Introduction
“Through their recorded testimonies, we get a small glimpse into the unimaginable experiences that shaped them—and shaped our world. Their voices are a stark reminder of the millions of people who did not live to tell their stories.”
Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust is the only podcast dedicated to sharing the history of the Holocaust through the first-hand testimonies of survivors and witnesses. The podcast draws on recorded interviews from Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, which comprises the oral histories of over 4,000 people. It took incredible courage for these individuals to revisit their memories of Nazi-occupied Europe and provide testimony to the Fortunoff Video Archive.
Profiles
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Malka Baran
“I remember hiding in a cellar, and we were very, very quiet as the German troops were entering the city. And a baby started crying, and there was a candle on the windowsill. The windows were closed. In order for the Germans not to hear the baby cry, the mother was stifling the baby.”
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Leon Bass
“Can you imagine? I put in three years of my life, put it on the line to make it possible for people like that young lady and that manager or whoever owned that store to function and enjoy the rights and privileges of Americans, and they were saying to me, just like the Nazis did, just like they told me down in the South, what they told my father, ‘Leon, you’re not good enough.’”
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Sally Frishberg
“And there was really no place to go. But my grandfather always contended that you don’t do anything. You stay put because, after all, he used to say, “Es iz nisht keyn hefke velt.” He meant that life had an orderly way of being conducted and that people who did nothing wrong need not be afraid of anything.”
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Renee Hartman
“We lived on the fourth floor in the apartment. And my parents were both deaf. And I had a deaf sister. So I became the ears. I would have to warn them that the transport was coming. And what I would do is we would all rush in the back room. And when they knocked on the door, we didn’t answer.”
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Annelies Herz
“I had seen an advertisement, that a big, big, big, more than a farm is looking for help. And, um, I wrote them a letter. Same story: we lost our parents, we have vacation, and we would like to work in our vacation, but only when, if I can bring my sister.”
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Sally Horwitz
“My sister came to get me because the communications were bad. She says they were killing Jewish people. They killed, at the time, some people in Kielce. And, um, my sister came to tell me that we have to get out of the small towns, because they were killing the Jewish people. This was after the war.”
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Helen Jonas
“I was cleaning barracks until one day the commander, Amon Göth, who was in charge of the camp, walked in in the barrack and made, made his selection. He pointed a finger at me and ordered me to be his servant in his house that was located in the camp.”
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Celia Kassow — Part 1
“I can’t begin to tell it because what it meant to be in hiding. The guy made a hole under the floor in the barn. The hole consisted of maybe as wide as I was—two feet—and as long as I was. You couldn’t turn. If you crawled in on your stomach, you remained on your stomach….”
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Celia Kassow — Part 2
“They wanted me to work in the kitchen, being a Jew and being a girl. They told me to dissect a pig. When I looked at that, and I started doing it, I fainted flat. I couldn’t do it. I said, ‘I’m volunteering for the patrol.’ They used to call it razvedka.”
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Sam Kassow
In October 1945, Celia Kassow gave birth to her son Sam in a German displaced persons camp. Seventy-five years later, Sam Kassow reflects on his mother’s life and an astonishing journey of discovery to his mother’s hometown in Eastern Europe.
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Heda Kovaly
“And they let us get out of the train to bring some water—the young people. So they said, ‘Out and get the water.’ And I remember how we got out of the train and there was some, a pile of gravel. And there was this beautiful flower growing out of this mess. And I thought, This is the last flower I’m going to see.”
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Arne B. Lie
“We were arrested and we were sent north. I was 17 years old. The Germans had decided that we were to be used as forced labour, and from that day on nothing was ever the same again.”
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Leonard Linton
“I drove there, and when I arrived, an incredible sight greeted me. You can imagine that a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division is a fairly hardened individual. However, when I came into this concentration camp, I must say that, to this day— an incredible and really undescribable disgust, a feeling, a mixture of horror, repulsion…”
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Abram Merczynski
“Nobody really, in their right mind, could imagine that, uh, that they could do, uh, things like this—just take innocent people, and murder, and put to gas chambers or something. Uh, nobody could imagine.”
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Judith Perlaki
“They opened the doors and we saw prisoners. They had striped uniform and a striped cap on it. And they were whispering, ‘Let the children go, let your children go,’ in Jewish. We didn’t understand it. Why?”
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Leon Pommers
“Something unexplainable happened—it was a miracle. One day a rumor was spread, which happened to be true later, that somebody went—he had some personal contact with the Japanese, uh, consulate in Kovno.”
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Elias Recanati
“I was born in Salonika, Greece, on March 30, 1932. My mother’s family was, uh, Spanish. And, uh, it was agreed between the Spaniards and the Germans that, uh, my mother, my brother, and myself would be spared if the Spaniards would give us a visa to go to Spain.”
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Martin Schiller
“One of the things I remember as a child coming out, I felt I had to tell the world what was happening. So, I remember the first few months in the yeshiva I would speak freely. I would tell the kids everything. I would tell my rabbi what happened and so on.”
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Esther Schwartzman
“We marched for days and days, and my older sister said she can’t march anymore, and a couple of times, she said she’s going to stop, she’s not going on. And there were a lot of people who did, and they shot them on the road.”
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Isaac Zieman
“We were sent to a kolkhoz, a collective farm, called Svobodnyi Trud, which means ‘free labor,’ and we were free laborers. We were laborers that were only given to eat, but not paid anything else.”