Oral History Interview with Judy Freeman

Liza Kessler, nee Rak, was born in the Ukrainian town of Vinnitsa, located on the Polish border between Kiev and Odessa. A center of Jewish learning, it boasted 15 Jewish schools. Liza graduated from a Jewish high school, married and had two children. Liza describes how in July, 1941, after a German bombing raid, Polish Jews fled into her town. She heard reports from them that the Jews were herded into the synagogue and burned. Liza with her two children, and sisters-in-law and their children fled with the ‘echelons’ (transports which carried machinery). They boarded a barge for Central Asia. In November, 1941 they arrived in Georgia. They stayed on a kolkhoz (collective farm) until the Germans came. They then fled further East to Uzbekistan, finally landing in Bukhara where they stayed until the end of the war. Liza describes harsh conditions: food rationing and bitter cold. Liza’s sisters and parents were murdered in mass killings.

After World War II Liza went back to Poland with her second husband, a Jewish Polish national. Because it was too much like Russia, they left and were smuggled into the American zone in Austria via Czechoslovakia. Liza and her family stayed in Austria for five years. They were aided by the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration). Finally, in 1950, through an aunt in Philadelphia they received papers and were able to enter the United States as part of the quota.

Interviewee: KESSLER, Liza Date: January 18, 1983

Harry Methner was born in Germany on July 21, 1922 into an observant Jewish family who had moved from the Polish Corridor to Berlin in 1901 or 1902. His father was a cook and later a kosher butcher and sausage manufacturer. Harry shares his childhood memories of his schooling, andchanges that took place in Germany during the Nazi rise to power. He shares sequence of events that led his family to seek options for emigration, including being warned by a non-Jewish acquaintance. Harry describes the damage done to the family store duringKristallnacht.

Harry and his family left Germany with their property and assets frozen on December 26, 1938 on a German luxury liner. He explains how his family got to Shanghai in April 1939 after an attempt to go to Cuba and a 90 day stopover in Singapore where his father worked as a kosher butcher for an Australian farmer. He briefly mentions that Jews on board ship received help from Dutch, English, American and local Jews.

Harry describes living conditions in Shanghai, tropical diseases, as well as life during the war in great detail. His family had almost no contact with the Russian, French, English or Sephardic Jewish communities. He worked with his father selling strictly kosher food and as a photographer’s assistant documenting Hongkew Ghetto inhabitants for the Japanese. He also worked with a so-called “Sanitary Group” that helped Jews who were wounded when the ghetto was bombed by American planes on July 23, 1945. He belonged to a Zionist youth group, BritNoarTzion (HanoarHatzioni), led by Rabbi Teichner. Once he was in the United States, Harry and his friends started a youth group with the same name as they had in Shanghai for Jewish immigrants from middle Europe, which was very successful. He relates how his life changed once the American forces arrived, especially after the Japanese surrender. After the war ended, Harry worked for the American Army.

Harry left for the United States on October 17, 1947 and moved to Rochester, N.Y. He got a job at Eastman Kodak on October 31, 1947 with the help of the Jewish Family Service. He married a Holocaust survivor. Harry managed to get his parents to attend his wedding in New York while they were in Ellis Island on a transport ship bringing Jews from Shanghai to Italy. He was able to bring them to America two years later. The entire family, including his children, moved to Denver, Colorado. Once Harry found out about the concentration camps and the relatives he lost, he realized that there was a place much worse than the Shanghai he once hated.

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.

Ida Firestone, née Hoffman, born February 19, 1929, in Pont-a-Moussou, France, attended public schools and studied music privately, aspiring to be a concert pianist. In 1942, her father was falsely accused of being a Communist and was sent to Drancy concentration camp. He was later released.

In March, 1944, Ida and her family went into hiding. They were sheltered by a teacher, a grocer, a baker, a prostitute and several farmers. Separated from her family, she posed as an orphan, working for a farmer’s wife who treated her cruelly.

Ida hid in forests and in a barn, sleeping with animals and stealing food to survive. Before liberation by the Americans in December, 1944, she found protection on the Gouy family farm. She had lost 25 pounds and suffered with stomach problems which persisted throughout her life.

Reunited with her family in 1945, Ida resumed her music studies and graduated from a conservatory. In 1948, she and her family emigrated to the United States, settling in Philadelphia, where she married Herman Firestone in 1949. She became a piano teacher and a Holocaust speaker in schools and synagogues.

YadVashem has recognized as Righteous Among the Nations Victor and CecilleHergott, Germaine Bour, Lucien Louyot, Emile and GenvièveThouvenin and Victor and Marie (Friboug) Guoy, who protected Ida and her family members.

Poetry and a letter to her mother written by Ida during her wartime wandering is included in this interview.

Rachel Hochhauser, née Swerdlin, was born July 2, 1928 in Krzywice, Poland. She was the only child of a religious family. Her grandfather was Rabbi and Shochet of the shtetl. Her grandmother and parents operated a general store. She describes religious education and a comfortable life, pre WWII, and friendly relations with Polish and Russian neighbors until September 3, 1939. She details restrictive occupations under Russians and subsequent persecution by Germans and local collaborators in summer of 1941. When her father was killed she went into hiding with her mother and other relatives after warnings from non-Jews, including the police Kommandant for whom she worked.

The family hid on several farms from April, 1942 until 1944. They were protected for 20 months by a Catholic farmer’s wife, Anna Kobinska, with whom Rachel continued to correspond after the war. When forced to move for the final time, they went into a partisan-occupied area. She describes the privations of living in a swamp during the winter of 1943-44. A log bunker built for them in the woods in exchange for 20 rubles of gold sheltered ten people until spring, 1944. The Russian Blitzkrieg and deserting Germans drove the group to return to their homes in Krzywice, where her family was welcomed home by neighbors. They adopted an orphan girl found in their house and moved westward to the DP camp at Foehrenwald. Rachel describes her education there in an ORT school. She immigrated to the United States in April, 1951.

Recorded at the 1985 American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia, PA.

Werner Glass, born in 1927, the youngest child of a Berlin pediatrician, emigrated to Shanghai in 1933 with his family and governess. His father, a founder of the Shanghai Doctors Association, practiced medicine in the family’s apartment in the International Settlement. A comfortable life, with many Chinese servants, is described. Werner attended German and English schools, technical college and a French-Jewish university. A vignette relates student resistance to Japanese occupation.

In 1938, his father’s passport was not renewed and the family became stateless. An influx of German refugees, including his grandparents, led to the formation of the JüdischeGemeinde; he details refugee support by the “Joint” and the Sephardic community. He describes his religious education, his Bar Mitzvah in 1940, and his activity in a Jewish Boy Scout troop.

After Pearl Harbor, enemy nationals were interned in a Japanese POW camp, and a ghetto was established in Hongkew for all post-1937 refugees, both Jews and non-Jews. The Glass family, as stateless immigrants who arrived in 1933, were unaffected. In 1942, they were dispossessed by a Japanese officer and moved into one room in a hotel occupied by Chinese and Russian prostitutes. Difficult living conditions, Japanese rules of conduct and penalties for infractions are depicted.

Werner emigrated to the United States in 1947, sponsored by his sister Helga who married an American-Jewish soldier. He completed graduate studies in Chemical Engineering at Syracuse University, married and fathered several sons.

Jack Arnel (previously YashaAronovitz) was born on May 23, 1929 in Vilna, Poland (now Vilna, Lithuania) to a well-to-do Jewish family. His father owned a furrier factory and his mother was a custom tailor. He shares his childhood memories of his war-time experiences. He describes their pre-war life, having a maid, and a governess and spending summers in the country. Jack was a member of Betar. Jack briefly describes how their lives changed under the Soviet Occupation in 1939.

Jack describes that in 1941, when the Germans occupied the area,his family was moved into the Vilna Ghetto and from there to a sub-camp for furriers (who were privileged prisoners called Keilis). There they made fur vests for German soldiers. Jack describes the family’s deportation in 1944 and the fear that they were being sent to their death since they were headed toward Ponary2, but eventually passed it. The women were forced off the trains in Stutthof and the men were sent to LagerKreisLandsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau. Jack was forced to work building underground facilities to manufacture weaponry for the German armies and describes Dachau in detail: beatings, starvation, killings and brutal labor. Later he and his father fled from a transport during an American air-raid and found an advancing American Army unit. They were cared for at St. Ottilien Hospital, an American camp set up in a church in Germany. His mother and sister, Sonia, survived as well and were liberated by the Russians. Jack describes how they were all reunited in Munich. They remained in a Displaced Persons Camp for four years and arrived in the United States in July 1949.