Oral Histories:
Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust
All Excerpts
Each excerpt features an audio recording and the companion text.
Listen to their stories

Why didn't the Jews in the ghetto fight back?
- Rosa Katz

A young woman escapes from the Warsaw Ghetto
- Pela Alpert

Living under a rule of silence while hiding in Holland
- Herb DeLevie

A Polish mother and her baby escape liquidation in 1943
- Chana Comins

A female prisoner at Auschwitz kills a guard
- Walter Peltz

A young Dutch woman evades capture by the Gestapo
- Flora Bader

A teenager's Gentile friends turn against him
- Fred Platner

A rabbi recalls Kristallnacht in Berlin
- Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky

Rescued from death's door at Bergen-Belsen
- Magda Herzberger

A survivor's kindergartener comes home in tears
- Cyla Stundel

Two Czech brothers reunite after the war
- Louis Koplin

A survivor immigrates after nine years in Holland
- Flora Bader

A Polish survivor stands up to neo-Nazis in Milwaukee
- Cyla Stundel

Dachau prisoners destined for massacre are freed
- Israel Wolnerman

Witnessing pandemonium at the Theresienstadt liberation
- Henry Golde

Unrestrained freedom for a group of survivors
- Salvator Moshe

Why resistance was futile in the camps
- Harry Gordon

Suffering as a form of resistance
- Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky

Witnessing the torture of prisoners caught trying to escape
- Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky

Forced laborers break away from a Polish labor camp
- Fred Platner

A rabbi escapes to Switzerland in 1944
- Rabbi Mayer Relles

A Polish man's final goodbye to his sister
- Walter Peltz

Living conditions in the ghetto in Cluj, Romania
- Magda Herzberger

Trying to stay kosher in the Lodz Ghetto
- Rosa Katz

Jewish hospital burned down by Germans in Lithuania
- Harry Gordon

The massacre of Jews in Maniewicze, Poland
- Cyla Stundel

Witnessing the beginning of Polish Jews persecution
- Walter Peltz

Prejudice against Jews becomes violent in 1930s Poland
- Walter Peltz

Relations between Jews and Gentiles in Holland
- Flora Bader

Attitudes of German Jews toward their homeland
- Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky

The anticipation of Jewish holidays and tradition
- Cyla Stundel

School days in 1920s Poland
- Pela Alpert

Childhood memories of Jewish traditions in 1920s Ukraine
- Cyla Stundel

Visions of dead relatives console a starving Polish woman
- Cyla Stundel

A young Polish mother is protected from Germans
- Chana Comins

That cat is here to stay
- Herb Delevie

An American witnesses Dachau hours after liberation
- William Applegate

Death march to Dachau
- Salvator Moshe

The walking dead
- Henry Golde

Nazis trick the young, old, and sick into extermination lines
- Magda Herzberger

A Romanian teenager arrives at Auschwitz
- Magda Herzberger
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