Volume 1, Tracks 1-2
INTRODUCTION

[John Rauch] It’s almost like you’ve lived on borrowed time, a time that really wasn’t yours. In one sense, your life could have ended, but it didn’t.

[Abe Cheslow] Sometime I go to Dodger stadium, and I look around, and I figure what would happen if the government suddenly decided to take the Episcopalians or the Baptists or the Mexicans, or there was an announcement, "All Southern Baptists go to Exit 15?" It’s incomprehensible how you can take everybody that I see and just wipe ’em out.

[Siegfried Halbreich] In school they asking me, "Do you have nightmares?" I said, "Nightmares, dreams, I never do because I live with it, day and night."

[Sonia Meyers] They killed all my mother’s family. They killed my one and only sister—that I can never forgive them. They killed my husband, who never had a chance. He was 21-years-old, a wonderful person, and they killed all his family.

[Cesia Kingston] Why did they take away? Why couldn’t my kids have a grandma and grandpa and uncles and aunts and cousins? Why?
Who had the right to take away their lives?

[Rauch] And so it gives you kind of a strange feeling on life. That this is like a special given time.

[Narrator] Hello. My name is Elliott Gould, and welcome to Voices Of The Shoah. The Shoah was the attempted annihilation of all Jews in Europe during World War II. Voices Of The Shoah includes interviews with people who survived this attempt and tell us their story. They will talk of times prior to the troubles, when life was hopeful and memories bright. They will tell us of more difficult times—of the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, being thrown from their homes, and put into ghettos. They will also tell us of incomprehensible horrors of the death camps—pain, starvation, and a loss of human dignity.
Voices Of The Shoah is accompanied by a book, which includes discussion questions, a time line and overview of the Shoah, photos, detailed maps, and a comprehensive index and glossary.
All the voices you will hear, with the exception of my voice, are voices of those who lived through the experiences they describe. These are firsthand stories, from the people who directly experienced the beauty of peaceful life before World War II and the cruelty, indifference, and terror of war as World War II and the Shoah gathered steam.


Volume 1, Tracks 3-7
LIFE BEFORE THE SHOAH

[Rauch] My name is John Rauch. I was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1930.
[Meyers] I was born in December 6, 1921, in Kalnias, Lithuania.
[Kingston] My name is Cesia Kingston. I was born in Lodz, Poland.
[Shlomo Berger] My name is Shlomo Berger. I was born in a small town in Poland—Krosno, on October the 28, 1919.
[Halbreich] My name is Siegfried Halbreich. I was born November 13, ’09.
[Jack Kagan] The Jewish community settled in our place in 1484: 14,000 people living in the town, 7,000 Jews.
[Berger] Inside the town, practically all Jews. All little stores, all little tailor shops, and barber shops were all Jewish.
[Meyers] My father was an Orthodox rabbi. My mother was a business woman because somebody had to make a living.
[Kingston] In our home was stressed education, so all I had to do was really bring good grades, and I had no other worry in my head.

[Meyers] We had family gatherings every Friday and Saturday. On Friday night after we ate, we always sang zmirot . . . I’m going to cry. I can’t sing it anymore. I . . . that . . . it’s too painful to sing. It’s painful to sing those songs.
Our meals never really got finished until about 10, 11 o’clock at night because my father was, on Friday night he was the king. He was the king most on Passover, but definitely on Friday night.
Life was beautiful, really. I would say that in Kovno, I did not feel any anti-Semitism, because we just never were around non-Jewish people.

[Berger] We lived right next door to the school, and I was a very late sleeper. And I never used to get up from bed before I heard the bell. When I heard the bell ringing, I used to jump up from bed and run into the school, and at the first intermission, I used to come home back for breakfast.
My parents were Orthodox Jews. I became more modern, and we just strayed from the religion. In the house we used to wear kippahs, but going out we already took off our caps.
We wanted to be just like anybody else. We lived in a country where we were second-grade citizens.

[Kingston] We went to Hebrew school. Our main language was Hebrew. Like geography, arithmetic—everything, everything was in Hebrew. My father dreamed of making me a lawyer and go to Israel. Education, education, education. Yah. This was the most important thing always, even in the ghetto—study, study hard. My sister was a good student, too, and they always said this is the only thing nobody will take it away, not even Hitler—nobody. Study, study. And we did.

[Halbreich] I was not so interested in studying. I was interested in playing soccer and tennis. See, I was a very well-known athlete, and this part of me I would say, ascribe it to my survival.
My grandmother used to live in Oswiecim. Later on, the Germans they changed the name to Auschwitz. We knew the city very well because when we were in high school during the summer vacation, my older brother and myself, we went to Auschwitz, and we lived with our grandmother. We had a good time. In Auschwitz I would say, 90 percent were Jews. We stayed there the vacation. We went swimming in the river in Auschwitz. This is where the former military camp was. This was actually Auschwitz, the concentration camp. The Germans in 1940 changed it to a concentration camp.

[Kingston] Summer vacation was just pure joy. We went bicycle riding and playing with all the kids from school. I went to private Hebrew Jewish school. Next to it was the German youth house, and when the boys play ball, and the Germans grab the ball, we were afraid to go and get it back. I stayed within my friends from the class. I didn’t venture very far away. I was always protected.

[Rauch] My dad used to listen on the shortwave radio to Hitler’s speeches. Jewish life just seemed to go on. It was as though it were happening in some remote, distant place.

[Vera Schaufeld] Until Hitler came I think we were very . . . my father was a very patriotic Czech, and there was equality for Jews and for everybody, really believing that everything was all right. I grew up very secure in mainstream Czech life.

[Anonymous] You asked how I occupied myself. This was it: visiting relatives, playing, going to school, skating on Saturdays, visiting Grandmother on Sundays. I’ve got a photo of my mother, father, grandfather, the Sunday before I came to England, and we look so innocent; we’re sitting in a cafe, the trees are in bloom, it’s midsummer, my mother’s got a 1930s dress on and a smart hat. You wouldn’t think anybody had a care in the world, and I was about to get on the train in order to have my life saved. My grandfather was shot in the street a few months later, and my parents went to concentration camps and got killed. And to look at us, you wouldn’t have believed anything was happening.


Volume 1, Tracks 8-16
ANTI-SEMITISM and HITLER’S RISE TO POWER

[Narrator] Following World War I, Germany experienced massive inflation and unemployment. The country had to pay war reparations, which pushed it into economic and social chaos. Hitler promised to solve these problems; he promised jobs and stability, and his solutions gave desperate German people hope for a more stable future. They went along with Hitler and let some of his anti-Semitic policies slide. In 1933 Jews made up less than one percent of Germany’s population, yet, in speech after speech, Nazi leaders led by Adolf Hitler maintained that the Jews were secretly everywhere, controlling everything. In 1933 the Nazi party takes power in Germany—democratically, in an election.

[Berger] While we were going to school we were second-class citizens, and we used to fight all the time with the Polish kids. The Poles, they could smell a Jew from a mile away. When we were young, we used to have bicycles on the road, took off our caps just like any Polish kid. Kids used to run out from their houses and used to call, "Dirty Jews!? and throw rocks after us. They didn’t even know us, but they knew we are Jews. We were dressed just like them. We were acting just like them. Naturally, there were some of them that they were decent and that helped, but without the Polish collaboration Hitler could not accomplish what he did.

[Halbreich] After bar mitzvah, I laid tefillin every time, and I do it up today. I promised in the camp that if I survive, I will lay tefillin, and I do it till now.
Polish anti-Semitism. There were pogroms, beating up people in the streets, in Poland.
We were already hardened, but I never gave up. For instance, we had the kibbutz. Friday night we had services. We sang songs, and all of a sudden came the Poles and broke the windows, broke in, and beat people. The police came only when it was too late. I said, "Next week we do the same thing, but we will be outside, hidden, and when they come we will attack them." And they came, and we beat them up, and from that time no more. There was peace.

[Narrator] With the support of German society and Adolf Hitler, Nazis boycott Jewish businesses, set up the first ten concentration camps, burn books considered a threat to Nazi beliefs, ban Jews from working in government, ban Jews from being doctors in the National Health Service, ban Jews from teaching in public high schools and from studying in public high schools and universities.
What you will see in the next testimonies is how slowly, ever so slowly, from 1933 through 1938, like a cloud approaching overhead that becomes a storm, Jews and many other quote “undesirables” lost all forms of freedom.

[Rauch] By that time, we really began to feel a sense of isolation, a sense of being an outcast. And when the kids who used to be friends would taunt you, and there were certain cliché catchphrases that all the kids picked up from the environment, like ?filthy Jew,? ?dirty Jew,? ?hook-nosed Jew." Kids, some of them, didn’t even know what they were saying. It was just a popular thing to say.
My mother took me to Hitler’s birthday parade in Vienna ’cause I was such a pest and nuisance ’cause all my friends got to go, my former friends, and they got to form this cordon along the streets, and everybody’s all dressed up, it’s like a big festive thing. That’s the only real “rally,” quote unquote, I went to. This was the big cheese coming to town. Saw him between other people’s legs, but I saw him. Well, you know, you had a feeling this person must be somebody extremely important. I mean it’s like a Cecil B. DeMille movie seeing Caesar entering. You got the feeling this is a person of that stature. I should have been his assassin, but too young. I had the opportunity, I had the motive, but I didn’t have the means!

[Fischl] I had sometimes the invitations to the big official balls in Vienna, where it said at the bottom, "We would prefer non-Jews? or something like that. On two invitations. And when I got them I used to say, "You send me this invitation. You know I am Jewish. Why do you send me this invitation?" And he says, "But you aren’t the Je . . . No, we invite you because we want you there."

[Berger] Nineteen thirty-five: university admission for Jews was completely eliminated. So my father said to us, "Kids, you have no other choice. You got to learn tailoring. It will save you from two things: you’ll never get rich, and you’ll never starve." So I started to learn tailoring. And we were four brothers; we were all working in the shop. And we became very successful.

[Eugene Heimler] You could smell the war around us. The relationship between myself and non-Jews became rarer and rarer as the time went on, because I think that they did not feel so safe to befriend the Jew. Also, it was not encouraged by the Jewish people either; we were not sure whether they were not spies for the police. All the suspicions begin to come about.

[Rauch] One of the Nazi myths was that Jews never did any physical work, and that Jews were sucking off the fat of the land, and so they would love to find Jews, especially Jewish women with fur coats and men with business suits—people who used to be bankers, and people who used to be lawyers and rabbis—and force them to do this menial work on the theory that we used to be maids in your homes, and now we have a chance to see you cleaning up our city.

[Narrator] In 1935 the Nuremberg laws were put into effect, which took away Jews’ basic freedoms. Not many could envision at that time that Nazis would attempt to murder all Jews, but one law after another was added. Eventually, 400 anti-Jewish laws would be written. Unfortunately, countries outside Germany, including the United States, had quotas which strictly limited Jewish immigration, leaving Jews who did not make the quota with no place to go for freedom. Jews became increasingly desperate.

[Ilse Sinclair] I think I never went to bed without saying, "Please, God, get me out of here." We knew that we would be killed. How we would be killed we had no idea; I suppose we thought we would be lined up and shot, because we knew of people who had never come out of concentration camps. We knew of people who had been killed. I mean there were more and more people one knew who were never seen again.


Volume 1, Tracks 17-18
EFFORTS TO ESCAPE

[Anonymous] And as things got worse and worse, my mother realized that the whole family had to be got out. My father was an extremely nice man—they both were—but I think she must have been the sort of go-getter of the two, and she decided that heaven and earth had to be moved to get us out. She did all the form filling and all the queuing. And she ran from office to office—and I have a record of all this—and the door closed in her face, and she banged on the door, and she tried and tried and tried. And the fact I know that she made all this effort to save my life has been a big influence on me.

[Rauch] My family was working feverishly to get visa to America.

[Berger] By 1939 we were going to go, our whole group is illegal immigration to Palestine to fight the British. I was full of life, full of desire to go and do that. They used to call me the fascist because I was wearing a uniform, but my parents were too much involved making a living. They were not involved in any politics.

[Kingston] We were still in summer vacation. There were placards all over the city that opening of school years was postponed for one week. Didn’t bother me. We were happy. I mean, one more week of vacation. We did not think much about, because how I visualize war was soldiers from two opposing countries will fight, but of course they wouldn’t do anything to us. We are young, we are kids, we are not politically involved. No. What can they do to us? This was in 1939, end of August. In September, the war broke out.
Why didn’t you leave? That’s the question my son all the time. He’s an immigration attorney. You couldn’t. They didn’t let you. You couldn’t. You just couldn’t.
Everybody was running away. They say that men, they should run. My father went with my cousin. He’s a few years older than I. He took him, and they went towards Warsaw. And I remember my father came back, my mother said, "Why did you come back? Everybody goes to Warsaw." He said he was on the way he saw, I remember like now, he saw a couch, and on the couch was a woman with two children, and the house was burning, and my father said, "Oh my gosh, I left my wife and four children. Where am I going?" And he came back.

[Schaufeld] I can remember very clearly the day that England came into the war. I know that I had just had a letter from my parents saying that they were hoping to go to Holland. I can remember going upstairs into my bedroom, and crying, because I said, "Oh, war has started, and my parents won’t be able to come, and I won’t see them." And Mrs. Fair saying, "Vera, you are a very selfish little girl. It means a great deal more than this. It means that our boys will have to go into the army and all this, and you are a very selfish girl to be crying about yourself at a time like this."

[Narrator] March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria to Germany: 500,000 people of Vienna lined the streets to welcome the Nazis, and all German laws were now applied to Austria. At the end of 1938, Kristallnacht: 150 synagogues destroyed; 7,500 businesses looted; 30,000 Jews rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Four months later, March 1939, Germany takes Czechoslovakia. On September 1st, 1939, Germany takes Poland. Two days after that, England and France declare war.


Volume 1, Tracks 19-22
AT WAR

[Berger] Nineteen thirty-nine, Friday, September the 1st, about 5 o’clock in the morning, we wake up and there is bombarding the whole city. We thought that this is the Polish Air Force are doing exercises. Germany attacked Poland. They demolished the Polish planes. They demolished [an] oil refinery, and within an hour we find out that we are at war with Germany.
An order came out from the Polish military authorities. All young people have to retreat to get into the Polish army. So my younger brother and I and a group of other boys, we started to retreat on foot, and as we were going, the German planes kept attacking us. We walked for about 150 kilometers. Finally, we see that the German tanks are outrunning us. We start to go back. During our walk back home, we heard about the big massacres. The Ukraines were a minority in Poland, and the first thing they did is they helped them kill the Jews. And when we came back, we started to realize what is happening. We just—we had to be afraid to go out in the streets.

[Kagan] The conversation in my home between my father and my uncle, Moishke, was ?Why do we have to run? They are used to work. They are not just business people; so they will take us to a camp. They won’t kill us. What for? We are not members of any party whatsoever. To leave our home and to run somewhere, to search for a piece of bread and to risk our life, there is no reason for it."

[Berger] Orders came out that all Jews have to wear white arm bands with blue Magen Davids. Anybody that is not going to be caught without wearing an arm band will be shot. Jews had to go out to work, shovel snow, cleaning the roads, working in the airport without being paid, without getting anything.

[Halbreich] The Germans start to register us: ?All Jews, young men, from 18 to 45, on a certain day you come to the rail station, and you will go to work for us." The day before the transport supposed to go, I said, "I’m not going." I took a friend of mine, dressed up, got on the train, went through south Germany, through Austria, to the Yugoslavian border. And here we got out of the train full of German military. Not one asked us who we are. We were very well dressed. And here, right from the train, we go up in the mountains, we marched all night with suitcases. We saw the border lights, and there comes this Yugoslavian soldier. We give him to understand we are Polish officers.
They took us down to the border garrison, and here the officers interrogated us.
?Where do you want to go?"
?We want to go to France to join the Polish legion to fight the Germans."
They said, "Oh, you can go where you want to."
They give us a Yugoslavian soldier to lead us through the station. He was a German spy. And instead to take us to the station, he took us to the border and handed us over to the Germans. They arrested us. They took me with the guard on the train . . . A big gate, on top a sign: Arbeit Macht Frei, "Labor makes you free." Sachsenhausen. And this was in October ’39.
And this way I became not only Jew, but the first Pole in a German concentration camp.

[Berger] I left for a city called Tarnov, and that was 1940. There used to be a Gestapo officer in our town. His name was Becker. He used to come into the Judenrat and say, "I need three Jews now. One of them with a shovel." He used to take them down to a field. The guy with the shovel, he told him to dig a grave. He was to shoot the other two, and then he shot him to get him to the same grave. Every day was worse. We were not people anymore.

Volume 1, Tracks 23-30
LIFE IN THE GHETTOS and MASS EXECUTIONS OF JEWS

[Kingston] Rumors were going that they’re going to build a ghetto. Well, you know, we school kids, what’d we know about ghetto? Middle Ages. They not going to make it. It’s not Middle Ages—it’s 20th century. They not gonna do it. I mean, no. What is a ghetto? What do you mean? They’re going to put us where? But let me tell you, they took this street, that street, you have to go, you have to go. You went, and that’s it. We went to the ghetto.
We were allocated one little, small room for six people; 160,000 people in one-and-a-half square miles. All Jews—160,000 Jews, surrounded by barbed wire, German soldiers with machine guns, and guards with dogs.

[Berger] So it came August 9, 1942. It was on a Sunday morning. An order came out, placed all over on every house and through the Judenrat that all Jews—all—9 o’clock in the morning, Monday morning, they have to come up to the marketplace for registration. You can take with you 25 pounds of luggage, and to leave all the houses open. Anybody that will be caught will be shot. Panic started. They started to run. One started to run to the other to try to find out, and nobody knew what’s going on. The Judenrat wouldn’t say anything. The Jewish police wouldn’t say anything. My friends wouldn’t say anything. Nobody knew what was going to happen. My parents were still home. We were still four brothers, my sister and her husband, and two girls—two children, one of 12 and one of 8. Some Jews went into hiding. Took a chance. Our whole family came out to that marketplace for registration. Everybody had to line up and wait.
By 10 o’clock, trucks started to come. The Ukraine SS circled around all the people, made a ring all the way around. They started to separate old people and the rest of the people. They loaded up about ten trucks of old people, which included my father, and they drove away. Must have been about four, five hundred people, and within two hours, they came back empty. We found out later that a mass grave was prepared about 15 kilometers from us, in a forest. They took all the Jews over there, and they mowed them down with machine guns and killed them all there in this grave.

The German prepared one street, which was about 10-to-12 houses. They fenced it around on both sides, and this is what they would be calling the ghetto.
At nighttime, everybody that survived that registration was brought back into the ghetto—15 in a room, 20 in a room, laying on the floors on boxes, one on top of each other. This was supposed to be our life. Next day in the morning they came, and they picked us up to go to work. My mother and my sister and the kids were still standing at that marketplace with another thousand or more people, and at nighttime they marched them to the railway station. They accumulated a full trainload, 180 to a car, locked them up. We didn’t know what happened with them; they didn’t know what happened to us.

The trains left, east. My mom, my sister, and a lot, a lot of relatives, a lot of family, they took them to Belzec. Belzec was not a concentration camp. Belzec was just, they had crematoriums, they came in there, they gassed them, they burned them. I don’t know anybody that came back from Belzec.

[Rose Groves] I never forget the joyful Friday nights, when my father came home from the synagogue and my beautiful mother . . . Often I thought, Why do they want to destroy this very beautiful family life? When we were in the ghetto I thought to myself, We’re never going to have more. We didn’t hurt anybody; my mother was a gentle, loving person. Her main hobbies in life was her garden.

One day a Hungarian person with some German SS entered the house, and we were marched out of the house. And some Gentile people, who were living in the next house, were calling out, you know, "Good riddance of the dirty Jews." And we were marched in the middle of the road to the ghetto.

[Ruth Foster] And in rows of five or six we had to march towards the ghetto. In front of us walked a young couple. The mother had a little child on her hand, and the father an infant on his arms. And one of the SS men came over to this child and said, "Would you like a sweet?" The child was frightened, and the mother tugged on her arm as to say, "Answer him." So she said, "Yes." ?Open your mouth,? and he shot right through her mouth, and the child dropped dead on the mother’s hand, and she had to leave it there.

And my father, who was a soldier in the first World War, said, "I thought we were coming here to work, but I have never expected anything like this." So we drudged along; it was quite a long march in this cold, and we came to the Riga ghetto.

[Meyers] In one room, we were six people. They gave enough space, like in a casket, so what we did is we hung curtains from the ceiling to get privacy.
A piece of bacon was a big thing because you melted it, and you had something to fry, and eggs were very valuable.
People would trade stockings, silk stockings, risk their lives when they take off their yellow stars and trade with the Lithuanians.
I didn’t have anymore a family. All I had is a mother-in-law. She was wonderful to me. We even were together in the concentration camp. She just didn’t make it in the end.
Somehow, I always had a little extra piece of bread, and I would tell her, "How come I still have bread?" She would say, "’Cause I know how to slice it real thin." I think she cheated, that she gave me more than what she kept for herself. Because of her, really, I am alive.

[Kingston] My mother gave birth to this little one in November of 1940. Jewish people usually give names after a dead person in the family who lived long life, and my father said, "Uh-uh, I’m gonna give her the name Hadassa,? which in Hebrew means ?hope." She was the apple of our eyes; we just adored this little girl.
We had boyfriends. We started looking at boys, yes, and after the curfew we met in the courtyard, you know, because you couldn’t go in the street, and we all talk about the things we gonna do after the war, and the war would end very shortly. We were sure of it. The stomach will be full, and everybody will have enough work.

[Meyers] Most of the people that are alive are people that were lucky, one way or the other. I had a few things. Number one, I spoke good German. I also looked like a German, and I was not very bad-looking. Fortunately, all those things were very lucky for people to remain alive.
I know what you’re going to ask me: if I was ever raped. No. And, matter of fact, there were some girls that decided to be nice to a German guy because so her mother could remain alive, or her sister. To rape a Jewish woman or to have sex with a Jewish woman meant to be killed.

[Berger] We had a friend whose name was Nagel. He worked in a German store, and he had connections with a printer, making stamps for the Gestapo. He made up a counterfeit stamp, and he made false documents, Polish documents for me, for my brother, for him, and for somebody else over there. And we decided when the time comes, we are going to run away. One day he comes in, and he says—and that was first part of December 1942—and he says, "Something is happening."
?What’s happening?"
He says, "Too many Gestapo from all towns are coming in." We decided that we are not going back to the ghetto. We’re going to hide overnight to see what is going to happen.
I ran out to the Pole that had our shop. I came into his house, and I says, "I got to sleep over here tonight." He didn’t want me to, but I almost forced him into it. I says, "I’ll sleep in the attic." The rules were if anybody that will hide a Jew, will be shot.
In the morning he goes to town and comes back two hours later, and he says, "The ghetto’s surrounded. They killing the Jews. They taking them out. They’re liquidating the ghetto, and I want you to leave."
I says, "I’m not going to leave now. Not at daytime."
He says, "I’m going to throw you out."
?You throw me out, and I’m going to tell them if I get caught that you hid me overnight." I blackmailed him. Got dark. I went through the fields to the next little village. No baggage, no luggage, nothing. Just that little piece of paper. I went to the train, bought a ticket, and I boarded the train.

[Meyers] Bad rumors travel fast, and we heard that the ghettos are being liquidated. And then, of course, came the day that they killed all the children. I was that day in, like, a hospital. I hurt my foot, and I got an infection, and I was in one of the barracks. A week before, Eichmann came, and he said he wanted to know exactly how many children are in this camp because they don’t get enough milk, so he would bring a cow. And so he counted the children, and a week later two trucks came, and the children were playing, and they took all the children, put them in trucks, and none of us ever know what happened to the children. In the night, when the women came from the work, and the children were not at the gate, I still can hear their screams. Their screams.
When I was freed, I worked a short time in a place where they killed cattle and sheep, and every time the sheep cried, I could hear the mothers screaming when their children were taken.

[Kingston] We fought to keep our sanity. Surprisingly, in ghetto, there were a lot of books. The lady who had the library before the war, she brought it to the ghetto, and we used to, you know, pay a little bit and take out books and read. If you read, you forget the hunger. We made amateur theaters, tap dancing, singing, just anything to try to keep the sanity.
But we had hope. We were young. Of course they will come. Somebody will come. The whole world couldn’t die on us. We tried to meet and talk about Israel, about anything, just not about the hunger.

[Fela Bernstein] You lived on like a . . . on a volcano, you know, you think you’re going to blow up any minute, because your stomach is so full of nerves, from fear, and they emptying out the building, and the Gestapo standing in the streets with dogs. The trams are ready for our building, next-door building, cleaning out. And we still laying there in the quiet, and we hear all this going on, the shouting and the yelling, and it’s getting quiet. We think everybody’s gone, we can hear the trams, chuck chuck chuck away . . .
But there left standing on the opposite side, by the church, the Gestapo and the SS. They come back in the courtyard, and they start ripping down the sheds, and that very big . . . the iron bar going across with a big lock, and they ripped that off with crowbars. And, of course, when they come in, they see us all there. We were discovered.
But there was about 700 or 800 people were hiding, and we were amongst those people. And when they come in they had these big . . . I don’t know what it was, truncheons or wooden sticks. They made us come out, and we all went out on the street; we stood outside the buildings. And one of them was strolling up and down and looking at us lot, and he says, "Who is the oldest Jew here?" So, of course, he saw this man with a beard, he took it for granted he’s the oldest Jew. ?You’re the oldest Jew. Was that your idea, about hiding?" Whack! Whack! He hit him so.


Volume 1, Tracks 31-39
DEPORTATION TO LABOR AND DEATH CAMPS

[Kingston] Couple days later they came to our apartment. I start screaming, "Mother, they’re going to kill us all. You can hear the Germans. They’re going to kill us!? And with the dogs. Till today, I wouldn’t pet a dog for no money in the world. And my mother said, "What should we do with grandma?"
My mother said, "If I wouldn’t be able to walk, would you leave me?" I said, "Of course not! You’re my mother! That’s not even a question." She said, "But you know that she is my mother." We didn’t know what to do with grandma. My mother and my aunt went over to grandma’s bed, and then they dressed her, and we walked to the railroad station.
They squeeze you in cattle cars. There was not such a thing as 60 people or 80 people or 90. They just pushed you in. They said to take so many, so many kilos in a suitcase, your private belongings, and be sure to put your name on it—everything deception. There was a pail of clean drinking water and a pail for toilet facilities. It was August; the heat was unbearable. The pail with the drinking water was gone in five minutes, and the other one was overflowing. A lot of people suffocate and just gave up, and you put them on the side. There were not too many children, but if there was a child, it was sitting.
Finally, they unbolted the cattle cars. You know, cattle cars are higher. They didn’t give you a stool to go down, just jump down, so a lot of people fell down, and it looked like Dante’s Hell. The German running with the big dogs, screaming, "Schnell! Raus!? [?Quick! Get out!?] And the lights! This I remember distinctly even when I was in the United States already years—when I saw those big lights, they scared me.
They said, "Leave those suitcases, belongings where you are. Just go like that."
My sister was a very pretty girl—blonde, blue eyes. She said, "Where am I? Tell me, have mercy in your heart! Tell me where am I!?
One man said to her, "I cannot tell you, but not a nice place."
He said, "Give away the baby, and she has a chance to live."
We said, "Ma, give away Hadassa. She will go in front of us with another little girl of about eight-years-old, Kosha. She will take care. Come with us, Ma." And the little one held on to my mother like chains.
My mother said, "No, I’ll go with the baby and with my mother, but you try to survive and stay together." And we went to the left. And I cried. And I cried very loud. I wanted my mother.

[Barbara Stimler] When we got to Auschwitz, which I didn’t know it was Auschwitz, I did not know nothing about it; I did not know about concentration camps, I did not know what was going on at all. When we got there they told us, "Raus, raus, raus!? They start separating women from men. Cries. It was just terrible. The husbands were from wives, the mothers from sons. And it was left and right, left and right. I went to the right, they told me to go to the right, the SS men.
And can you imagine the screams, the . . . the mother was going to the left, the daughter was going to the right; the babies going to the left, the mothers going to the right, or the mothers went together with the babies . . . Oy, oy! I cannot explain to you the cries and the screams and tearing their hair off.

[Kingston] In front of us was the infamous Dr. Mengele. He said, "Quiet! No screaming. Sunday is the family day." I said to my sister, "I don’t care what day is today. How long can it be to Sunday? Not longer than six days." We went quietly because we have Sunday, and what can you do? You couldn’t say, "I want to go!? And we were ushered in a long auditorium and told to strip naked and hair shaved all over, and had a shower, a real shower with the soap. And after your hair is shaved, and they give you a funny dress, no shoes, no underwear. We did not look human, and that was their purpose, to make us subhuman.
This was Auschwitz, but we didn’t know Auschwitz. Even if they would tell me, I didn’t hear of it. I didn’t know where, what, and nobody knew. And there is a sign, big sign, "Work Makes You Free? in German. So we are young, we’re going to work, and Sunday is the family day.
I did not know that there were crematorium[s] in Auschwitz when I was there. After the war when I went with my daughter, I said, "How could I be so stupid not to see it, not to know? That they are . . ." I saw why: Auschwitz is 19-square-kilometers big, so maybe my block was very far away, and I didn’t see.

[Edith Birkin] With this unbelievable situation of people being . . . you could smell, you could smell these people being burnt. All the time you smelt this . . . it was a little bit like you know, when people used to boil glue, it was the bones that smelt like glue.

[Groves] I closed my eyes, and I made a vow, that whatever they’re going to do to me I want to survive, I don’t want . . . I’ll never let these people kill me, becauseI couldn’t . . . Why, why, why, why? Why are they doing this? And so many of us. I mean, there were a thousand people to one block, and there were 30 blocks in that enclosure. Now, I was standing with my sister and other friends at the wire fence, when all of a sudden we recognized a boy from our town on the other side.
And I said, "Hello Miki. Miki, what’s happening? What’s going to happen to us?"
He said, "Just don’t scream, don’t cry, and stand straight like a pole. They have gassed our parents in the crematorium."
I said, "What is a crematorium?" And he told me that we have no more, our parents have been killed the first night, and he is working there, and you may not never see me again. And this . . . this is what they deny today, that it didn’t happen. But it did, as two weeks later, I and other friends of mine were taken to the crematorium, to clear away the things. We had to clear away the clothes and whatever was in there and put . . . and dig . . . and . . . And that went on for quite some time, working outside the crematorium, taken out in the morning and going back at night.

[Meyers] In the concentration camp, we were digging trenches for German soldiers. Our group was 1,200 women.
We slept on straw, ten women in one tent. And it was cold, and in the morning our hair would freeze to the tent. And we used to laugh at each other because we had maps on our, excuse me, behinds, because every morning when the whistle blew, we had to jump out of our tent and if you didn’t get out fast enough, then you got 25 beatings on your behind. And the Germans were very thorough. The one place they didn’t follow us was in that rest room, which was, of course, on the field, an open space. It’s just that it wasn’t—the air wasn’t very good there.

[Halbreich] They beat us up, and they chased us around. Then you return from work. At night you stretch out on the straw sacks, but they don’t let you rest. They coming through the doors, through the windows with water hoses. They spray you, regardless if it’s summer, winter. They step on you. There was no rest. We always were prepared to accept something cruel, and every SS man had his specialty. So when we saw an SS man coming, we were prepared already, and many people died. We couldn’t resist the Germans. They were heavily armed, and we had no arms, and we were undernourished.

In the morning before we went out, always 10, 15 we assembled. No sidurim, no prayer books, no nothing, but we prayed by heart. There were people who knew it by heart. People were watching, we shouldn’t get caught because they would have killed us for it. We knew every holiday. We didn’t have no calendars. When our holidays came, we got the special treatment. The Germans, they knew, "Oh, tomorrow you have Passover. We will give you Passover." They took away the food. ?Oh, New Year’s! We show you what New Year’s means. We know everything."
They chained us together on the train. And we traveling, traveling. I look out of the window at the stations we passed—looked so familiar to me. Closer, closer to my hometown. An hour later we stop. I look through the window. Auschwitz. So after three years being in other two camps, we didn’t even know that other camps existed. We had no communication, no newspaper, nothing. And here’s Auschwitz. And I know every building.

They tattooed us right away. But not everybody was tattooed; they made selections. And they selected the sick ones, the old ones, and the children right away to the gas chamber, to Auschwitz II, to Brzezinka, to Birkenau. Only the people who were still capable to perform some kind of work were tattooed.

[Meyers] And every morning we would walk to the fields. And I would put my shovel on my shoulder, and I would entertain the women—I would sing. And of course the most popular song was . . .
I can’t sing. Anyway, see this song, "Zol Nicht Camele,? I can’t sing it because . . . But then I would sing funny songs, like I would sing. The Nazi would say, "Yah, yah, das ist sehr gut [that is very good],? because when I would sing, we would walk faster.
All of us were hungry and cold and frozen. We were barefooted, and it was snow, but luckily I didn’t lose any toes, I didn’t lose my feet, and I’m still dancing.
That was my very favorite song because I would mimic the Polish accent. The Polish Jews speak different, and the women would start laughing instead of crying, and I guess this was also helpful for me.
Very often when we marched home, that same guard would pull me out and would say, "The women cry. Why don’t you go in the front and sing?" It was hopeless. The good guards used to tell us, "Why are you suffering? In the end, we anyway have to shoot you all."

[Narrator] The Germans periodically rounded up Jews in the camps where the weakest would be chosen for death.

[Kingston] You know they were quite often selections. They told you to strip naked in front of the Germans, and if you had the smallest blemish, you were not good.

[Meyers] They put my mother-in-law in the bad line. I couldn’t let her go by herself. I just got in.
And this old guard said, "What are you doing here?"
I said, "My mother is here."
He hit me over the head, and he took me out because he said, "We need good workers,? which, in a way, really saved my life. I had mixed feelings, you see. I wanted to go with her, yet I also was afraid. The pull for life is very strong.


Volume 2, Tracks 1-6
RESISTANCE

[Narrator] There are many instances of resistance in the Shoah—prior to World War II, in the ghettos, and even in the death camps. The resistance ranged from spiritual resistance to active armed struggle, from underground organizations within ghettos and camps to partisan fighters in the forests.


[Halbreich] Auschwitz Buna, this is Auschwitz III. The majority of the inmates were Jews. The SS asked us about our professions, and I said, "I’m a pharmacist."

He said, "Tomorrow you start to work in the hospital."

So I, in Auschwitz, never worked anymore, physically. My work, my activities in the camps was only to work against the Germans.

We slowly took over the management. We had, for instance, Jewish kapos, Jewish barrack elders in the office, assistants, secretaries. We had mostly Jewish doctors and nurses. When you come to work in the hospital, you do your job. You treat the people as good as you can. There was no prescriptions, I had 30 to 35 people laying, on pneumonia.

The SS man, the administrator who was responsible for the hospital, once in a while put on my table 12 sulfa tablets—12 is enough for one person a day—so what I do with 12? I have so many people. So we decided we have to give it to the young ones, so I turn to him, I said, "You gave me for one person, but I have another two or three young ones I would like to help." He could take out the gun and shoot me for the question! He walked out, went to the SS camp, and after maybe one-and-a-half hours, I see I have here more tablets, so I could save another two, three. He didn’t talk that much, but he was a decent man.
We tried everything just to cheat them to save lives. This was our purpose.

[Trude Levi] Already by the second day we had an organized sabotage group. At each point there was one person, one key person, to ruin the grenade. The first step was, the leaving out of the sulphur from the mixture. That was in the laboratory, up in the filling room, when there was no control. The next one was damaging the ring of the grenade. I don’t remember every step, but one of the steps was, to damage caps, to not tighten the caps too much.
If there was control, and you couldn’t put it through, then you managed to make a sign, so that the next person knew that they had to do damage to the grenade. And so I was the last one in the chain, and my job was throwing the grenades in a way that the caps got damaged. And I learnt it quite quickly, so that I am quite sure that after a while there was hardly ever a grenade which managed to come through, slip through, in a decent condition, in a usable condition.

[Berger] There came an order from the German labor department that all people that don’t have no jobs have to register to go to Germany to work. And the Poles did not want to go to Germany, so they run away to the forest, and I went with them. And that’s, whether I like it or not, I became part of the partisan group in the forest.

[Narrator] Partisans were underground fighters who resisted after their countries were overrun and occupied by the Nazis. Shlomo Berger became part of a Polish secret fighting group. This partisan group was made up of non-Jews, and because the members were anti-Semitic, Shlomo had to keep his Jewish identity hidden.

[Berger] Most of the time we were not so active. Everybody that’s over there tried to survive and wait for the time that times will change. There were local people there. They had hidden arms. They got their rifles out and their guns, and everybody was given a rifle, and whenever we had a chance, we used to mine the railroad tracks when we saw a military transport. We used to mine it, and whatever we could get out of these transports. We knew guys that used to be army people. They knew how to make small bombs, and we could put them under the railroad tracks, and we left. We were hiding. We picked places that there was a turn around that you can’t see when you are coming, and usually these trains were very little guards with them. This way we had ammunition, we had arms, we had all kinds of things, but basically we did not get involved in combat with the Germans. We tried to be nuisances. We knew the forest like our own hands, so they could never catch us.
I pretended to be a Pole. Nobody knew that I was a Jew. Anytime they were talking about Jews, they said, "The only good thing that the Nazis did is that they killed the Jews." These same Poles that had trouble couldn’t stand the Jews.
We were in these forests till the 29th of March, 1944. By March 1944, the Russian Army advanced, and we joined up with the advancing Russian Army.
[Narrator] There were other forms of resistance. Amazingly, in the camps and ghettos of World War II, some continued their religious observance.
[Halbreich] Two years in Auschwitz during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I organized religious service. In my barrack, in the reeducational camp, we were between 15, 20 men—all day we prayed. Lighted candles. We had one doctor. See, here I break down. Doctor Jonah Silver. He came from France, from Strasbourg. He know to daven everything. We had another, Doctor Yunikover. He was a lawyer from Breslau. He knew the whole Humash by heart. It was very dangerous that we’d be caught. The young people, I told them to watch. They pretend they are working, and then somebody would come from the SS nearer; they would immediately call attention to it.
[Kingston] One day I fainted. It was cold, miserable. One lady had extra sweater, and she gave me. She rubbed my hands and said, "Fight it. Fight it."
Towards the end of November, I went to one of the girls. She was the youngest. A red-headed girl, not more than 12, 13. The reason she lived so long because she was very tall for her age.
I said to her, "I think today’s the birthday of my little sister. Let me celebrate with you. Let me share my bread."
She look at me, and she say, "Cesia, I don’t want your bread, but if you want to celebrate with me, bring me water to wash myself."
I went over to this lady that I knew, and I said, "Give me some water for her,? and she gave me a cup of water. I ran with this cup of water like it would be most prized possession you ever saw, and I gave it to her.
She looked at me with such glassy eyes, and then she said to me, "Cesia, I didn’t mean water like that. I meant water all over my body, all over my face, all over."
I said, "Oh, of course. This you will have right after the war, but take it." Of course she took it, but you know what? Next morning she was dead. Next to me she just gave up. Didn’t want to fight it anymore.
I am an optimist. I believe. I believe strongly. Must be end of the war. My gosh! It’s coming already! I was six weeks in Auschwitz. After six weeks, they send us out.


Volume 2, Tracks 7-12
DEATH MARCHES and LIBERATION

[Narrator] By November 1944, America and other Allied Forces were successfully storming through Europe, and German leaders saw the inevitable end. Nazi officials ordered the destruction of all records and all camps—an attempt to hide as much evidence of the atrocities as possible. Camps were evacuated, and hundreds of thousands of people were marched toward Germany.
[Kingston] One day they came—this was already January ’45—cold, slippery, muddy, every good thing. They said they going to liquidate the camp, and they want we should go on the march. And they knew that the Allied Forces are coming; we didn’t know.
And I said to my sister, "I am not coming, no matter what you will say."
And she said, "All right, if you’re not going to go, I won’t go either. We both going to die. They going to abandon the camp, and we will die as simple as that."
And I couldn’t let it be on my conscience, so I said, "OK." I went over to the girls, and I said, "Come on. If I can do it, you can, too. Come on."
She look at me. She said, "No, but you know what? I have something of great, great value, and I want to give it to you."
And I said, "No, keep it, because after the war you will need it."
She said, "No, it’s too late for me." And I thought, what could she have? She had to have something little. And she produced the smallest little piece of soap you ever saw in your life. She said, "In a free world, you have to be clean. Take it." We embraced, and we cried for a long, long time, and I never saw her again.
We had to march. So my sister is older; she gave me her shoes, and she took some old shmattes from rags and wrapped like everybody else. It was January 1945. It was so slippery and cold—no food, nothing—that if you slipped, you couldn’t get up. There was no way in heaven you could get up.
[Birkin] The Russians were advancing again, and we had to get out of the camp. They didn’t let us there to be liberated, so we had to go on the so-called death march. You had to keep up, because if you fell down they shot you.
[Stimler] It’s snow, and you are walking, walking. No food, no nothing. And when we were resting, we just flopped on the snow. The snow was building up on the shoes. It was just terrible.
[Kingston] We were already starving for five years. At the beginning, they shot you right on the spot, but after the while, why waste a bullet? Let them freeze to death. And we walked for days and days. When the Germans got tired, we stopped, and then we couldn’t get up. That’s why they called the death march.
[Levi] All my energies were concentrated in going on, in holding on as long as . . . I mean if you already felt that this was the end of the war. I thought, well if I got through until now, now I don’t want to die anymore.
[Kingston] Lo and behold, we come to the port. We saw boats. Real boats. “Shnell, raus! Raus! Fast!” So we went.
We pushed ourselves on the boats, like sardines. My two cousins, all my friends, everybody. It was a air raid, end of January, and the Germans with the machine gun, with the dogs, run to the bunkers. I pinch my sister, and I said, "They are human. Take a look. They’re afraid." They left us on the boat.
One of my girlfriends said, "I am not staying on the boat. I am coming down."
So 14 of us, we went down. I, my sister, two other sisters, and we lay down to sleep, we said, for the rest of our life. We wanted sleep. When we got up, the boats were gone. We were heartbroken. Our chance to the free world, to Sweden, Switzerland, but we didn’t know that the boats had holes in the bottom. In an hour and a half, all of them were drowned. My two cousins and all my friends. All of them drowned.
[Meyers] We marched four days, and I think in four days we probably made a whole four miles. My girlfriend and I were horse number one, and we just tied ourselves to the rope, and we were dragging the sleighs. The guard said, and those were his words, he said, "Children, I’m leading you to your freedom." He knew that we will never make the Alps because we just didn’t have the strength. Each time somebody died, he would stop to bury the dead.
Suddenly, it was like tohu vavohu. Everybody was running. Germans were running, guards were running in all directions. There were some barracks, they were deserted, and he told us to lie down in those barracks, and lie flat.
Suddenly, there were two Russians, and believe it or not, one of them was on a white horse, like you say Moshiach. We crawled out on all fours from the tents ’cause we couldn’t walk, and we were crying. And he said, "You are free! Why are you crying?" We were crying because we really couldn’t believe it we were free.
[Foster] We heard distant shooting. Quite a few of us panicked inside this barn. We thought they come and shoot us; they must have shot already others. And the noise came nearer and nearer, and as we then dared to go out we saw all our guards, the SS women and Schultz, being shot. They had to stand in a circle, and the Russians just didn’t ask any questions, and they shot them. Whether anybody was decent or not, they are shot. So that was the hour of our liberation.
[Birkin] We were always imagining that when we are liberated we are going to be dancing, and kissing them—and I don’t think they wanted to be kissed by us, to be honest! We didn’t think of it that way, we didn’t think we were so dreadful, you know, but to them we looked absolutely awful, of course. But all we wanted to do was to lie down and be allowed to be ill.
[Groves] As I was lying on the floor, almost dead, covered in sores, I saw this terribly . . . it seems to be a gigantic tank coming through the gates and hearing a terrible bang, and seeing the German guard falling on the floor, dead. He was shot. This huge tank looked . . . looked like it was reaching up the heaven, it was so big this tank.
And an American soldier came off there, and he just picked me up like a piece of paper and said, "My child, what’s wrong with you?"
I said, "I don’t know, but put me down." I saw for the first time, face to face, a man who was colored, and the gentleness of this person . . . You know, I said to myself, well, I don’t often say a prayer—in Auschwitz I did say once, "If they say there’s a God it’s not true?—I just said a prayer in my own way, "Thank God . . . that they didn’t do to him . . . what they do to my race,? and this is the God’s truth. I came out on my fours, I was free, and I sat down, and I said to myself, "Now what? No mother, no father, no sister, no brother, but I’m free." And I said, "I’ve got to survive."


Volume 2, Tracks 13-20
POSTWAR SICKNESS AND RECOVERY: LOOKING FOR A FUTURE

[Heimler] We heard on the radio that the war was over, which was on the 8th of May, 1945. I went alone out onto a field. I lay down on the warm earth and began to cry, and it was the first time that I had a terrible sadness about the people I lost. And came a young girl, anything between 15 and 18. She saw that I still had my uniform on, so that people would know who I am, that I am not a Nazi or anyone like that. And she knelt down and embraced me and kissed me like a sister. She was very sweet. And these were the first normal human words that I have had.
A number of people from the camps, they heard that in the forest nearby there were some SS men were hiding. And they went to hunt them with guns, and they invited me to go as well. I could not do that. And at the time I thought, Is it a weakness? Is this a strength? Am I soft-headed? Because these murderers deserve anything. I couldn’t do it. Later on I thought about it, and I haven’t regretted it. Even to this very day I feel that I couldn’t adopt the same approach to them as they have to us.
[Berger] By 1945 I came back to my town. I looked around. There were about 25 Jews there. Survivors that came back home. The Zionists were transporting Jews from place to place to get them out of Poland. Nobody wanted to remain in Poland. I came into the committee in Krakow, and I knew the girl that was in charge, and I look at the very beautiful girl that’s standing right next to her, so I made a date with this girl, and I said, "I’m going to marry this girl." She was also a survivor. I decided that it’s time to leave. I took a group from Krakow to Krosno, including her.
We made up some papers, prepared myself concentration camp uniforms. Everybody was wearing the striped uniforms. We went, our whole group, to the train. We were going to Czechoslovakia. In the train, I tore up all my documents, all my pictures, and I put on a concentration camp uniform. We all became Greeks, going home from the concentration camps to Greece. I changed my name to Shlomo Harari. Harari is like Berger. We came to Czechoslovakia. We were traveling in these open trains. People were coming out. They brought food, clothes. We changed the clothes. We came into Hungary. We are in a town that’s called Debrecen.
The 8th of May—firing, shooting, music, bands playing. Germany capitulated. The war ended. We are free people now. About a week, we got married. I met her the first part of May. We got married the 18th of May.
[Meyers] We were freed by the Russian Army. A lot of people who were freed by the Americans died from overeating. We were not that lucky. We didn’t get much food. We were starving even after we were free.
[Birkin] They did establish hospitals, and I went to hospital because I had typhus. And people around me were dying. I could see the look on their faces. I knew when they were going to die. And I refused to look at myself in the mirror. I said, "I’m not going to look in the mirror, because if I see that I am that ill, I’ll die just of the fear of it."
There were German doctors and nurses still looking after us. I remember a German doctor coming, and he looked at me, and he told to these Germans—that was in the evening—?She won’t last till the morning,? about me. And I said to myself, "That’s what you think." That really gave me strength. I was very frightened, I can tell you, but I refused to go to sleep because I thought I’m not going to wake up. So I used to stay up every night and slept during the day. Oh, I just sat up and I wouldn’t go to sleep, and I even tried walking around.
[Narrator] After liberation, many survivors hoped to find family with which to build a new life. Unfortunately, for most that was not to be. Two-thirds of European Jews were killed in the Shoah. Thousands of Jewish communities no longer existed. Jewish life in Eastern and central Europe was essentially gone.
[Birkin] All I remember is just walking out of that station and walking through Prague on my own. A lot of strangers all of a sudden. Of course the first thing I did was to go back to where I used to live. I don’t know what I was expecting, but obviously there was no one there because they were all dead.
There was an office in Prague where you had lists and lists of people who came back, and I went to see these lists every day, hoping somebody would come back I knew, but none of the family came back at all. So I just remember walking around Prague being absolutely devastated, feeling that, you know, I was alone in the world. The hope was gone. Because until then, one had hope: that there would be a small group of people one knew, some relative, some friends, and one would start life again in a community, get married, have children, and . . . carry on. But there was absolutely nobody there whom I knew. I was seventeen.
[Kingston] Oh, we thought, We’re going home. Everybody will be alive. Any Pole what you met on the way and asked, "Oh, all of them are alive,? he said, "Go back to your hometown. They are all, all back."
We came back to Poland. Nobody was alive. I went to school in Poland. Back to school. Yah. So I was the only Jewish girl there. They were saying like this: ?Thank God Poland is without Jews! Thank God! We don’t need them." And I was scared, so I dropped out.
We lived on the second floor. Downstair on the first floor was the young girls and boys on the way to Israel, right after the war. I knew most of them. I knew most of the young girls between 16 and 19, 18. Then 1946 was the pogrom in Kielce, and they kill them all: 42 girls and boys. They cut off their heads.
I said, "I’m not staying one day here. Not a half a day. I’m leaving." Those all were young survivors from the camps.
[Halbreich] In Sachsenhausen, I stayed two years. Then one year in Gross-Rosen, two-and-a-half years in Auschwitz, and the last three months in Nordhausen. So all together, five-and-a-half years. The war ended. The Americans marched in. The second day, I joined the American Army as an interpreter and as an investigator, right the next day when the Americans came, because nobody could communicate with them. I still remember English from high school.
With this friend, with this prosecutor from Poland, I worked with the War Crimes Commission for one-and-a-half year, helping preparing the trial for Nuremberg.
We asked them, "Could we go from camp to camp and collect records?" And we took trucks, and we went from camp to camp and took every piece of paper, the records, because the Germans kept very good records. But not only about the prisoners, but about themself, too. In fact, when we went to the barracks, SS barracks, we removed from the beds the names of the SS. This is proof!
In ’46 I came to the United States. In ’46 started the trial of Nuremberg. I was not at the trial. It gave me some satisfaction. Later on, I was called from United States three times to be a witness at the Sachsenhausen trial, the Auschwitz trial, and the Gross-Rosen trial.
[Meyers] The Communists, the first thing they did is took away three factories. Since I spoke good German and good Russian, I became the manager from one of the big salami factories, and this was my beautiful revenge over the Germans. They were horrified of me. They called me Kleine Shefi, "Little Boss." I was only 24. They were our, more or less, our prisoners, even though they were free to go home. But to work in our factory meant life.
At night when they left, they steal a salami. But I knew how to look. I ask the big chief to give me a Jewish boy as a helper, and I volunteered to stay at the gate when the Germans were going home from the factory, and I would walk back and forth, and I could tell by the face whoever was hiding something, and I would drag them out of the line.
And I would say, "Search him!? One man got on his knees, and he kissed the toes of my shoes, and he begged me to let him work, and I said no.
And then one of my friends said, "If you walk out of there, maybe he’ll kill you."
I said, "I don’t care."
The pleasure of telling him no, you cannot work here because he was stealing a few salamis, I said, I think that brought back my sanity. I could do anything I wanted. I could put him in prison. I could . . . but it was just the satisfaction: Take their work card and tear it in as many pieces as I could, and that would make me happy.
And then they would cry, and they would say, "This is the food I have to bring."
I said, "You at least remain alive, but when you people found something that we were bringing home, you killed us."
After a month, I couldn’t do it anymore. One day I came home, and I was crying.
My girlfriend said, "What’s the matter?"
And I said, "The pleasure of being mean is over. I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to do it anymore."
I knew I was free. After this I was. My husband, who also found out that I was in Berlin, sent for me. With help, we escaped Berlin into Munich, and Munich was the American zone.


Volume 2, Tracks 21-28
A NEW LIFE IN AMERICA and A SURVIVOR’S PHILOSOPHY OF WAR

[Narrator] Most survivors left their birthplaces for a new home in a new country—usually that meant Palestine or America. The transition was difficult. Most lost their entire families; they had to learn a new language, fit into a vastly different culture. They possessed nothing except memories and the desire to start life anew. Most considered themselves as having two birthdays now—the day of their birth, and the day of their liberation.
[Rauch] My father was never the same. He was never the same person who came to America as the person that I remember two years before. A lot of the wind got knocked out of his sails. In Vienna he had a certain stature among his friends, a certain standing in the community, and when he came to America all those things meant nothing. He was very literate in German. Didn’t mean anything ’cause nobody wanted anyone to speak German or to read German. The people in America were beginning to hate all things German. He had to take on very menial jobs. It really changed his personality.
[Halbreich] I will tell you, in spite I was already free, but still I feel a certain pressure. I didn’t feel liberated. What liberated? Where’s your family? All is gone. My sister I found in Germany. She went to Israel, to Palestine illegally, and she has a daughter. It is very hard to adjust. My relatives, they were extremely good to us. They tried so hard. Every day, every evening, parties and parties, and people came from the town, from Cleveland, to meet us.
?How are you?" And questions like, "How do you like America?"
?My gosh, " I said. ?What what what kind of question? I just came in here, I’m just from the boat! What do you ask, ‘How do you like America’!?
And then, "Oh, we suffered, too. We had rations on meat, on sugar,? and this went on for weeks.
Finally, I said to my wife, "I cannot take it anymore. It’s too much. I don’t know where I am! I want peace. I want to settle down and start to work and find myself."
So I sat down with my cousins and said, "Listen, we are extremely thankful. We appreciate your receptions, the way you treat us, but it cannot go on forever. We want to start to work, settle. We want an apartment." My wife was pregnant, and there were many times I was thinking to return to Germany, to go back to Europe. It was hard for me to adjust because I was not a young person. I was already, when I got out I was 35, 36 years old. I was used to a normal, other life.
[Kingston] I liked it right away. I liked it right away. We came to a very loving family, my husband’s family. I know they had probably the best intention, but everybody told us, "Learn English. Be American, but don’t talk about it,? and we were full of pain. We wanted to talk; nobody wanted to listen.
Sometimes I think maybe they didn’t want to face the fact that they were silent, that they didn’t have the power to do anything. Sure, you found a nice person who listened to you, but on the overall, that what it was. The survivors’ community became closer. If one found a job, "Oh, I have another job for you! Come on!?
There was a lot of compassion, and we always talk still. Everybody was extended family. We always talk about, even today. There is no funeral or wedding or bar mitzvah. ?Where were you? So how did you, did you know this one? Did you know that one?" All the gatherings, what are they? We’re still looking. We’re still looking for a familiar face.
[Berger] We came to America on the ninth of May, 1950. The next day, I went to work. I got a job immediately. America was very good to me. Within a year, I had a car. Within two years, I bought a house. I stayed in business for about 25 years—liquor store. Then I retired at the age of 58. I took a real estate class, and I was 13 years working in real estate in Beverly Hills. I have a son, a physician. We have a daughter, a marriage counselor. In Poland, I would have nothing. I would have been a worker all my life, even without the war. This was not a place for young Jewish people to grow up. If I wouldn’t be that stubborn and taking risks and have some luck, I’d have never survived.
Poland was a very anti-Semitic country. There were some good people, but most of them were very bad. The Catholic religion—their teaching was, when you get up in the morning, you say the prayers. You said the Jews killed Jesus. We got to learn to be tolerant. You got to treat all people equal.
[Kingston] High school is free! Do you know how expensive it was in Poland? I couldn’t imagine. And the universities. I mean you work, you have the money, nobody ask you if you’re Jewish and wear a yellow star in front and back. You are free man. And that’s why any injustice, it hurts us because we know what it means to be abandoned and left to die because the whole world, they didn’t care about us. They just didn’t care.
They could’ve bombed and saved 10,000 Jews a day, but they bombed two miles away the I.G. Farben Company. So they didn’t. They stumbled on us.
[Halbreich] My parents died in Auschwitz when they were 57-years-old. What I’m missing is my close family, and my chaverim and chaverot [friends] from the organization.
The majority got killed. But still people got away, and they’re living in Israel.
This was it. This is life. Telling the story, it is not easy. You cannot enjoy it, but I feel it is my duty to go out and to talk to students, to young people, to old people. I don’t care who it is. I’m always ready to help, and I feel by relating it to those people, hopefully it will help, and there will be less anti-Semitism, less hate. And I’m being questioned, asked, "What do you feel? Can this happen ever again?" I said, "Yes. Not only to Jews, but to everyone, and everywhere and every country and anytime." This is my purpose. There are survivors who never opened up, never actually told their children what’s going on.
[Kingston] I have a son and a daughter. I was one of those who could talk. Some couldn’t.
[Meyers] I cannot help it. I will hate the Lithuanians and the Nazis and the Germans as long as I live.
[Halbreich] Like a session like now, for instance, at night for sure because I’m thinking about it, I would start to dream, and often my wife wakes me up: “Sig, what’s going on? You hitting around. You hitting me!”
And in school they asking me, "Do you have nightmares?" I said, "Nightmares, dreams—I never do because I live with it, day and night."
[Kingston] Sometimes they ask me, "Do you hate the Germans?" What a question! I don’t hate the new generation. They didn’t do anything to me, but the one who did to me. Why did they take away? Why couldn’t my kids have a grandma and grandpa and uncles and aunts and cousins? Why? Who had the right to take away their lives?
[Meyers] One of the Nazis, not one of the bad Nazis, the good ones, once said, "You don’t look Jewish. You must have some German blood. Why don’t you go through one of the checkups, and you can get out?"
And I said, "What for? If all the Jews will be killed, why should I remain alive?"
[Halbreich] Going through all those miseries in the camps and the sicknesses, how come I went through so much in my life? But not only bad things, good things, too. We enjoyed, we had a wonderful youth and life in Poland. We naturally had trouble, we had anti-Semitism, but we were able to resist and to fight. And I ask myself, "How come you survived while so many millions got killed?" I said, I have only three reasons: very lucky, a very strong willpower to survive, and number three is the most important: having faith.
Regardless what religion you practice, but you have to feel somebody is leading you, is watching over you. This is the most important thing. This is destiny.
[Rauch] It’s almost like you’ve lived on borrowed time, a time that really wasn’t yours. In one sense, your life could have ended, but it didn’t, and so it gives you kind of a strange feeling on life. That this is, like, a special given time. There is a dehumanization process, which has a lot of psychological impacts. We can’t shop at the store this day. Next day, there’s a rule you can’t go to the swimming pool. Next day, you can’t sit on this bench. Next day, you can’t go to this school. Next day, you can’t buy shoes. Next day, everybody gets two ration coupons to buy bread, but you get only one. I mean, I couldn’t imagine in England or Canada or Australia or United States overnight somebody taking millions of people to camps, but I can imagine scenarios where people begin to set limits for certain segments of the population which are accepted by the majority because it’s not so terrible. So Jews can’t go to Santa Monica beach. Big deal, you know, they can go to Redondo Beach. That’s the dangers to watch out for in a so-called free society. Yeah, I saw that happen. I saw its impact on people. I saw, and my father’s not the only one.
New York in the ’40s was filled with Central Europeans whose life—they were like people on a life support system. They continued to function as human beings, but their whole reason for living had kind of been destroyed because they were like the trunk of the tree with the branches, but the roots were just cut off.
To this very day, I have an abiding fear of black-and-white cars and motorcycle cops. Not because I’m antipolice. I’m a very strong law-and-order person. But the idea of the police as a possible hostile agency never really leaves you. It’s a very strange phenomena. I’m a lawyer, but when a traffic cop stops me, I feel like I’m being grilled by the SS.
Ruth and I were in this hotel, the White Elk. It’s an old inn in Salzburg, and in Austria, when you check into a hotel you have to give them your passport, and they have to check you out with the police. This must have been 1980 or ’81. I gave the guy my passport. Then there was a ring in the hotel room. I picked up the phone, and the guy was on the line.
He said, "Mr. Rauch, I have wonderful news for you. All former Austrians returning to Austria, we have a 25 percent discount on the room rate." So I said, "That’s wonderful." Then I went down, and we got to talking. He said to me, "When did you actually leave Austria?" I said, "1938." He said, "No, 1938? Why would anyone leave then? Those were the good days." I said, "Well, it depends on your perspective. For me, it wasn’t one of the good days." When we got the bill, there was no discount.


Volume 2, Tracks 29-30
CONCLUSION

[Narrator] 5.8 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Gypsies were murdered in the death camps. In addition, 3 million Poles, political prisoners, homosexuals, and others considered enemies of the state were killed in the prison, concentration, and forced labor camps throughout German-occupied Europe. One third of the total Jewish population was wiped off the face of the earth.
Many Jews who survived left Europe to find a new life in Palestine (soon to be Israel), England, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Others were trapped behind the Soviet Iron Curtain, forced to remain in lands controlled by Communist rulers. In the late 1980s, as Communism fell, many descendants of surviving Jews in what was the Soviet Union emigrated to Israel and America.
We hope you will use the accompanying Voices Of The Shoah book and the additional audio material that follows to learn and discuss more about the Shoah of World War II. You can also explore more on-line by going to our Web site.
In the following sections are individual stories: one from a Jewish soldier who fought for the United States during World War II and liberated Dachau; another from two soldiers, Japanese, who fought for the U.S. and are first-person witnesses to prisoners liberated from a subcamp of Dachau. You will hear the heroic story of a Jewish rabbi stationed in Germany in the aftermath of World War II. Then you will hear from a man whose parents survived the war and of the effect the Shoah has had on his life. Finally, you have the opportunity to hear the dramatic and beautiful testimony of Dana Schwartz, who survived the Shoah as a child by hiding in a small, rural village, carefully concealing her religious identity.


Volume 3, Tracks 1-4
Kindertransport: Saving the Children

[Narrator] As the situation got worse in the late 1930s, parents became desperate to save their children, to do anything they could to send their children to safety. Next, you will hear testimonies from a group of people who were _on the famous Kindertransport to England. They were children who went on trains with thousands of other children, most never to see their parents again. Five-year-olds, eight-year-olds, ten-year-olds . . .
[Edith Birkin] It was very, very expensive to get out, and we didn’t have the money. And I remember there was a family, friends of my parents, who were very rich, and my father suggested we all go out together, and they pay, and my father would be paid—and they said no; they didn’t go, and we didn’t go. They died in the camps, and my parents did, and what happened to the money? They were just too mean to help out, and they had a lot of money somewhere. So we didn’t go, but . . . Who could have known what was going to happen? We knew that we were going to have a bad time, we knew people were going to [be] anti-Semitic; we knew that we weren’t allowed _to do anything, and be very, very careful. But who could have predicted something like that?
[Ilse Sinclair] I would queue with other Jews in offices, where I swear they kept us waiting on purpose. You would sit outside some big nob’s office for about four, five, six hours with other Jews, trying to get out of the country.
[Anonymous] My future adoptive mother offered to have all of us over. And each adult had to be offered a job which no English person wanted, and mostly these jobs were domestic or nursing or something of that kind. And she offered my parents _the job of housekeeper, cook, cleaning lady, and my father gardener, chauffeur, et cetera, and I would just come along as the child of the family. So my mother continued her running around and got permission in the end for all of us to go. My permit was to come over on a specific date, in July 1939, _and my parents’ permit was for the 15th of September, and therefore they were able to get me out. But because war broke out on the 3rd, they missed it.
I remember very well preparing to come over to England. My mother explained it all to me. I didn’t fully understand about Hitler, but I just understood we had to get out. We had to keep it from my paternal grandmother because the scenes she would have made would have been too horrific, and she would have tried to stop me leaving. So we had to keep up a charade, to pretend that I wasn’t going, I would be seeing her the next week. And my mother and I packed two cases—we were each allowed two—and into one she put all the family linen. There was a great deal of embroidered work which her mother had done, very beautiful stuff. And I was able to choose my clothes and my toys, and she helped me as best she could. She also taught me a little bit of English, but not very much. I only knew one or two phrases. I was six-and-a-half.
I’ve got a feeling that the entire family saw me off at the railway station, and I do remember there was a deathly silence on the platform, all the parents were seeing off these children. And we had labels around our necks with our names, and I sort of have a feeling I began to feel like a refugee right there. And I remember the pitch silence, but my cousin said that I screamed for my parents, but I have no recollection of screaming at all.
[Renate Collins] I don’t think I did say good-bye, because I had chicken pox, and I was very poorly. I had a temperature of 103 or 104, and my mother literally carried me to the station, and at the last minute she was going to hold me back, and our doctor said to her, "Well, Hilda, you must realize this is the last chance; if she doesn’t go now, she won’t go." So she literally threw me into Tanya’s arms as the train was going out, so I didn’t really say good-bye, and if I did, I probably thought _I was coming back. The German soldiers literally lined the platform, and the parents were allowed to put their children on the train, and then they had to stand back.
[Anonymous] And I can remember the beginning of the journey being quite excited, but gradually, of course, one got tired. And I do remember the train stopping, and the boys got out and played football, and we girls had a picnic, and I’ve been told later that must have been in Holland. And we got to the Hook of Holland, and then we got onto a boat, a very nice, clean berth I remember, and we arrived at Harwich, in England, and were taken down to London.
[Renate Collins] I remember walking up the platform, and there was this gentleman with a black hat, black coat, and a dog collar. And I had never seen anybody like that before, but he had a lovely smile. So I was just given to him and said, "This is Renata,? which was the only bit I understood, and I went off with him, not speaking any of English apart from ?yes? and ?no."
And I can remember being put to bed that first night, having the cuddle and the kiss.
And the next morning I was taken to church, first time in my life, and knowing none of the children there at all. And service ended, and I saw two little girls picking up the hymn books, and Mum looked around, and I wasn’t there. And she looked down the front of the church, and I was with the other two little girls, collecting hymn books, and the three of us were laughing our heads off.
They treated me as if I was their own. They couldn’t have any children. I wouldn’t say they gave me everything, because they didn’t have everything to give, but I was certainly made to feel one _of the family. Everybody accepted me just as one of them eventually. And I go back now, and people used to tell my sons, "We can remember your mum when she was so-high, when she first came,? and after being away from _the place for 35 years, _I still walk down the main street and people remember.


Volume 3, Tracks 5-10
An American-Jewish Soldier AT THE LIBERATION of dachau

[Narrator] The American soldiers of World War II were not fighting to free Jews from death camps; they were fighting to save Europe–to stop Hitler’s relentless push for total global control. In the eyes of the American government, working to free Jews was a nuisance that only delayed victory. At the most, the U.S. government saw it as a side issue, not a goal.
Abe Cheslow was a soldier for America fighting in Europe during the war. He also happens to be Jewish. When his armored division reached Dachau and liberated it _in 1945, the prisoners that were found alive were barely so, many of their minds weakened to comatose states.
Soldiers rushed to find extra food in their army supplies and to feed the survivors, but because the survivors starved for so long, their stomachs had shrunk and the food was—to them—undigestible. Many survivors died from being fed this food. _This is an eyewitness, first-hand account of the liberation of Dachau, from an American soldier.
[Abe Cheslow] My name is Abe Cheslow. I was present at the liberation of Dachau, and I was a 20-year-old corporal at that time, in the 20th Armored Division. _I was born and brought up in Brooklyn, New York, and, of course, I was Jewish because the whole world was Jewish.
In my elementary school, out of 40 or 42 children probably three or four were not Jewish. My father was a kosher butcher. And then, at the age of 18, I was drafted, and for whatever reason, the wisdom of the army put me into the armored force; _I was put into a tank.
And everybody in the division came from Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri. Of the 117 men _in my company, I was the only Jewish kid, and I was the only kid from New York.
In the three years I spent with them, there was never a single instance of anti-Semitism or any prejudice. We knew Hitler was bad, but I had no idea, even as _I went into Dachau, that there were concentration camps. I had no idea.
Armored divisions are very mobile so you go where they need you—17 tanks, _five men to a tank. There were 117 men in a company, and we ended up in the 7th Army in southern Germany, close to the Austrian border, a week before the war ended in Germany. The war ended on May 7th. We had been in combat. We had lost some people, and basically all we wanted to do was stay alive. For the most part, _the German infantry would take off their uniforms and put on civilian clothes and _try to melt into the general population.
The only . . . we were hit badly just outside of Munich. There was a Wehrmacht [Nazi military] antitank school and an S.S. school, and we didn’t know anything about it, and we came merrily down the road, and all of a sudden they opened up with these 88s, which were great antitank guns, and they just wiped us out.
I lost a tank commander who was killed then. Just as the army intelligence, if you _can put the two words together, never told us that we were coming up against an antitank school, they never told us that there was a concentration camp. And we _had no idea. And we came through a picturesque, picture-postcard town, and it was called Dachau. And we had no problem at all, and we just rolled through.
There wasn’t any defense, no problem at all.
And we came across what looked like a college campus. There were _brick buildings set in the pines. It was very pretty. There was a fence around it, but it looked like a prison.
We could hear some gunfire, and so we buttoned up the tanks, and then . . . when you’re in a tank you look through a periscope—that’s the only visibility you have. And as we took the turn through the gates into the camp, all of a sudden we saw Dachau, and we saw the full camp, and it _was much more vivid, much more hurtful than even combat.
It was, it was totally unbelievable. We saw hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies, corpses stacked in line helter-skelter on the ground, some nude, most in black-and-white pajama-type clothes, and _they were literally skeletons covered with skin.
There was a railroad siding, and there were 40 railroad cars, and for _the most part they were full of corpses. They just lay there, and many _of them died before we got there. The only way we knew that they were alive is that their eyes would follow us as we went around the camp because they were so weak, they couldn’t get up or do anything, they _just lay there. But the eyes did follow. And those eyes, those eyes made _you feel guilty.
We unbuttoned the tank, and we jumped out and . . . and, we had seen combat, we’d had friends killed, we’d had tanks burned, we were macho, we were he-men—we didn’t show emotion. And it was probably good, because after being in combat and seeing some tanks blown up, that’s the only way that you could climb up into a tank the next day and go out. And here I saw these guys jump out of their tanks, get down on the ground, cradle one of the survivors, and they cried. And I climbed down, and I cried, and it was the first time in service that any of us cried. And they were deeply affected.
Being normal, typical GIs, the first thing you want to do is help, and we jumped back into out tanks, and we went through everything we owned, and we got cookies from home and candy bars that we had put away for future use and C rations and K rations, and we jumped down and we tried to feed the survivors.
And we didn’t know that that was the worse thing we possibly could have done, and many of them died because of it—and they died terrible deaths. The guilt of killing these people just at the moment of their deliverance was a terrible, terrible guilt. _I did not speak of any of this for more than 40 years.
As we approached, the German S.S. and the German people who ran the camp tried to take off their uniforms and hide, and later they were pointed out. Some _of them put on the pajama-type things and tried to pass as prisoners, which was not very bright because they looked healthy.
If you looked and saw somebody with flesh on his face you knew that he was _a German. We did find some German soldiers dead. Once the Germans threw _their arms away and their uniforms, the survivors rose up and they got chair _legs and pieces of beds and sharp sticks, and they fell on the Germans, and _they killed them.
And the people in my company who had seen acts of bravery or acts of cowardice saw that these skeletons, these corpses almost had killed these Germans, and there was a respect that went to these survivors, and some of that respect radiated back towards me ’cause I was the only Jew that they were familiar with.
The immediate thing was they had to get Germans to bury the corpses because there was fear of disease, typhus. And, of course, every, everybody in Dachau, without exception said, "We didn’t know what went on." Which was ridiculous, because train tracks went through Dachau, and then you couldn’t, you could not have seen it. The road went through. They all swore that no, they didn’t know.
They brought ’em to the camp. And they really didn’t want to have anything to do with it. And they were forced to. And in groups of three or five men, they were taken around, and this is before military government got in. The military government did have people who spoke German and did set down patterns and rules, but before that, we were so angry, we were going to show them what they did.
I remember I had a school teacher, and I had a banker, and I took ’em around, and I said, "This is the, this is the railroad car, this is this, this is this, and this is the oven." One of them turned to the other and said, "Hey, this would be a good thing for my mother-in-law." And he said it so flippantly that I wanted to kill him. And it’s the, _the only time that I lost my cool, and I jumped on him, and I would have killed him. _I started to bang his head against the, and they pulled me off. And that’s the, and, _and that’s probably one of the, maybe two or three times in my whole life I lost my temper. But I would have killed him, there was just no question about it. And they didn’t, they were not angry with me, the military people were not angry with me because I had done it. I mean there was justification in their eyes.
As I talked to them in Yiddish they asked whether I was a Jew, and they took my arm, and it was like a letter from home. As long as I was a Jew and as long as I was there, nothing bad would happen to them.
I would imagine when you’re in the last stages of malnutrition, and you look up, and here are these big tanks and soldiers carrying guns and speaking a language you’re not familiar with . . . When you did talk to them, their conversation and their interest and everything else focused on survival, or ?Have you seen my daughter?" ?Have you seen my wife?" ?Can you do something for my friend here?" ?Have you seen _my children?"
The same medics that patched us up when we got wounded, they were the first medics to try to treat these people, and then the evacuation hospitals came in, and instead of the food that we gave them, they set up IVs. And we went on; there wasn’t anything else for us to do.
For the most part I buried it for many years. My wife and my children knew about it, and some of my friends knew about it tangentially. They knew I was there, but it was never talked about. It’s funny. When I was in the army, and we were having a rough time, somebody who was very wise, I have no idea who he was, but I remember he said, "After this is all over, many years later, you will forget all the rotten, miserable, chicken things, but when you do remember, you’ll remember the funny parts."
Four years ago I got a phone call, and there was a reunion. And there was about _40 or 50 people got together in South Dakota. We didn’t talk about combat, we didn’t talk about the people who died. We . . . we didn’t talk about Dachau. So, we buried it.
My daughter is a school teacher, and she called and she said, "Would you speak?" _I said, "Of course." I found it was cathartic. It was the first time that I talked about it, and it has been very good. I had mentioned in one of the schools the fact that we _fed the survivors, and that they died and we felt so terrible and that, that I carried this guilt.
And then I got letters from the children. And one letter in particular, a young girl said, "You shouldn’t feel guilty, you were trying to do good. And you have to keep on doing this,? and so forth, and it made it all right, and it made it lots better.
I have fewer nightmares now. I feel better about it than I did ten years ago, because ten years ago it was still bottled up. And I knew it was there, but it was _my little secret. I was always less sure of politics, because, I came home and Roosevelt was still the great savior, and later I found that, that they knew about _the concentration camps, and they didn’t bomb the railroads going in. They didn’t take the 20,000 children that could’ve come in. So, I don’t trust government as _much as I should, and it isn’t just a fanciful type thing. I know that some of these people could have been saved.
Sometime I go to Dodger stadium, and I look around and I figure what would happen if the government suddenly decided to take the Episcopalians or the Baptists or the Mexicans or there was an announcement, "All Southern Baptists go to exit 15."
There are times I look around if I’m in the temple. I look around at all the faces and try to figure out how could you take all of these faces, all of these people, the children and the infants and the grandfathers and so forth and put ’em away just because . . . had Hitler won, all of them would have been killed.
It’s incomprehensible how you can take everybody that I see and just wipe ’em out because they’re Jewish. It could happen unless we watch out for it.


Volume 3, Tracks 11-16
Two Japanese-American Soldiers Witness The HORRORS of Dachau

[Narrator] For ten years before World War II, Japan was attempting to expand as a military world power, and as Hitler gained greater power in Europe, Japan saw _a chance to attack the United States while attention was diverted. Japan surprise-attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.
Americans became suspicious of anyone of Japanese descent, thinking they could _be spies. Soon after, people in the United States of Japanese decent, whether full American citizens or not, whether born in the United States or not, were labeled enemy aliens and put into detention camps.
This is the story of two Americans of Japanese descent, who were drafted to join _the American Army to fight in World War II. Their family remained in U.S. detention camps while these two men risked their lives in Europe, helping to free others. As you will hear, they are important witnesses to the results of the torture and murder committed by the Germans and their conspirators in World War II.
[Fred Yasukochi] My name is Fred Yasukochi. I was born in Garden Grove, California, in 1920.
[Lawrence Mori] And my name is Lawrence Mori, born in 1918, in L.A. And my father was always a farmer.
[Yasukochi] I was drafted into the U.S. Army in the month of December 1941. _And came into induction center through Fort MacArthur in San Pedro. I was not forced to evacuate into the camps as the rest of the Japanese-Americans were. _I was already in the service. However, it was doubtful in my mind that they even wanted us there to begin with, because they had already issued a proclamation _or something that Japanese-American GIs were to be discharged and were to be treated as enemy alien.
[Mori] I was inducted into the army in ’41, on April the 8th. I was in Fort Ord until the war started. Where we had to leave California and ended up in Texas, Camp Walters. From there I went to Mississippi, where they started the 442nd Combat Team, and I ended up as a _522 Artillery. And from there we went overseas.
[Yasukochi] Don’t forget that the 442nd was first started out in 1943. At that point, they decided to keep the Niseis in the military. We were named to be part of the 442nd Combat Team. I was in Camp Robinson, Arkansas, and that was a training center for the infantry. Nobody ever bothered us there. Meaning that I was not blunt end of a joke or anything else. I was treated as a human being. But the only trouble was, that the officials of the Army and the captains were not too sure as to what to do with us or how far we should go. We were busted off—all of our stripes were taken. No promotion was visible. And as a consequence, we were turned out to mow lawns and chop trees and fight the chiggers out in Arkansas.
[Mori] While we were in Texas, we were in the army, but they didn’t know what to do with us. We got up in the morning, we went up to the hill, we got this rock and moved it about 50 yards to the other hill. Next day we went back to same hill and got that rock and moved it back to the hill that we moved it the day before. And we did that for I don’t know how many weeks or months. The one good thing about it, we didn’t need to pull KP because they didn’t trust us in the kitchen. So that was the only good part of it. And toward the end we went around collecting trash. Then they finally came out that they are going to form some kind of combat team. So we landed in Italy, I think the town of Brindisi, that’s more or less at the bottom of the boot.
[Yasukochi] But, we ran into resistance later on.
[Mori] Well, that was for me, was really a mixed feeling. You wasn’t sure exactly why we were there. Especially when our parents was in a relocation camp, and on top of that, when we did come out the army, which way were we going? We weren’t sure of anything because our parents were in the relocation camp; how long they going to be there? And what’s going to happen after the war? We were never sure _of anything.
[Yasukochi] As I viewed the situation, I could not see ourselves getting away from this prejudicial attitude that the American people were going to have against us. We had to have the tools to fight that. What better than to have an army record behind you that you could show to these guys? I had some property in the United States, in California, that my father gave me, it was about a 40-acre lemon orchard. And he issued it to me when I was, when I turned 21, which, which I did that year that I got in the service. And so one day, on the front, in Italy, there’s a guy from the state of California that wanted to see me, and he wanted for me to accept a summons to appear in court, because they wanted to escheat my property. Here, on one hand, _I had the rifle and here, on the other hand, I had this order to appear in court because I was considered an enemy alien. You know, right then and there I thought, my goodness, you know, what do they expect a poor guy like me to do? In the first place, he’s trying to prove himself as, as an American. Fighting for, for his country. _On the other hand, the country is trying to take everything he’s got. But, fortunately, in this particular case, it’s known as the Oyama case, we all got together and pooled our resources so that we could fight the California government and the United States. And we won.
[Mori] We were what, six month in Italy?
[Yasukochi] Yeah, just about.
[Mori] And about six month in France, and I think we ended up about six month in Germany.
[Yasukochi] From the standpoint of knowing about the atrocities that the Germans committed, nobody told us about that. And we weren’t looking for prisoners to begin with. And as a consequence _I was very surprised to hear about it and to see what they intended to do with the Jewish people. When we got into northern France _the only thing they told us to look out for was heavy water, and, of course, we didn’t know what heavy water was. The only people that knew what heavy water was, was the scientific people that knew all about it. Well, is it heavier than ordinary water? What is this?
[Mori] While we were fighting we came across all kinds of town, _but we just go through, it was just another town, in other words, each town we took, we figured, well, we’re getting closer to the _end of the war. So Dachau wasn’t just another subcamp, city, or whatever, we didn’t know. Rather, I didn’t know.
[Yasukochi] Didn’t know it was a prison camp.
[Mori] Yeah. Until afterward. After we went through the Siegfried Line we kept going, kept going, and going. We came across this subcamp says Dachau on it. And at that time it was just another camp, another city just like any one until went through it. When I saw the camp, and there was a flat ground. There were three piles on the _flat ground, which was, oh I’d say eight-, ten-feet high. And I was so curious about what that was because I saw that toward the evening. So I went back the next day, and the gate—they had a chain, but there it was broken—so I went through there; there wasn’t anybody in there as far I saw. But I went to see what this pile was. It _was all political prisoner, that died, I guess, it was all stacked up. And then I saw this building . . . and I had to, I was so curious to see what that was, and that’s where I saw the oven. There were three that I saw. That was right before the war ended, I was maybe just, gee, I couldn’t tell you exactly, maybe a week, ten days, before the war ended. That was toward the end of the war.
[Yasukochi] Could’ve been prior to that. Because there was snow on the ground.
[Mori] Yeah.
[Yasukochi] I don’t know about German weather, but snow always gives me the creeps. But anyway there were prisoners around there, but they were kind of hiding in the barracks, and you couldn’t see from the outside in. It was all dark inside. But the cadavers that was piled up, was almost too much for me, _so I didn’t get as curious as Sergeant Mori. It was something that really turned you, turned your stomach over.
[Mori] Well, the worst scene I saw was . . . there was a horse that stepped on a mine, and it blew almost all the inside out. And these liberated prisoners, they didn’t eat anything for I don’t know how many days ’cause they were on the forced march, so when they found out they were liberated and they were hungry, the first thing they saw was the horse meat, and they were on this horse just like flies. Raw meat, and _I said, "Jesus,? but I guess when you’re hungry, there’s nothing you can do about it. And it was snow all over the place, but they were, they were eating the horse flesh.
The next morning I saw ’em, and, gee, there must’ve been I don’t know how many there dead. Because they overate. Well, my reaction was, if you were a human, that you could do such a thing to another human is something that I couldn’t understand, you know. It’s just like a human maybe killing a chicken or a pig. Why did they have to kill these people?
[Yasukochi] I think the German psyche was such that we couldn’t understand it. The inhumanity was something that really opened your eyes. You couldn’t understand why people would do the things that they did. Seeing these poor prisoners, about 90 pounds, 95 pounds, a guy that was originally 6-foot something. To see a man so shriveled up and everything; the man could be 19 or 20 years old, and he looked like he was maybe 80 or 90 years old. You know, you’ve seen hunger of different magnitudes and in order to comprehend just exactly how, how famished and how hungry these people were, was to have them looking for food.
I was on a truck that had a borderline piece of metal that goes around the truck. _We of the 442nd and 522nd were notorious for exchanging stuff with other troops because we needed our rice, we didn’t care what happened, you know. ?Here’s some sugar, here’s some cream, here’s some powdered milk, whatever; take it, but give us the rice."
So in this manner, of course, we accumulated a lot of rice, and what happened was that as the rice bags open up, you get some around the fringe of the trucks, you know where it’s level. And this truck that I was on, it actually happened to been hauling rice the morning before. We had traded somebody for sugar, and we took the rice.
But to see a poor fella with just the palms of his hands go around the truck and just, just whisked that rice into his palms so that he could keep it, was something to behold, because _we didn’t think anything of a handful of rice. But to him it was really a life and death matter. Because he could clean it up, _and cook it, and make soup out of it. And it was precious to him. And he asked me for other subsistences, and at that time Patton’s army was going so fast that we missed a lot of times to pick up our rations, and so the ration was very scarce. We still had to fight a war, and as a consequence we couldn’t give ’em all of our rations, but we did give them everything that _we could.
When I first saw these men in striped pajamalike clothing, _I couldn’t figure out who these people were.
[Mori] We got word that we gonna come to this subcamp where they’re taking all the prisoner out of Dachau, and they’re forced marching ’em out, so we knew that most of the camp’s going to be empty. We came across all these prisoners and there were, they didn’t know exactly to bow to us or to bow to the Germans. You know they weren’t sure if they were freed or not. For a while they didn’t know which way to go now.
When I got into camp I didn’t see anyone. Only the dead bodies. The only contact I got with a political prisoner was a few days after they were marched out of the camp. They were all skinny; they were skin and bone. And they only had that pajama in that ice-cold weather. Gee, they were freezing, and their reaction was they were so happy that they were liberated. And I guess some of the weak ones, to them it didn’t make any difference, they were too weak to even understand that they were free.
After the war finished, there was a lot of problem with the Polish prisoners because they got finding wine and schnapps, and all that I guess, and they became wild, because now, they were prisoners for such a long time, and now they’re free, they didn’t know what to do with themselves, I guess.
[Yasukochi] I think one of the basic problems with the prisoners at that point was that retaliation was foremost in their minds. If they had a rifle I guess they would have killed every German that they could see. We were trying to keep them apart from the others. But basically we’re combat troops; we didn’t have any time for that. We had to go to a point near Linz, Austria, and that’s what we were told to do. So, after surveying what we had seen there, then we all got back on our trucks and took off for other parts of Germany.
[Mori] You know this interpreter that we had, which used to be a political prisoner, and he was asking us, that he couldn’t understand that we, being Japanese, what were we doing in the United States Army? You know, especially when he heard Japan was fighting United States. First he thought we were Chinese _or something else, and it took him a while for that to sink in, _I guess, because we told him we were born in the United States.
We heard about it, but we figured that’s a lot of rumors, that they were killing these political prisoners because they were Jewish. I says, "Oh, no, they can’t be doing that kind of thing, they must just, was just rumors during the war." Then when I did see all these dead bodies, and then these oven that I saw that was so big and I saw three of ’em in a row and, gee, I guess this is where, it’s really true that I heard about, you know, soon as they died, they just threw ’em in there and cremated ’em. But until I saw all that, I wasn’t sure that it was true.
So all these people said they were forced marched out of the camp. And they been walking for—I think one bunch that we caught up was about three days or four—they said they never stop, they just keep marching them. And one day they woke up and then, then the guards that was around them they are gone, and they couldn’t understand what happened to them. Toward the end, you see dead body or torture or this and that didn’t seem to do anything to us. Not to me, it didn’t. At the beginning it did, but toward the end of the war we saw that every day.
[Yasukochi] I think that the attitude of the U.S. troops toward the German people and the German Army changed from place to place. I imagine that if the German troops had stayed there, the guards and so forth in that camp, we would have probably slaughtered ’em. There’s no question about it. But, as it happens, there wasn’t anybody there. And nobody could tell _us where they were. It just proved to me, basically, how cruel man can be towards another man.
[Mori] What I saw with my own eyes in, in this subcamp is all these dead bodies, and they all had these striped pajama-type clothing on. And there was snow on the ground, and it happened. And I saw it.
[Yasukochi] As far as the crematoriums are concerned, that really sends chills up and down your spine, when you see that, ’cause you know what’s there. But what Lawrence saw, and what I saw there were that they didn’t get rid of the bodies in time to clean this place up, and they’re stacked up like cordwood.
[Mori] The Germans did not expect the United States soldiers to be coming through there that fast. So they didn’t have that much time to get rid of all that evidence that they left behind.
[Yasukochi] Now, when you see it, I’m sure that the place has been cleaned up. And although there are some pictures and signs showing you how they were abused, it doesn’t ring the same bell. Because of the fact there is no stench there, there’s no blood on the floor. I would like to see all of us speak up if you think unfairness is being done. Maybe we’ll be able to keep our democracy. Who knows?


Volume 3, Tracks 17-30
An American military rabbi brings _hope to newly freed survivors

[Narrator] Rabbi Abraham Klausner is an example of an individual who went against accepted norms, who acted contrary to U.S. Army regulations to make a difference, to save lives. Rabbi Klausner entered the U.S. Army in 1944 and was placed at Dachau after its liberation in 1945. His true story is an astounding reminder that one person can make a difference.
[Abraham Klausner] My name is Klausner, Abraham Klausner. I was born _in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1915. Our class, which was 1943 class, was rushed because we were designated as replacements for rabbis who were going into the Chaplaincy Corps.

Academic year was over, I was accepted into the military. That would be in 1944.

When Dachau was overrun, the army immediately brought in hospital units. It wasn’t the kind of a liberation where you say, "You’re free now, and go wherever you want to go." The army came in and locked the camps immediately so that the people who were the prisoners of the Nazis were now, not prisoners, but were confined. They were behind barbed wire, and there were guards. Some got out of the camp during the hectic first days, but basically the camps were locked.

A great number of the people were ill. And a lot of ’em in the first days of liberation stuffed themselves with food and whatever they could get their hands on, and this turned out to be detrimental to them.

Part of my job was to bury the dead. In the first days, the dead were laying all _over the place, especially where the boxcars came in with them from different parts of Germany. During the day, the trucks would take the bodies out and place each _one in a grave, and then I would come out in the evening and recite a service, say some words. Nobody was there, I was the only one present, except a short while afterwards one of the liberated asked me if he could come with me, and I would _take him.
In Dachau I felt strange, it was overwhelming. I was a bit envious of the doctors, nurses; at least they had some sort of expertise to do something. What was I going to do? I wasn’t going to start preaching to them. I felt completely inadequate. And so I started to walk down the row, looked at each barrack. Finally I stopped at one and decided I was going to walk into that barrack.
The door led into a little kind of an alcove, and there they were. It was _a desperate scene. The place had hardly an opening for light to come in. Nothing in it except shelves. _I just stood there. I was wearing a chaplain’s insignia, but no one seemed to pay any attention to me. Strange world. Figures are moving around as if in a shadow.
Finally somebody walked over to me, stared at me, saw my insignia, and simply asked me a question out of nowhere. ?Do you know my uncle in Toledo?" So I kind _of hemmed and hawed a bit, said that I wasn’t from Toledo, there was nothing I could do.

Another figure came, another question, and the questions fell into that kind of a pattern; they were asking me if I knew certain people.
A voice came from one of the shelves. It was a thin, crying voice. ?Do you know my brother?" I couldn’t see the figure, it was too dark. The other figures seemed to move aside to let the voice come forward, and the voice began to tell me that he had a brother, came to the United States, and became a rabbi. As soon as he gave me the name, I said to him, "I know your brother. He is here in Europe, and I’m going to bring him to you."

That was the turning point of my life. I knew then when I walked out of that barracks that there was work to be done, and I was going to do it.
I then began to set goals for myself. I wanted to know who was in the camp. And so _I got people together, and we were going to collect the names. I had to get paper, _I had to get all the materials necessary.

[Narrator] Rabbi Klausner met a doctor at a nearby camp, and together they decided to travel and look for surviving Jews. They collected survivors’ names _and tried to solve their problems—problems the U.S. military was not prepared _to handle.

[Klausner] When a military unit would come across a pocket of Jews, they really didn’t know what to do with them. The policy of the United States government, especially under Eisenhower, was you take these liberated back to the countries from which they were driven. And you create inducements. You give them cartons _of what they call 10-in-1 rations. Get them to go, and people were moving. _Trucks were leaving regularly for the different countries.
The policy could not account for Jews because there was no place to send Jews to. The army was not equipped to handle liberated Jews.
[Narrator] Rabbi Klausner found problems throughout the region—poor conditions, lack of food—things got so bad that there were rebellions. The U.S. military responded by shooting at the rebelling people and leaving conditions as they were. Klausner met with the commanding officers to try and resolve these problems. And in June of ’45 he wrote a report on what was happening and sent it _to American Jewish Leaders. He never received a single response.

At the end of June 1945, a notice went up in Dachau that Klausner’s hospital _unit was to get some time off, a furlough, and they were to leave Dachau.

[Klausner] That was a miserable trip, emotionally. I felt that I wasn’t entitled to rest. I hadn’t been with the unit through their experiences, and I hadn’t done what they did.

So we got to this beautiful recreation hotel, each truck unloaded soldiers, everyone jumped off, rushed towards the hotel. I held back, and when all the trucks were unloaded, I was still left, and now the trucks began to move around the circle. I grabbed the tailgate of the sixth truck. It was back in the truck and back to Dachau. _I went over to the 127th evac hospital, and I said to ’em, "Uh, I’m going to be reassigned to the 127th,? and the commanding officer said, "Find a place." There were no accommodations, we didn’t live in rooms. You found a spot someplace, you took one of these folding cots, you opened it up, that’s where you lived. And now I was with the 127th, but technically I was A.W.O.L. And that began the second phase of my career.
Now that I knew I was unassigned and had no authority, I felt free to do whatever _I wanted.

[Narrator] With an amazing flurry of activity, Rabbi Klausner went about Germany setting up programs to help the liberated Jews of Germany. Before Klausner made changes, sick Jews in Germany were being put into hospitals run by non-Jewish, German doctors. Jewish patients were shocked, scared, and unwilling to go to medical appointments. Klausner set up organized hospitals for the survivors, _run by Jewish doctors.

[Klausner] I came upon a monastery called St. Ottilien, and I found a small group of Jews there. The German Army had taken over the main sanctuary of the monastery and used it as a hospital. I decided, together with the Jewish doctor that was in charge, Dr. Zalman Grinberg, that we would turn St. Ottilien into a Jewish hospital. St. Ottilien became our large Jewish hospital. That was the first of the hospitals that we established.

One day, coming back from a trip around Bavaria, there was a group huddled. _I stopped the jeep, and they came over and told me that they were from a camp, the other side of Munich, called Freising