>> All right. This is James Newberry.
I'm here with Norbert Friedman on November 11th, 2013,
we're at the Museum of History and
Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University.
So Mr. Friedman, when and where were you born?
>> I was born in December 20th, 1922
in the City of Coco Poland.
>> And what was life like for your family and
friends in the 1920's and 1930's before World War II?
>> Well, life in 1922 was different than it is now here.
We didn't have
the technological advantages that we have today.
We didn't have television. We had no Internet.
I didn't even have a radio until I was 14 years old,
that I had to build myself.
In a city of 25,000 people,
there were my handful of cars maybe,
so getting around was
much more different than it is today.
As far as recreation is concerned,
it was a lot different than is today.
The basic recreation that
we were able to avail ourselves to was reading.
Whether you had it in the winter the
kerosene lamp where darkness came
in early in the summer
or with a flashlight under the covers.
But that was the only recreation that
you had except for sports,
which in winter was skiing and
skating and the summer was playing soccer.
That was basically, the life
of a youngster growing up at that time.
>> And what role did
your Jewish faith and identity play
in your life as a young person?
>> It played the most prominent role.
My house was a house of observant family.
My father was a kosher butcher.
The laws of the Bible were observed strictly.
We were not what you would call ultra-Hasidic.
My father was clean shaving.
I always wore a head covering.
I attended the Jewish day school
until about the seventh grade.
For the eighth grade, I went to a public school.
So Jewish life was the center, that was it.
I had nine Jewish friends
because we lived in non-Jewish neighborhood,
but Jewish laws and
Jewish customs were central to our life.
>> And in 1933,
when the Nazis came to power in Germany,
did your life change at all in Poland,
or did it remain somewhat same?
>> Not in any obvious way.
It was changing a little bit politically,
but it took a while
until the events in
Germany started having an effect on our lives.
It started when Germany started
to extradite Jewish of Polish origin from Germany.
By 1938, they wanted
every Jew who originally whose family came from
Poland to be moved to Poland and they
were moved to a camp on the board of Poland.
The Popes didn't want to accept them.
They claimed they were German citizens
and the Germans didn't want them.
This was one of the reasons for
the Kristallnacht because the parents
of the fellow who shot
the German official at the French embassy,
which triggered Kristallnacht
his parents were in that camp,
and he was so frustrated and affected by
the uncertainty of the fate
that he shot the German official,
and that German ambassador then passed.
But after 38, when the Jews
from Germany started coming to Poland
and we were getting
firsthand reports of what was transpiring in Germany.
But the anti-Semitism existed
not because of what was happening in Germany,
although there was a political party,
the National Democratic Party called the Endecja.
Because END consisted mostly of
academic academia and intellectual people
who wanted the Jews out of Poland.
There were political negotiations
taking place between Poland,
Portugal, United States about
extraditing Jews to the island of Madagascar,
which was Portuguese territory in 1936.
President Roosevelt in his communications
with the interior minister of Poland.
I had a copy of the letter which I
obtained under the freedom of information,
where he writes to the Polish Minister.
We're going to extradite the Jews.
Please, first, I would
suggest you ship out the young people to
create the labor market for
the Polish young people in 1936.
>> Were you mindful of these talks as a young person?
>> These particular talks we were
aware of when they appeared in the newspapers.
But there were other aspects
that affected my life specifically.
Because, as I told you,
my father was a kosher butcher,
in 1936 after the death
of the Polish Marshal, Piłsudski,
who was in fact the leader of
the Polish government who tried to
enforce laws protecting the minority.
After his death in 1936,
the Polish government issued a decree.
Originally, they wanted to totally
do away with ritual slaughter.
They came to agreement that they would allow
one-third of what was used before for
ritual slaughter to be available to use for slaughter.
My father was a butcher.
He could not make a living by selling
one-third of the amount of
meat that he was selling before.
So economically,
things have become much
more difficult for us at that time.
>> So why do you think
the Nazis were able to come to power in Germany?
>> You're asking about a political question.
For my experience and from
my research and talking to Germans,
not only Jewish citizen of Germany but Germans.
Before World War I,
in my opinion, Germany was the most cultural,
the most civilized advanced nation in Europe,
and they were proud of who they were.
And 1914 during the World War I,
they felt that they're going to be victorious.
And because of the forces of England,
France, and United States, they lost the war.
And on November 11, 1918,
when the Versailles Treaty was written,
they suffered a tremendous amount of being
humiliated and the sense of pride was affected.
And after 1918, the powers tried
to keep Germany economically unable
to produce war equipment again.
There was unemployment in Germany.
There was inflation to the point that if you
went one morning to buy a loaf of bread
and you couldn't buy it because you didn't
have enough money because it was
100 mark yesterday was 500 today and you went next day,
you took 500 marks.
You couldn't buy the loaf because
that loaf was next day, 1,000 marks.
It was a speedily rising inflation.
People were very, very depressed.
And when Hitler came to power and promised
them prominence, again,
promised them work and put
the blame on the situation on Jews,
using the Jews as a stepping stone towards his power.
He was very successful.
People gladly grabbed that particular idea,
and they joined him.
>> So with this rise of anti-Semitism,
was there any talk in your family,
any serious talk of leaving Poland or the continent?
>> By the Germans?
>> No, in your family.
>> In my family, those who were affluent sometimes,
I had a second cousin who was sent out.
There was a fair in New York. the world's fair.
They sent out supposedly to the world's
fair and she stayed in the United States.
First of all, obtaining
a visa to go to any other country was very difficult.
The countries in Europe did not want
the Jews to come into their countries.
Unless you had a lot of money and you
could buy papers and so on,
it was very difficult.
It was very difficult to leave the country.
For young people like myself,
the only hope at the end of a tunnel was Palestine.
Where we were going to build a country for ourselves.
Because if you go through the history of Europe,
every prominent country that
includes Russia, France, Germany,
England, Spain, Portugal, at one time or another,
expelled the Jews that lived there.
So we knew there was really no future for us.
When I finished my public school education,
I applied to a minor polytechnic trying to
study mechanical engineering and
we had 200 applicants for that course.
We had two days of written exams,
and a week later, we were supposed to have
two days of oral exams.
Now the 200, I and two others,
had our oral exams waived
because of the excellence of our written exams.
When the day came and they announced who was admitted,
my name was called, passed not admitted.
Only one Jew was admitted to the class.
What was being practiced in educational field in
the middle education and
higher education was what's
known as the numerous clauses.
There was just a certain amount
of Jews that were admitted.
The Polish universities were
known for their anti-Semitic stance.
And at the Polish universities during the classes,
there was a special bench,
what was today called the Jim Crow Bench,
one bench reserved for the Jews to sit on.
As a means of protesting,
Jewish students at Polish universities never
sit down to the four years of attending the universities.
There were incidents of beatings and
a couple of cases of murder of Jewish students.
More affluent Jewish youth used to go abroad to
study to other countries but we knew really,
there was no future for us.
>> So with the war beginning in September 1939,
with the invasion of Poland,
how did that affect your immediate family?
>> Well, as I told you, I was
born in the City of Krakow.
When I was in the fourth grade,
we moved to another city
which was close to the German border.
When the war broke out,
I was working in Krakow,
living with my aunt and on September 1st,
the German Stuka plane,
the fighter planes,
bombed Polish army barracks across
the street from where I was staying with my aunt and
that's the first time I saw death
and wounded being carried out.
And we realized that this was
the end of a certain part of our chapter of our lives,
and the new chapter was beginning.
This happened on Friday.
On Saturday night, my mother was able to get
a bus from the city where
my parents lived to come to Krakow.
And they had a meeting
with her three sisters and two brothers,
and the decision was made that the young men,
which was I and three of my cousins,
should leave and go east
in the hope that eventually the Polish Army,
and by Sunday, friends in
England declared war on Germany already.
And we just couldn't believe that
the army of those countries will not be
able to overcome the mad man
with a mustache, as we called him.
So we left Krakow and we went east
and we marched about 400 kilometers
before the Germans caught up with us.
And they told us that the deal
was made between Russia and Germany that
Russia is going to occupy Eastern part of Poland up to
the Vistula River and West of Vistula River,
the Germans would occupy.
So because the father
of one of my cousins spent the World War I
time in the Russian prison camp
and his experiences were not that encouraging,
we made the decision to go back to
our families and we walked back to Krakow.
So in total, we walked
about 700-800 kilometers during the four weeks.
When we came to Krakow,
Krakow was already occupied by
the German forces because they
marched into Krakow on September 6th.
And already there were atrocities and
certain laws taking place and beatings
and people being taken
away to labor camps from which they never returned,
etc, so our lives changed completely.
>> And at that time,
you and family,
your parents, began to move around?
>> Well, we stayed in Krakow.
From the outbreak of the war,
we stayed with our aunt in my grandparents' apartment.
And in 1940, when the rumor
started that the ghetto is
going to be created in Krakow,
since we were not citizens of Krakow,
we had no jobs,
we left Krakow, went to a smaller town,
the town of Tarnow.
And then in 1941,
we learned that they're going
to create the ghetto in Tarnow,
so we left the town of Tarnow,
we went to a smaller community called Zawichost.
And from there, we had to leave
because my father was
caught butchering and there was a price on his head.
And we went to the village where he was
originally born where his parents were and his family.
>> So was he informed on about his butchering?
>> He was informed on, yes.
>> And that was a Polish informant?
>> The person who informed on him was a chimney sweeper,
who had access to all the houses,
who knew what was going on,
and he informed to
the German authorities that he was slaughtering meat.
>> And what repercussions did it have?
>> Well, if they caught you slaughtering,
it was death penalty,
because it was against the law.
And they didn't have many nuances in their laws,
either you were found guilty or innocent.
They found you guilty, they got rid of you.
And bullets were less expensive than courts.
>> So at that time,
were anti-Semitic laws pretty quickly?
>> These were not anti-Semitic laws,
these were anti-Jewish laws
because when you say anti-Semitic,
you have to include some people who
were Semites but who were not Jews.
There was a sect of Jews,
people who converted to
Judaism and they were [inaudible] in Minor Asia,
and the Germans left them alone because racially,
they were not Jewish.
So the laws were we call them
anti-Semitic but they were strictly anti-Jewish laws.
>> Okay. So at that time,
your family was your father was informed on.
And what was the punishment for that?
>> Well, the punishment was that we ran away.
We had my Polish friend,
Miha Kravitz arranged for us to be
able he saved our lives and we were able to leave.
And while we were gone,
there were posters with the price on
my father's head because he was he
was He was being sought by
German authorities with the help of
Polish authorities who had no choice but they were
subservient to the German authorities.
>> And this is when you and your family.
>> This is when we went to the village
where my father was born and his parents were living,
his brothers and sister.
And this is the village
from which we eventually went to the labor camp.
>> And so you moved around quite a bit.
>> I moved a lot more than I told you
because we had to have a income to live.
So my father had a permit from a marmalade factory,
that had a Jews owner and eventually,
they had a German overseer, so he had papers.
He was allowed to go on
the countryside and buy fruit for that company.
And I had to to help him
get around and Jews were not allowed.
From February of 1940,
Jews were not allowed to use public transportation.
So I had to use false papers as an IN.
And on some occasion,
I had to impersonate Germans in order
to accomplish what we had
to do in them to to make sure that
whatever food my father bought was was
able to ship from area that he
boarded to the city where it was being used.
And all the trains and
all the transportation was taken by
the German army because they were already at that time,
they were moving they start the war
against Russia in June of 1941.
So all the transportation was requisitioned by them.
So I had to impersonate as a German in order to be able
to move our merchandise from one town to another.
>> So during that time,
your younger brother lived with your grandparents?
>> I lost an uncle.
My father's brother died of a heart attack in 1938
and my grandmother was very
distraught and she loved my little brother.
And she insisted that he stayed with her.
So he stayed with my grandmother in another town.
When the war broke out,
he was with my paternal grandparents
in the town where they lived.
And eventually, he arrived they also went
to the village where
my father was born and he came with them.
>> So then in 1942,
the Germans surrounded your town.
>> Yeah.
>> And at that point they call them up for work?
>> On the night of June 15,
1942, they surrounded the village.
I wouldn't call it a town, it was the village.
And they set up megaphones and they made an announcement.
If the able-bodied man will
volunteer to go to a labor camp to women,
children, and the elderly will be spared deportation.
So we had a discussion among ourselves,
especially my father and my mother and
I since we didn't live in that village,
which just recently arrived there.
My father and I, we decided that we'll
volunteer and so the two of
his brothers to save our families.
And we went into the labor camp of [inaudible],
which eventually became
the concentration camp of [inaudible].
Four weeks later, the Germans rounded up that village,
marched them to the nearest railroad station.
They put them in the cattle cars,
and the whole village was exterminated on 23 July 1942,
including about some 50 members of my family,
including my mother, my brother.
>> So can you describe what your mother gave you as you
were leaving to go to join the workforce?
>> What was what?
>> What your mother gave you as you were leaving.
>> Oh. When we were leaving saying goodbye,
she reached and in the bosom,
took out a handkerchief and took
a $5 gold coins
that was sent to us by a relative in United States.
And she gave it to me saying keep
it may someday buy freedom or life.
And very prophetically, she said,
we'll never see each other again.
>> So was there a sense at that time
that you were going to
do something other than work
or did you have not yet have?
>> We didn't have a specific idea
of what we were going to do but we
were told that we were going to
a labor camp and we're going to do work.
What kind of work?
We were not told.
We were loaded on two trucks and we
were driven about was close to
60 miles away to the labor camp.
When we arrived at the labor camp,
we realized that the camp was
adjacent to an airplane factory.
That camp we came in June.
The camp existed since March of 1942,
where the adjacent town of
[inaudible] the Jewish population
was sent out to camp.
So they exterminated during
an action and the able-bodied men
were also put in the camp.
So when we came that camp,
there were already several hundred people in it.
>> And could you
describe in that first work camp that you went to,
describe the adjustment to
living and working there and the conditions in the camp?
>> It was a different universe.
It was a different world.
All of a sudden, you were drawn from
what you considered a normal way of life.
You got up with your family had
breakfast, discussion here,
the corps woke you up at
six o'clock in the morning by hitting
your feet with the truncheon and you had to line up.
And you got some black brew masquerading as coffee.
And sometimes some boiled farina
there was your breakfast,
and then you had to line up and
march to whatever labor assignment you had.
You were a slave.
You were not a human being anymore.
You lost your identity.
Nobody called you by your name.
You got a number and you were prison number so and so.
You lost your humanity,
you lost the reliance
or self perspective of who you were.
>> And and you have a tattoo on your forehand?
>> I have a tattoo on my forehand.
There are only two camps where they tattooed.
One is very well known camp of Auschwitz,
where they put the serial number on the left forearm.
And the other one was the camp that we were.
We were satellite of the larger camp in
Plaszow camp that was
made infamous in the Schindler's List film.
So that camp and the satellites of
that camp had a tattoo on the forehand.
Originally, when the order came in,
the German commandant of the camp Herman de Schomberg,
announced that the tattoo was
going to be done on our forehead
unless we turned in
every available valuables that we had.
So the internal camp police collected whatever people
had money, values, treasures chains,
gold chains, watches, rings, whatever we had,
we collected and we gave it to him
so as not to have the tatoo done on our forehead.
When we brought it to him,
he looked at it and he said, is that all?
Where is the gold from their teeth?
Unless you give me the gold from their teeth,
I'll take it out from their dead bodies.
So the dentist start pulling out.
It was very common in Europe to have
the fillings and bridges done with gold.
So he pulled out all the gold from
people's teeth and we gave it to him.
In 1945 when the war ended Herman de Schomberg,
he was apprehended on the German French border.
And I have the newspaper clippings from that time.
He was found with eight bags
of treasure and jewelry, whatever it was.
I know how big the bags were,
there were not pillow cases.
There were small cloth bags.
He apparently was able to buy freedom and he disappeared.
In 1978, he was found in Argentina extradited to Germany.
And he was tried,
found guilty, and sent to life in prison.
He died about nine years ago in prison.
If you go to a library,
some library may have a book called The Last Nazi.
You can read about his life.
Before he came to our camp,
SS guards came ahead of him to build a barn.
He said he had two horses to build a barn for his horses.
And they told us what a heroic man he was.
He himself liquidated a ghetto in
[inaudible] and he himself executed about 600 people.
And he gave a gun to
his five year old son to shoot the children.
So he brought the child with him.
By the time they came to our camp he
was already six years old.
I worked night shift one morning.
They woke me up and said,
you have to go to Herman de Schomberg bag.
The kid's toy broke,
see if you can fix the kid's toy.
So I went in there.
He had a little tank
which wound up and it wasn't working.
So I got on my knees to start taking it apart.
One of the springs broke and I took it
out in the hope to be able to fix it but it took time.
So he came from behind and he kicked
me in the behind and he said in German,
"Hurry up, you shitty Jew otherwise,
I finish you off".
He was six years old at that time.
I tried to find out what happened to him after the war,
see how he managed to live with memories of who he was,
what his father was.
I wasn't able to find him.
There are no trace of him.
I don't know what happened to him.
>> And you went to the camp with your father?
>> Right.
>> Correct. And so in the camp,
you were you able to stay
beside each other and keep track?
>> Well, the camp when we
came in said several hundred people.
Eventually, the camp had 3,000 people
when it was closed in July of 1944,
we had about 3,000 inmates.
My father when we came to the camp,
he got a job in
the German kitchen since he was a butcher.
He was able to help the butcher in the German kitchen.
So then when they when they created the kitchen in
the camp he was one of the heads.
He used to run the kitchen in the camp.
So he worked on the camp premises.
I worked outside the camp.
I worked in the originally,
I worked in the [inaudible] factory,
then for a while on
the garbage detail and then back to in the factory.
So during the working time, we were separated.
And he lived in a different barrack than I did.
I joined the barrack with people of my age.
We felt more comfortable.
We had more in common with each other.
So this is where I lived but we saw each other every day.
>> So you went as you said
11 different camps over the course of time?
>> Over the course of three years.
One of the things that baffled us was
the first camp we were there for two years
in one camp and a consequent year,
we went through 10 different camps.
And we wondered why were
we moved from one camp in another.
And so we did some research and it
turned out that out of the 10 camps that we were in,
there were either transit camps,
where we were just a short amount of time where they
had a selection and determine
who was still physically able to do work and was sent to
another camp or who was not physically able
to work and was sent to an extermination camp.
So we were on those 10 camps,
some of them were transit camps and
the all the others were somehow affiliated
with airplane manufacturing, either [inaudible].
What happened while we were in that first original camp,
we were categorized into
different work being able to do certain type of work.
They had trick, under
the number we wore different letters.
Either you had a letter Z, letter W,
or letter R. Letter Z indicated that
you worked for the civilian aspects
of that particular camp.
Letter W indicated that you worked
for the vermart for the military aspects.
The letter R was listed industry,
indicated that you were a skilled defense labor.
So that particularly,
the Germans were very meticulous,
wherever we went, the documents went with us.
And those were categorized
as skilled labor were sent to factories,
where we were manufacturing
airplane or parts of airplanes,
fuselages and so on.
And because of shortage of labor,
the German youths went into
the army so the only labor they had was slave labor,
or labor from prisoners of war that they had.
So we were an important desirable element
for the defense industry.
We didn't know it at the time,
but we found it out later.
>> So as you were moving from camp to camp,
was there a point at which you
realized what the ultimate intention of?
>> We had no idea.
One of the first things that
you tried to find out when you came
to a new camp and other 10 camps,
there were not two camps that were the same.
Each one was different,
depending on who the German commander of the camp was.
The first thing when you came to a camp,
you tried to find out who were
the interior authorities that ran the camp.
Each and every prisoner in
the concentration camp wore a triangle over his number.
The triangle was a different color,
that color indicated two reasons
why you were in the camp.
The red triangles indicated
that you were a political prisoner,
a green triangle indicated that you were a criminal.
A black triangle, you were conscientious objector.
No, black was gypsy.
A purple was conscientious objector,
a purple indicated that you were homosexual.
The Jews were either red triangles
and some camps but later on
we wore the star of David
made out of a red and yellow triangle.
So you came to a camp,
you looked who the couples were,
who were the enforces, so to speak.
If they were red triangle,
you knew your existence is going to be
more moderate because these were political prisoners,
these were intellectuals, professors,
for whatever reason they were in
the camp but they were more understanding.
But if we came to a camp that was run
by green triangles this was
run by criminals by pathological killers, by sadists.
That was a very very bad place to be.
So that was the first thing that you checked out.
The second thing checked out,
what food did they give you?
When and how much?
And of course, sleeping accommodation etc and
what work was least
exposed to physical punishment, etc.
So after a while, you became a camp wise convict,
and these were the first thing that you try to find out.
>> Were there any sources of outside news of the war?
>> When we were still in Poland in the first labor camp,
we occasionally would find scraps of newspapers etc.
We had contact with the Polish underground.
You heard about the V1 and V2s,
the flying racket that fell on London.
And I just saw a program on television,
according to the historical documents,
they were all manufactured Mittelwerk which
was close to the German Baltic Sea.
It is not true, I wrote about it in
my memoir and historian
who went through it says, you should take it out.
Because I wrote that I used to see
V1s and V2s flying over our camp.
When we heard the noise,
we looked up they were gone already.
And one day as a matter of fact,
while I was working inside the factory,
the Polish engineer who worked next to me,
all of a sudden he grabbed me by the neck and pushed
me under the desk and hid himself and
we heard an explosion was one of the V1s that
fell several kilometers away from this and exploded.
And I wrote about I said no,
there was only [inaudible] And
today if you Google the name
Kapustin you find out
that this is where
there were experimental work done on the V2.
That V2 that we hear exploded [NOISE] part of
that V2 was shipped to England by the underground.
You can read Churchill's memoirs will tell you about it.
>> So you said the Polish underground,
did you have any contact
with resistance efforts at that time?
>> There were all underground activities,
there were those who were active military activities.
My best Polish friend,
the one who saved our lives he
died blowing up German transport.
But there were other activities,
there were political activities,
there were building of resistance
You have a picture of mine with
four Polish friends in town of Zawichost.
They were all students at
the agriculture vocational school.
The picture was taken by this friend,
I'm told Polish friend Mihakawz
who enrolled them all into underground.
I was able because of
the support and help of the Underground,
I was able to go in July of 1941 to the Warsaw ghetto.
And then September of 1941
to go to the Krakow ghetto looking
for members of my family because
my mother's three sisters and two brothers
lived in Krakow and we stopped getting news from them.
So the Underground existed.
There were different organizations.
There there was Underground that was run
by the socialist organization,
the Polish Socialist Party.
There was Underground that was run by
the military veterans,
by some of their academics.
They all did different things to
oppose and to do
harm to the German establishment and German occupation.
I knew that one of the Polish engineer,
the one who pulled me under the thing,
I knew he was a member of
Underground because he's the one
who brought me the news
that my friend [inaudible] was killed.
And he wouldn't tell me the sources,
but he said, don't ask, this is it.
I want you to know.
He was able, if I sent out mail the picture of the
four of myself and the four my Polish friends,
it's the only picture that I had during the war.
I sent a picture to a sister of a friend of mine
who lived on Aryan papers on Polish papers,
and he was able to mail it to her.
In the back of that picture,
the origin that I have is
my note to this girl written in 1941.
>> You said your friend was killed.
Describe the situation and what happened.
>> What?
>> You said your friend was killed.
>> Well, my friend was
a member of the Polish Underground.
And while I was in camp,
it was end of 1942.
He was involved in blowing up a German transport,
a military transport, and he was cut down by
machine gun fire and he was killed doing that.
And they knew that he was
my friend and they brought me the news of it.
>> And in the camps with
such poor food and no medical attention,
and you didn't know the rest of your family,
what situations they were in,
how did you survive?
What was motivating you at that point?
>> How did you survive is
the most frequently asked questions by
my audiences when I speak to schools.
I wrestle with that question myself.
Was it the divine intervention?
I came to the conclusion that there were two factors.
First, it was sheer luck,
because you never knew when
they lined you up and they picked
one part of the group as they
did when we first camped in Germany,
they divided our transport at one point,
part of the transport,
went to Mauthausen camp from which less than 5% survived.
The other part where I was
in we went to a camp in [inaudible]
and eventually to Dao where
the survival rate was higher than that.
So you didn't know, you had
no impact on it, which is sheer luck.
But in order to get to the point of sheer luck,
and in order to survive to that particular point,
you needed besides physical support, you needed,
what I would call spiritual and
emotional and intellectual support.
And that came from people,
from examples by certain people
by the nobility of the spirit where they were able to
rise above the existing norm in
the camps by their willingness to give of themselves,
by the willingness of sacrifice,
sometimes their lives in
order to save other people's lives.
Those particularly rare instances,
what gave us the strength,
the moral impetus to keep going.
We still were worth something that was a world outside,
there was a humanity outside.
If you came across
very difficult conditions and
somebody was willing to share
with you his ration of bread when you were
in bad shape or give you a spoonful of soup,
your esteem, your faith in man was reinforced.
And if you yourself found the strength to
give of yourself and share what
you had and give it to others,
in your own esteem,
you felt you were more worthy person,
and that you should try
to fight and to get through it and survive.
>> Can you tell me about [inaudible] Schildkraut?
>> Well, the story of [inaudible]
Schildkraut takes more than a few minutes to tell.
I told you when we came to the camp,
boys of my age decided to
find a barrack where we could live together,
we had more things in common.
[inaudible] Schildkraut was the leader of the barrack.
Every barrack had to have
a leader because of inspection came in,
he had to report to the German authorities,
how many people were in there and
how many people worked, etc.
And he was the leader in our camp.
He was several years older than most of us.
He was married before the wall.
His wife was killed during
the deportation action in this town of Tarnow when
she refused to part
with infant child and the child was shot in her arms,
and she was shot also.
He was a very talented,
very active individual who helped
other people who had to
get through emotional difficulties.
He was a cartoonist.
He was a great draftsman.
He he drew the scenes of our camp life on
the walls of our back and he
worked in the power press department and one day he
came very dejected and we didn't know what happened.
We found out, turns out
that he was setting up a job and the die crashed,
his number was taken down.
And we knew what happened in cases like this.
We knew that anytime you
were found guilty of spoiling material or something,
you were accused of sabotage,
your number was taken down.
And when there were enough people to be taken out to be
executed on the killing grounds, you were included.
And once this number was taken down,
we knew that we had to watch him.
We assumed that he would try to escape.
It was possible, sometimes escape.
The Germans instituted a rule of
group responsibility by which
if somebody escaped from a labor detail,
10-20 prisoners from the labor detail
were taken out and executed.
Have you escaped from the camp premises,
10-20 members of the barrack that you lived in,
they were taken out and executed.
And the first one to be
executed if you had members of your family,
a brother or a father,
they were the first one taken out to be shot and we had
instances where people ran away leaving their family,
brothers and [inaudible] and the father to be executed.
The reason they ran away
because they had a young wife with
a child someplace in
the forest and they wanted to join them.
[NOISE] Excuse me.
When his number was taken down,
we decided we have to watch him because if he runs away,
it's going to be a death sentence for most of us.
We had always somebody accompany
him whether he went to a latrine,
when he went for food.
There was always somebody with him and we knew
that execution were going to take place when
the grave digger used to
leave the camp and go to the killing fields.
That particular night the grave digger went out,
so we knew the next day they're going to be
executing the people whose numbers were taken down.
That night, we decided to watch Hank more closely.
None of us went to sleep and we knew that he knew that,
but nobody talked about it till at one point,
the youngest inmate in
that particular room his protege
blurted out and started crying.
He said Hank, save yourself, run away.
We'll follow you, we'll be all right to save your life.
He got up and some of us said run away,
save yourself and he got up and he said,
don't worry, I will not run.
I will not jeopardize your lives to save my own.
I go and I die like a man.
I die on my feet like my wife did,
I will not cover before them,
because the routine was when
your number was taken down you went out for execution.
They made you undress,
kneel down naked in front of the grave,
they shot you in the back of the head,
they kicked you and pushed you in the common grave.
He said, I will not give the satisfaction to cover before
them and the next morning,
he and Alders were taken out to the killing grounds.
When they brought the clothing back from there
eight pair of clothes were clean.
Only one set of clothes had blood on it,
and that was the cloth of
Hank and we found
out from the grave digger what happened.
When the order came to undress,
he was the only one who wouldn't undress.
He just started walking away and they yelled after
him in German come back
you dog and he turned around and gave him the finger,
and he kept walking and
took four shots to bring him down.
To us that was an act of heroism of self sacrifice.
>> You also described
the allied bombing of Idaho when you were there?
>> Yeah.
>> What were your feelings at that point?
Did you feel maybe there was an end in sight?
>> We came Doha on October 23rd, 1944.
You know that historically the war was well advanced.
At no time during
the whole time with
all the camps that we were in where we ever bombed.
You know the story that they never
bombed the railroad to Auschwitz was the complaint.
If that had happened, maybe
that nine people wouldn't die there,
but we felt the fact that they didn't bomb where we were.
They didn't bomb our tormentors
was a sign that we were totally abandoned,
nobody cared who we were.
Before we came to
Idaho we kept in cars for three days without any food.
When they unloaded us,
they lined up in a square,
and they had kettles of potatoes and jackets and cabbage,
we could smell the potatoes and we could
smell the cabbage and they line us up
when people were supposed to get
the few potatoes and they leave out cabbage.
While we were lined up,
the alarm sounded and
they chased us to special trenches dug just for
this particular purpose and we sat in the trenches
while the planes flew over us and we begged them,
please bomb us together with
our tormentors because we
didn't ever think that
we're going to survive by that time.
This is five years of war already, 1944.
We just the only chance we
had is to choose how we're going to die,
but we knew we were not going
to survive and we begged them,
please bomb and they flew in,
they bombed the industrial complex
a couple miles away from the camp
and after that while they were flying over.
The people were so hungry,
they could smell the food.
They couldn't control their hunger,
they ran out from the trenches towards
the kettles the SS and
the watchtowers machine gun and
the square was full of
dead and and injured bodies laying there.
Then eventually they called us out and they line us up,
and the food was cold and bitter tasting.
The side of our comrades laying
there in the square did not help.
It was one of
the most depressing and
disappointing scenes that I remember.
>> The only possessions that you
managed to hold onto was the picture of
your mother in toothbrush you said and describe that.
>> While we were in Poland we
had access to limited possessions.
You could have a handkerchief,
you could have a spoon.
Once we came to Germany,
we were stripped from everything that we owned.
Once we came to Germany,
we were given for the first time
the striped pajama uniforms.
We had a shirt underneath.
We had a metal dish in
our rump and in
the spoon and in order to have a cutting implement,
we would take a rock and turn out the handle of the spoon
to serve as a cutting instrument
because we were not allowed to have knives.
Everything else during inspection
was taken away from you.
You were allowed to have a belt,
which they eventually they took
because they needed the leather or something.
I was able to conceal two items.
I had them wrapped in a rag and I had them
attached to the inside of my jacket.
One of the items was a picture of my mother.
The other item was a toothbrush.
The picture of my mother was my link to
my life before the war, to my home,
to the warmth of her love,
to all the family events and when I used
to sometimes miss the
like and I used to take the picture and look at it.
The toothbrush was the last vestige of civilized life.
The brushing of your teeth,
actually not teeth,
but gums void of teeth that have been knocked out
by butts of different guns by different Germans.
These oozilated gums, when you
brush them with a cold water without toothpaste,
without tooth powder just
with this brushing of your teeth
this daily maiden function
was your connection to normality,
to life, to humanity.
I kept these two items with me concealed.
When we came to Idaho after a couple of days
we were notified that we have to go for the lousing.
When you go for the lousing they take
your uniforms away and
the uniforms go to
the lousing you go for showers, there's infection.
We're going for it. We were lined up.
The old time is in the camp they said if you have
anything or value or anything,
give it to us, we'll keep it for you because otherwise,
they're going to take it away from you
because you're going to be naked, you won't have it.
Those who did it never saw the valuables again.
They never gave it back to them. I didn't give it.
I took my treasure and I ran to
one of the barracks and
pretending that I was doing some cleaning work,
hid it under the barrack and covered it with ground.
After the lousing they gave a new uniform.
They gave a new number.
I ran under the barrack to retrieve my treasure.
Apparently, somebody saw me
putting it there when I came it was gone.
I was like a wild animal.
I dug up the whole area,
looking for it and at that moment,
I stopped being a human being,
my connection to my life as a person was gone.
My connection to a civilization was
gone and I decided to commit suicide.
There's no point of me going wrong and I tried to get on
the electrified wire that surrounded
the camp and somebody saw me run and got my father.
My father came running and pulled me away
and then I broke down crying and he said,
we'll get to it, we'll make it,
we'll survive. Don't do it.
>> You were forced to
march and as the allied troops
were pushing inward from East and West.
Can you describe liberation?
>> If you had asked me
that question after the liberation,
I would have told you no.
Years later even when I started to write,
[NOISE] I was looking for
terminology for words to describe the emotions.
After six years of slavery,
of undescribable horror,
and here you have your freedom.
You should feel such of emotion of gratitude,
I didn't feel anything.
I couldn't find words.
I couldn't understand why can't I write about it?
Why can I think about it?
Why can't I retrieve what I experienced?
And then I realized that at the time of liberation,
we were so numb.
So worn out,
so cynical that we
were void of what normally are human feelings.
It took months before we could laugh,
before we could cry.
It took years before we could love.
The emotions were drained from us.
The thing that we lived by was was the fear of
death and the striving for overcoming hunger.
>> And you were in the barn at the time?
>> Well, there was a road leading to the liberation.
The last camp that we were in was finally bombed
by P-51 Mustangs on 16th of April.
On the 23rd of April,
that camp was closed.
And we put what was
later known as the Ganaka death march.
The name of the camp was Ganaka.
We left on the 23rd,
by the 27th,
2/3 of the convoy was almost gone,
either executed by for
the inability to keep going or exhausted,
and dying from exhaustion.
The German commandant of that convoy made a deal,
which we found out later,
with the eldest of
the prisoners that he's going to try to save,
there was no need of big guns,
we only could hear already the machine gun fire.
So the allied troops were close by.
So he made a deal with the eldest of the prisoners.
He's going to try to save whatever that
was left from the convoy for
him trying to save his life when
the allies come so vouch for his,
benevolence, so to speak.
And he called us out in
the clearing and he gave an order to the SS that was
still left with us for each guard to
take five or six prisoners and hold out in
the farmhouse till the glorious German army will
vanquish the enemy and we'll reassemble.
So my father picked SS of a Hungarian background,
whom we used to watch his conduct.
We knew he was a benovelent individual,
he didn't harm anybody.
And he went with us and we wound up
in a barn on the outskirts of a village.
And in that barn on the morning of May 1st
, we heard rumbling,
and we ran to the cracks in the barn and we watched
three tanks with five point white stars
on its sides and soldiers marching behind it,
marching into the road, into the village.
We thought five pointed stars to us was Russian stars.
We didn't know the Americans
used the same five pointed stars and we yelled,
the Russians are here.
The Hungarian says,
"No, this is Americana."
So we were sitting there,
we started crazily dancing.
First of all, we were shocked.
We were free. It was over.
The nightmare was over,
and we couldn't react to it.
And one of them started dancing,
jump up and down in the hay where we were up
then we started screaming and dancing.
And a couple of hours passed by and they decided,
well, we have to find out what it is, what it means.
Are we free? Can we go?
What's going on? So they picked me as
a scout to go into the village,
find out what's going on.
The reason they picked me because
I used to love American movies.
I used to go to American movies
whenever they played in the neighborhood.
And I used to brag about them.
So they felt I probably speak English.
The only thing I knew in English,
I love you and goodbye, darling.
[LAUGHTER] How was that going to help me?
They didn't care. They sent me into the village.
I came into the village in the village square,
in the village of [inaudible] they were
American soldiers sitting around,
mostly on their helmets or leaning against
the tanks or the Jeeps.
And what they were eating,
I thought they were eating Napoleons.
You know Napoleon pastries, it's cream inside.
What they were eating,
they were eating processed cheese
between crackers from C-rations.
I didn't know. I never saw C-rations.
I never saw processed cheese.
To me, they were eating Napoleons.
This was what the army was doing.
And I was walking around,
I was wearing the concentration camp uniform.
I was all over 80 pounds haggard,
dirty, totally confused.
I didn't know how to assess my situation
until one of the soldiers called to
me in broken German from a American Army book,
how to speak German.
He said, [FOREIGN] and I went over to him.
And so he started asking me who am I.
So I said, "I'm Polish."
I wasn't sure it was safe to say you were Jewish.
I knew what happened to Jews.
I knew what happened to you if
you said that you were Jewish,
so I said, "I'm Polish."
So he started yelling, "Hey,
[inaudible] come over here.
There's a Polack here."
Called a Polish speaking soldier
and they came over to me and asked me in Polish.
I tried to tell him the best I could,
who I was, what happened.
And he translated to the other fellows.
And they started giving me food.
They saw that I looked like emaciated and they gave
me K-ration and C-ration and they loaded them on my hand.
And I just couldn't hold all this.
And stuff started falling off my arms
rolling down the pavement and I started to cry.
First time, I shed tears in
years because here was
a life giving food. I was losing it.
It's falling away from me.
[NOISE] They got on their knees.
They put the food in the backpack and handed it to me.
There was the first act of compassion.
First act of kindness
from a uniformed individual shown to
me in six years
and there was a surge of lightning of hope,
and maybe this is the end of
our suffering and maybe is a good future for us.
>> So with the end of the war and liberation,
what did you do after the war,
and how soon did you iterate?
>> Well, we were in the village lived on a farm.
Several weeks later, we
went to the nearest town to find out what was going on.
Most of all, we wanted to put the names of
our families so others could see it,
that was the way of information people put out on walls,
names and if somebody
knew or somebody came across a given person.
And when we were going to the town,
one of the people who was in the convoy on
the march comes running to me and tells me,
hey, I saw your buddy Oscar in American uniform.
Now let me tell you about my buddy Oscar.
My buddy Oscar was my best friend,
my classmate from school.
In my childhood,
we used to walk to school
together and from school together.
We belonged to the same sport organization
and the war separate us.
I didn't see him. And they
brought him in one of the camps.
They brought the transport from another camp,
and he came with the transport and
from that time on we stayed together.
On that march from the last camp,
he was in such a bad shape.
He was running temperature.
And my father said he's not going to make it,
because if he's not going to keep up,
they're going to shoot him like they shot everybody else.
So the next time we stopped for a rest my, father said,
we're going to bury him
like we bury all the others who die.
So we put him alive,
we buried him alive in the ditch.
We covered him with branches and leaves.
And then we marched on,
and I never thought I'd ever see him again.
So a few weeks later when we went in town,
this fellow tells me, hey,
I saw you buddy Oscar.
So what are you talking about? I know
they stationed in the school over there.
So I run over to the school and there's a guard
standing in the entrance and I couldn't speak English.
So in German,
I'm telling him showing my striped uniform.
I said, Oscar, no Oscar?
Wait, Oscar come on down here and comes
my buddy Oscar comes down in American uniform.
After the convoy passed,
he got up and started wandering
around and he asked some people,
and they told me there was a PW camp not far away.
And he marched towards the PW camp.
This is already the 27th, 28th of April.
The Germans know the war is coming to an end.
The guards led him into
the PW camp and the medics diagnosed he had pneumonia.
They put him on medication.
On the May 1st, that camp was
liberated by American Army.
All the PWs went back state wise,
but he was not an American citizen,
so he stayed with that company and came to that town.
So he was telling me the story and he says,
you got to come, you got to
stay with me, you got to live with me.
And I'm like, what am I going to do?
You're going to work like I'm do?
I said, I can't speak English.
He said, it's okay. We have a captain he's from Chicago.
His name is Nilan. His mother
was Polish. She talks Polish.
So I went to work and I worked
in the kitchen and worked as a translator,
I had captain who spoke Polish and English.
I spoke German and Polish.
So we became a conduit between
the American army and between the German population,
and whatever he needed,
he used us to be the interpreters.
And I worked for the artric for a while,
and then they left,
and we were assigned to another artric,
which was the 35th tank battalion of
Fourth Armor Third Army General Pattntrop
There was stationed on
the Baronal estate in Southern Bavaria,
and I went to work for them,
and we had Captain Kingsley,
who is a hero of the battle of Basis.
You can find his name in the annals of the Forth Armor.
And I worked as an interpreter and assistant sergeant.
And I spent a whole year with that company.
That year was a year of physical convalescence,
and of emotion and intellectual rebirth.
Thanks to the soldiers,
the way they treated us,
the way they cared for us.
>> And when did you immigrate to the US?
>> Well, once we decided my friend and I,
Oscar and I, that we want to go to the United States.
We applied for it in 1946.
When we told the captain he
was elated that we want to go to America.
How could you not go to America after being embedded with
American soldiers and hearing
these stories about their country.
They came from all over the United States,
from California and New Mexico,
from New Hampshire, from Brooklyn,
and they all told the same story.
The love for the country and how they want
the values in life.
They taught us what later on will
probably be called democracy 101.
They taught us democracy by practical living,
by the care of the underdog
and by the love of sports and
teaching us how to throw the ball back and forth.
They call it baseball.
And how could you not want to go to their country?
So we applied to go to the United States.
When the captain found out, he said,
look, I can't give you anything.
They'll be more valuable for you,
more precious for you when you
go to America than education.
I said, get some education because we had to wait.
We knew it was going to take years
because before our visas come through.
And he hired a tutor for us.
Professor Sahovsky to prepare for college entrance exams.
We worked during the day at night, we studied,
we studied what we thought was necessary
to be admitted to university,
Algebra, History, Latin.
I took six years of Latin in six months.
I still remember [inaudible].
And when the company was leaving in 1946,
before 1946, we applied,
we admitted to University in Franco Germany.
Oscar left in 1949.
My visa came to in 1949,
and I was working on my PhD at that time.
And I asked the counsel to postpone it
another three months and
exact and again for three months.
And eventually he called me and says,
Nova you go now or you're going to lose your number?
You're going to wait another three,
four years before your number comes up.
I say, Jeff, but I want to know I want to get
the degree the hell wants a German PhD in America.
You can make better living cleaning the streets.
I said, I don't want to clean the street.
So he says, it doesn't matter what you do in
America as long as you do
a little better than the guy next to you.
I left Germany in May 1950.
I came to United States in June 1950.
We arrived in New Orleans on Sunday,
I think it was 4th of June.
We couldn't embark on Sunday,
we embarked on Monday.
Monday night, I was put on
the red eye train from New Orleans to Atlanta, Georgia.
I arrived in Atlanta,
Georgia, June 6, 1950.
If you look at the secular calendar,
if you look at the Christian calendar,
June 6, is St. Norbert's Day.
Couldn't be a better omen than that.
>> And what did you do for a living?
>> Well, they picked two young ladies
from an organization called as HIAS,
H-I-A-S, which is
Hebrew Immigration Aid Society
that used to help immigrants come to the United States
to acclimate themselves and who actually
provided the bonding for us
to come to America and they guarantee that we will
not become charge of the American government.
We will not become a burden to the American government.
So they had a fake labor contract for us, etc.
And so they picked us up.
There was another girl
a student from another university,
she had to go to Columbus,
Georgia, so she came to Atlanta with me and they had
a big sign and we walked over to them and
they started to speak to us in Yiddish.
Which is the language of the Jews,
the jargon because they assumed
that because they knew the others that came in,
they didn't speak English.
So they started speaking to us
in Yiddish and we said to them,
don't bother yourself, we both speak English. It's okay.
So they were so elated that they
could converse with us in English.
They took us for lunch.
And I remember what I had for lunch,
I had bread, the dark bread with raisins in it,
cream cheese and tea and milk.
And when check came in,
I came to the United States with $15 in
my pocket that a friend of mine gave me.
I spent $1 over it in Birmingham,
Alabama, when we were on the train.
I bought breakfast for the other girl and myself.
So I had $14 left,
but I grabbed a check again.
I said, no, we have funds for it.
I said, this is a good European male chauvinist.
I said, I'm not going to start my life in America,
having a woman pay for my food,
and I paid for the breakfast
and they dropped the girl off where she was going
to live and they told me I was going to live in the house
with four other family of newcomers.
And they took me to the house
on 11 Corney 11 in Peachtree.
And I went up to the second floor
and the woman house wife opened the door,
when she saw me, she fainted.
She was from my hometown.
She was a friend of mine.
After the war they lived in
the same displaced place that my father lived.
Her husband was a close friend of my father.
She knew somebody was coming,
but she didn't know the name.
So I lived with them.
She took good care of me.
I gained 20 pounds in four weeks.
It was before I got the job
and I started looking for a job.
When I came to Atlanta,
there was a bus strike.
So the only way that you could get from point A to
point B was known as a Jitney.
I know you're familiar with that.
It was a private car and
people used to drive you from one point to another.
You gave them a dime.
So I went looking for a job.
The first job that I applied for was
the job of my dreams to be a journalist.
We didn't have a journalist faculty in my university,
but I took the subjects that were
closest to the particular discipline.
So I went to Atlanta Journal to apply for a job,
and the head of the personnel listened to my story.
He says, "Come on, I'll buy you a cup coffee."
Took me to the Rexall drug store across the street,
bought me a cup of coffee.
I had an accent, it was a little worse than it is today.
He said, "Listen, you're not an American,
you're not a Southerner and you're Jewish.
You got three strikes on you before you start.
If I give you a job in the paper,
you're going to be in a copy room for
the rest of your life making 40 bucks a week.
Do you have any other skills?"
I said, "Yes, I'm a machinist." Then get the job.
So I started looking for a job in a machine shop.
Eventually, I got the job in
Southeastern Machine and Foundry on Marietta Street,
and I went to work over there.
>> So how did your experiences during
World War II and the loss of your family,
how did it impact your later life,
your family life, your marriage.
And also, how did it motivate you
to later tell your story,
start sharing your experiences?
>> It wasn't planned.
It just happened by itself as it went along.
When we came to the United States,
whether it was here and then Atlanta,
Georgia or later on in
New York or New Jersey where I moved after one year.
You tried to tell your experiences and
people either wouldn't listen and if they listened,
they didn't understand what you were talking about.
So the survivors community clamped up,
start talking about it.
We went inwards.
We could not relay it because we didn't feel or we
didn't think that we were
understood that anybody could
comprehend what we went through.
When I went up north to the efforts of a cousin of mine,
she introduced me to
a young lady whom I fell in love with,
and I got married in 1955.
We lived in New Jersey and 1968,
I think, we moved to Long Island.
And fortunately I had friends in the survivors community.
We used to get together.
Why? Because we knew each other.
We didn't need to tell each other what we went through.
We just told a word, a name,
a place, and the other person understood.
And I moved in the community.
I joined the congregation and
the spiritual leader of the congregation Rabbi Moseson,
whose family came from Poland in the '30s or '20s.
He felt that my reluctance
or failure to share
my experiences was an emotional burden.
And he prodded me to share
my experiences with the congregation.
And what happened, the young people of
the congregation came to me and said,
would you be willing to come to
my school and tell
my classmates of what you're
telling us because we never heard about it.
We never knew about it.
So I slowly started
speaking in different schools in Long Island area.
And then later on in 1996,
I joined the fledging museum in New York,
the Jewish Heritage Museum,
the living memorial to the Holocaust,
which opened up in 1997.
And there was a forum
for speaking and sharing your experiences.
We had thousands of young people coming because when
the museum opened up and it opened
up strangely on 911, 1997.
My job was to introduce the Chancellor of Education, Dr.
Crew. And I went to pick
him up and I brought him to the podium and he spoke.
And when I was taken him back to his seat, I said, Dr.
Crew unless you send us your children,
this whole building is
nothing but empty walls and pictures.
Four weeks later there was a directive to
all schools under his administration in
Greater New York area that designated the museum as
a major education center
and encouraged every school to go and visit it.
And my opportunity to speak to
young people is what eventually cured
me of what I didn't
know at that time was post traumatic stress symptoms.
We didn't have the terminology.
I was asked to speak at Fort Gillem recently.
And when I came to Fort Gillem
the base commandant asked to speak to me.
So I went to see General Wagner and
General Jujitsky who happened
to be board of Polish Heritage,
and they told me what they were doing,
who am I going to speak to.
He says, "What we do here,
we treat veterans of
Iraq and Afghanistan for post traumatic stress disorders.
That's what we do here."
And when I went to face the audience,
I realized I changed
my whole presentation and I addressed
myself to what I felt
were common experiences that they and I had.
And I gave them the benefit of my experiences,
and I suggested that the only way you can get out
of the prison of your experiences is by sharing it,
by speaking about it,
by writing about it,
by getting it out,
by verbalizing, it by facing it.
It took a little longer than
that for me to tell them that.
When we finished, they all lined
up to shake my hand and thank me.
And one of the soldiers was standing on the side.
The new uniforms had
a grayish camouflage and
they don't wear the insignia on the lapel they wore here,
I didn't know what the rank was this individual.
But later on I saw he was a sergeant first class.
When everybody passed by,
he came over to me and he said,
"I just finished the second tour of duty in Iraq.
When you serve in Iraq,
they give you a badge." Excuse me.
He pulled down the badge and handed it over to me.
He said, "I want you to have it."
I don't have to tell you we
wound up crying on each other's shoulder,
knowing that we understood each other's problem.
>> Thank you very much, Mr. Friedman.
>> Thank you.