Testimonials: An Introduction

In 1994, just about the time that Schindler's List was released, Steven Spielberg started sponsoring a program to collect the oral histories of Holocaust survivors.  The goal was to collect 50,000 testimonials.  They now have 52,000.

Those include at least four testimonials by our relatives:  Lena and Joe Mandelbaum,  Morris Barber (Lena's brother) and Feigusha (Fela) Lewkowitz, a cousin to both Jerry Schaufeld and Aliza Link. If you have Hochbaum or Schorr blood in you, these four relatives are probably first or second cousins, though for some of you they are several generations removed.

The testimonials are maintained by a program at called the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive at the University of Southern California.  They can't be viewed online or accessed remotely,  but they are available for viewing at various places around the country -- mostly universities. Paula Barber gave me a copy of Morris' testimonial.  I spent a couple of days at a library at Rutgers watching Lena, Joe, and Feigusha's testimonials, and now have gotten copies of these from the Shoah Foundation.

The videos are pretty amazing.  It helps to have some background on the family and geography before you watch them, but they give us as good a picture as we can get of what actually happened before, during and after the war.

And they also give us a good picture of the different circumstances families were in  -- even those in the same family.  Lena and Morris came from a middle class family with a business over the German border, in Beuthen, a city of over 60,000 people.  Joe came from a poorer, very religious family in a small town in Poland (Szczakowa -- even harder to spell than Chrzanow), and Feigusha came from a wealthier, more cosmopolitan family, doing business in Katowice -- a city like Beuthen, but on the Polish side of the border --  and living in Chrzanow.

The experiences of Lena and Morris were probably similar to those of other members of our family who were living in Germany before the war.  These include Charlie and his family, Tamar and her family, Erna Hochbaum Hochbaum (my father's other sister) and her family,  and others.  Once productive, middle-class business people in Germany, they experienced increasing discrimination and tightening restrictions under the Nazis, and in most cases, lost their businesses and their livelihood.  Then, since the parents were Polish Jews, the family was deported back to Poland even though the children had been born in Germany.  Once in Poland, they lived a much more difficult existence as the war threatened and Germany invaded Poland. Eventually, most members of the family either wound up being selected to work as forced laborers in a labor camp, or sent to the gas chambers, frequently to Auschwitz.


The testimonials are, of course, the stories of the survivors.  There are exceptions, but for the most part, those who survived shared two, or possibly three, characteristics: 1) they were young, resilient teenagers, capable of hard work, sustained hardship and the ability to fight the diseases that almost killed them, and 2) they were sent to the labor camps, where their lives were of value to the Germans, rather than to the extermination camps.   Additionally,  3) they often were in the camps with a family member or friend who helped them survive. 

Thus, Lena, her brother Morris and her sister Regina were 14, 16, and 18, respectively, when the war broke out. Joe was 17. Other family members who survived were Regina Rappaport,  who was 13 when the war broke out, and her brother Duftsha Schoenberg, who was 21.  Charlie, Tamar and Feigusha were pre-teens when the war broke out.  "Older" survivors were Regina Singer (27 when the war started) and Feigusha's mother Esther Singer, who was 33.  "The people who were 40 years old," Lena says in her testimonial, "did not survive."  Her father was 40.

I'll spend some time in a future post on the labor camps, but, in short, there were hundreds of these labor camps, and most of them you have never heard of.  There were camps where all the workers were women -- spinning flax and making cloth and sewing uniforms, and camps where all the workers were men, building the Autobahn, converting the Russian rail tracks so German trains could run on them, building Krups factories and bunkers for SS officers, and camps where the populations were mixed, making armaments, for example.  Conditions varied, but were almost always difficult at the start and became increasingly abysmal as the war went on. 

Lena and her sister spent the war in one camp, in Czechoslovakia, and Lena attributes being alive to her sister's protection.  Joe and Morris, who had come from the same town, started out in the same camp, but then each was moved to different camps -- 6 different camps for Joe, 5 for Morris.  Feigusha and her mother were together for the entire war, with Feigusha increasingly taking on the parental role, even though she was barely a teen-ager.  Margie Danziger says that she met women who were in the same camp as her mother, Regina Rappaport, who said they were envious of her having an older woman (her cousin, Regina Singer) to take care of her.

I'll use the testimonials to help capture some of the survivor's experiences in future posts, and, if I can figure out how to do it, I may even be able to include some excerpts from the videos. 

Morris' Suitcase

My grandfather on my father's side, Chaim Hirsch Hochbaum, was one of 8 children.  And all his siblings and half-siblings had children, so  my father had 34 first cousins that I know about. 

Among them were people you may or may not recognize -- the "two Reginas"  (Regina Rappaport and Regina Singer), Jerry Schaufeld's mother (Rose Schaufeld), Duftsha Schoenberg,  Aliza Link's mother (Golda Hochbaum Mendel), Tamar Landau's father (Pincus Hochbaum),  my mother's aunts and uncles (Ida, Minnie, Yetta, Max Schorr, etc.) and Lena Barber Mandelbaum and her brother Morris.

I re-connected with Paula Barber -- Morris' daughter -- at her mother's funeral in May.  Paula is a second cousin, but I hadn't seen her since we were kids.  When I introduced myself, these words tumbled out of her mouth:  "Your father is the reason my father got to America."   I hadn't heard this story, and I wanted to, so recently I sent her an email and she invited me to dinner with her and her husband,  Howard Buxbaum, at their home in Morristown.

I brought her some pictures of her father taken in Europe in 1947 and a copy of the ship manifest that showed him arriving in New York on Christmas Day, 1947.  The ship manifest (below) shows Morris' destination as 10 E. 198th Street, in the Bronx -- the apartment Mom and Dad and Esme and Charlie and I were all living in at that time.

Morris, born in 1925, was 15 years old when the war began, and 20 years old when it ended.  As you can see from this picture, taken in 1947, this was the good-looking branch of the family.  He and his sister, Lena, had been born in Beuthen, in Germany, where his parents. like my father's family,  were in the wholesale fruit business.  They had been deported to Poland in 1938 because their parents were Polish.  Morris and Lena and an older sister, Regina Barber, were in labor camps for most of the war, which probably helped them survive.  That, and the fact that they were young, resilient teenagers.  It also helped that they spoke German fluently. Their mother, Pesl Hochbaum, their father, and their two younger brothers were sent to Auschwitz and died there.     




Morris Barber - 1947

 



Lena Barber - 1947

I'll write more in a future post about the labor camps and Morris' and Lena's experiences during the war, but what I've been focused on lately is what happened AFTER the war?  The war ended in the spring of 1945, and Morris didn't come to the US until December, 1947.  Lena and her husband Joe Mandelbaum, came in March, 1950.  Where did they live during that time?  How did they survive?  How did they find each other?  And how did they find my father or vice versa?  Last week, I visited Lena and Joe Mandelbaum and learned something about this, and will have more to say in a future post.

While we were talking about all this at Paula's house, however, Paula’s husband disappeared from the kitchen and came back with the suitcase Morris had brought with him when he came to US. 

 

 

 

On one side are Morris' name (Morritc here, Morritz on the ship manifest, and Morris in the US) and "Epfenhausen" -- the name of the Displaced Persons' camp he was in.

 

 

 

On the other side, are my father's name (the German version) and our address in the Bronx.

 

 

 

 

I thought this was an amazing heirloom.

Morris and Shirley and their children (Paula and her older brother, Stanley) lived in Co-op City for much of their lives, and then retired to Delray Beach.  The EWR tags on the suitcase are from when Morris and his wife Shirley moved from Florida to an assisted living place in NJ.  Morris and Shirley have both since died. 

 

Here's a picture of Shirley from the 1949:

 

 

Morris didn't talk about his experiences in the war, and Paula was 12 before she realized that her grandparents had died in Auschwitz.  When Shindler’s List came out, Steven Spielberg started sponsoring testimonials from survivors, and Morris talked about his experiences.  Paula gave me a copy of her father’s testimonial.  By the time he gave the testimonial, Morris was beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s, so the DVD is both full of information about his experiences -- which I'll also address in a future post -- and moving on a couple of different counts.

And here are a couple of footnotes to this post:

*  Morris made his living in the US as a tailor and “finisher” working on high end couture for Mollie Parnis (a well-known dress designer).  One of his claims to fame was that he made the dress that Pat Nixon wore when Nixon went to China!

*  Paula said, "Your father sponsored my father.  Brought him to this country and the first week he was here took him to a Yankee game."

I loved that last story, but it is probably not literally true, since Morris arrived in the US on Christmas day.....

Ship manifest