Oral History Interview with Rachel Hochhauser

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.

Hans Braun was born in Hanover, Germany on June 3, 1923. His family were German Sintis (a gypsy tribe). They had a small carnival and traveled around Germany during the summer and lived in Bernau in the winter. Nazi persecution started in 1939 and they had to wear a patch with the letter "Z". In 1941 Hans and his father were forced to work for the German army in the armament industry. Hans was suspected of sabotage after accidentally breaking a machine. To escape arrest by the Gestapo, he fled to his grandfather's home in Berlin. Pursued by the Gestapo, he went into hiding, first with friends in Berlin then with an uncle in Eger, and finally with Sintis in Luxemburg who gave him false papers. He was arrested and jailed when he returned home but escaped. Hans describes subsequent arrests and escapes-using disguises and false papers-in great detail.

After his final capture he was put on a transport to Auschwitz with other Sinti families. He was put into the Birkenau Gypsy camp where he was reunited with his family. He describes conditions in the Gypsy camp, his work loading and unloading the dead at the crematorium, and his beatings by guards. One by one his entire family died of typhus and starvation. After he got typhus, he was experimented on in the hospital barracks. He describes how Dr. Mengele tortured children and used them for his medical experiments.

Hans was sent to Flossenbürg Labor Camp where he was again beaten. He was on a death march with surviving inmates for four days and nights just before liberation. Hans and two other men escaped and hid in a village which was defended by the SS. They were liberated by the Americans. Hans lived in Germany after the war and emigrated to Canada in 1980.

Samuel Yassi1 was born in Ostrow, Poland on April 28, 1924. He was the oldest of five children in a modestly middle class family. Sam and his family fled to the town of Poprusch [phonetic] when the Germans occupied Poland. When that area came under Soviet occupation all refugees, including the Yassi family were loaded into box cars and relocated to Siberia -a journey of six weeks duration. The Yassi’s were deported even though they had passports.The family settled in an apartment in Siberia. Sam (15 years old) and his parents were put to work in the forest felling trees;the younger siblings were not. He describes his attempt to get an education instead of working, but after hisfather’s death at age 43 from pneumonia shortly after their arrival, Sam had to return to work in order to receive food rations for the family. He describes the difficult living conditions, bitter weather and restrictions under the Soviet government.

Eventually the family was allowed to move to the south, to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and Sam tells of this journey on the chaotic Russian trains. He describes the next several years as the family tries to survive: being placed on a cooperative farm where they picked tobacco, being moved once again to the White Mountainsto make room for Russian refugees, moving back to the Tashkent area where thefound work building a factory. The family stayed in this last area for about two years during which time Sam managed to get his younger siblings into a Polish Jewish home for children run by ORT, where they were schooled, clothed and fed. Sam details this period of time tells of the death of his mother and brother. Sam then went to the city of Fergana to seek work. He tells of being sent on a huge canal building project which was very hard labor. Leaving there, he went back to Tashkent without a job. He was caught "speculating" but through his ingenuity and luck was not sent to the coal mines, but ended up first learning to be a shoemaker and then to make salt and he became a salt maker.

Sam met his wife, Sylvia in 1946, after the war had ended and were married. They went back to Poland and eventually found his brother and sister. He relates that his brother and sister stayed in Poland and how he and his pregnant wife ultimately made their way to the United States, first being smuggled out of Poland to Austria and then over the Alps to Italy. In Italy they lived in a Displaced Person’s camp where they stayed for three years until they could arrange for the papers to get them to the United States arriving November 21, 1947.

Mr. Yassi indicates in his interview that his former name was SholomYashenofsky.

GeniaKlapholz, nee Flachs2, was born in 1912 in Wisnicz, near Krakow, Poland to a religious family. After the town was ghettoized, she witnessed her baby niece kicked to death by a German soldier. Genia and a younger sister escaped and paid a woman in a neighboring village who hid them for eight days. They had to return to Wisnicz and were then transported to the Bochnia Ghetto, where they worked in a uniform factory for one year, enduring terrible conditions. They moved next to the Szebnie transit camp, where they saw Jews from Tarnow burned alive. Genia reads aloud her Yiddish poem, “In Memory of My Sister, Serl, of Camp Szebnie.” (Included with the transcript are Yiddish transliteration and English translation of this poem. Also included are the Yiddish transliteration and English translation of another poem, “The Death March from Auschwitz.”)

Genia worked for three months as a cleaning woman in a factory at Szebnie before deportation to Auschwitz in 1942, which she describes in detail. She discusses the brutal treatment during her two years in Birkenau. She worked in the ammunition factory from which four youngwomen smuggled gunpowder for the attempted explosion of the crematoria and she witnessed their hanging. She describes in detail a delousing procedure, when she had to stand in the snow, naked, for hours. She also tells of her foot operation, performed without anesthesia. Forced to leave Auschwitz on a death march in January, 1945, she managed to escape with two other women and they found shelter with a Polish woman and her family in Silesia. This family was recognized as one of the “Righteous among the Nations” by YadVashem in 1991. Documentation from YadVashem accompanies the transcript.

Genia was liberated by the Russians, March 28, 1945, and returned to Krakow in search of her family. She was in Displaced Persons camps in Einring, Regensburg and Landsburg, where she met and married her cousin, Henry Klapholz. With their baby son, they immigrated in 1948 to the United States, where they bought a farm in Vineland, New Jersey. In 1955, they moved to Philadelphia.

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.

Judy Freeman, nee Beitscher, was born in Uzhgorod (also known as Ungwar) in the Hungarian part of Czechoslovakia, March 2, 1929. Her father was a baker and she was educated in public school. She describes changes in Jewish life after the German occupation in August 1944. Jews were herded into two temporary ghettos and then transported to Auschwitz in cattle cars. During a selection by Dr. Mengele, she was separated from her family, processed, and taken to Jewish Lager C in Birkenau with 1000 young Jewish girls. She vividly describes the daily routine, roll calls, selections and terrible conditions at Birkenau. She devised several survival skills to keep her sanity and promised herself she would live to tell about her experiences. She was sent to a gas chamber once, survived, and later selected to go to Guben, a small labor camp near Berlin, to work in an electronics component factory, in November 1944. She mentions attempts at sabotage by the slave laborers.

She describes a Death march from Guben to Bergen-Belsen in January 1945, horrible conditions, treatment of prisoners and brutality by a Blockälteste at Bergen-Belsen extensively. She lost her will to live for the first time even though some hoarded jewelry saved her life at Bergen-Belsen during a typhus epidemic.

She was liberated by the British Army April 15, 1945. She recalls actions taken by Brigadier General Grimm Hughes and British liberators vis -a- vis the survivors and the Germans. After liberation, she was hospitalized, returned to her home town, and was smuggled into Munich with her new husband, also a survivor, from Czechoslovakia. They lived and worked in two Displaced Persons camps: Gabersee and Wasserburg for almost two years. They came to the United States September 21, 1947. She explains how they built a life and started a family, after a difficult beginning in New York, assisted by HIAS.