Walter Peltz - Oral History Interview, 1980
Walter Peltz was a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust who settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after World War II.
Walter Wolf Peltz was born into a working-class family in Warsaw, Poland, on May 12, 1919. His area of the city later became the Warsaw Ghetto. Walter quit school at the age of 10 to help support his family. When war broke out in 1939, his home was destroyed and his family left starving.
To avoid arrest by the Gestapo, Walter fled to central Poland, near Lublin, where he was hidden by a Christian family for more than a year. Taken into custody in 1941, Walter survived four years in the concentration camps of Majdanek, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau before being liberated by U.S. troops in May 1945.
Shortly after liberation, Walter married Rose Abraham, a Hungarian survivor of Dachau. They settled in Memmingen, Germany, opened a clothing store and, in 1946, had a son.
The family left Germany in April 1949, arriving in Milwaukee a month later where Walter quickly found work as a tailor. A daughter was born in 1952. Walter's wife died in 1968 and he remarried in 1972. Walter lectured frequently about the Holocaust until his death in 2003.
Walter Peltz, Oral History Interview
Listen to Walter Peltz tell his story to the Wisconsin Historical Society interviewer.
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Oral Histories: Wisconsin Survivors of the Holocaust
Hear the stories of 22 Holocaust Survivors and two American witnesses interviewed between 1974 and 1981.