and later when her mother had an intestinal parasite and she quit school to nurse her. In 1948, she married a gentile Russian teacher. They had five children and emigrated to Australia, aided by Sir Horace Kadoorie. They moved to the United States in 1951 and settled in New Jersey. Except for three survivors, all of Betty’s extended familywho remained behind died during the Nazi regime.

In her interview, Betty says she was born in 1939. However, her memoir, Once My Name Was Sarah (Original Seven Publishing Company, 1993) states that she was born in 1929.

Manya Perel, nee Frydman, was born 1924 in Radom, Poland, youngest of 10 children in a traditional Jewish family. Her father had a bakery. She describes her education and Jewish life in Radom, Polish antisemitism, Przytyk pogrom in 1936, and continues with post-September 1939 German invasion. She mentions persecutions, deportation of younger males to Belzec labor camp, 1941, establishment of ghetto in Radom, collaboration of Volksdeutsche and Ukrainians in brutalities, and some help by Jew‌ish police.

She details the August 1942 “resettlement” of Radom Jews to Treblinka gas chambers, with younger, able-bodied persons retained for forced labor in factories near Radom. She describes her efforts to hide her five-year-old niece in the barracks of a Majdanek sub-camp.

She was transferred to Majdanek, then to Plaszow and to Auschwitz. She describes conditions in these camps and the even harsher conditions in Gundelsdorf, Oberfranken, Germany, where slave laborers were taken as Russian Army approached. She experienced near starvation early 1945 during flight with guards to Camps Ravensbrück and Rechlin. She nearly died of typhus after liberation. After she recov‌ered she made her way back to Radom to search for family and found continued antisemitism there. She remembers German promise of safe exit to Radom Jews with foreign passports in exchange for prisoners of war and how they were executed instead.

She went to Stuttgart with the help of UNRRA and the Joint Distribution Committee. After three years of rehabilitation, she emigrated to Montreal, Canada in 1948 and moved to Philadelphia in 1958.

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.

Baroness Elizabeth Kemény-Fuchs, the Austrian-born young wife of the Hungarian Foreign Minister Gábor Kemény, was shocked by the October 1944 persecutions of Jews under the Arrow Cross government. She thus, when approached by Wallenberg, was ready to help him, mainly by persuading her husband to help issue protective passports for Jews and also prevailing upon the German Ambassador Veesenmayer to issue needed visas, all at considerable risk to herself. She outlines how the stress of this, of the official duties, and of a difficult pregnancy caused her to go for a brief visit to her mother in South Tyrol, and how because of the baby’s birth and the Soviet siege of Budapest she never could return there.

She critiques a film made about Wallenberg and her role, describing his actual activities, his special qualities, and his one misjudgment, being that of the Soviets’ motivations. She mentions aid to Jews by Weiss diplomats and by Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio. She asserts that her own involvement was solely humanitarian and that she neither is of Jewish descent nor ever was Wallenberg’s mistress. She insists that her husband was not a Nazi, that indeed he helped save many Jews, and that the unjust idea of collective guilt led to his arrest, condemnation, and execution. She describes her own post-war struggles.

She feels more could have been done, especially by Swedes, to free Wallenberg, doubted that he was still alive, asserts that he should remain “a very bright example” in an ever more selfish world.