Oral History Interviews

QUESTION :HOW DID GOING THROUGH THE HOLOCAUST CHANGE YOUR VIEWS ON LIFE, AND HAS IT AFFECTED YOUR LIFE NOW? DO YOU BELIEVE YOU WOULD BE DIFFERENT IF THIS EVENT HAD NOT HAPPENED? I was 11 years old when the Nazis occupied Poland, where I was born. At the age of

During the 2009 school year tenth-grade students from Northrop High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana asked Joseph Kempler the following question regarding his personal experiences during the Holocaust. Question : How did going through the holocaust change your views on life, and has it affected your life now? do you

During the 2009 school year tenth-grade students from Northrop High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana asked Anna Denz Turpin the following question regarding her personal experiences during the Holocaust. Question : How did you and your family keep your faith? When your friends and loved ones were dying, was it

QUESTION :How did you and your family keep your faith? When your friends and loved ones were dying, was it hard at times to keep your faith and stay strong and brave? Every morning my mom brought in a Bible and before Dad left for work, our family would read

At one program in commemoration of the Holocaust, one Jewish university professor who had studied and investigated the concentration camps and its effects it left behind on all prisoners in the camp, made this statement at the beginning of his talk saying: ‘All Jewish inmates in the camp were all

Let me please give you first some background information about myself and our family in which I grew up when I was your age and still going to school, because it had a strong influence on me as a young growing teenager. It will help you to better understand my

During the 2007 school year eighth-grade students from Columbia Explorers Academy (Chicago, Illinois) asked Rudolf Graichen two questions regarding his personal experiences. Question #1 : How did you feel when you went to prison both times ? Question #2 : How did you survive the Holocaust ? Nazi Prison Survivor

Living conditions got much worse as the war expanded. Prisoners from all of Europe overloaded the camps. Non-Jewish prisoners who could speak German and who had been in camp for a long time became foremen. Some Jehovah’s Witnesses had been incarcerated even before the war. Because the camp supervisors noted

My first camp was Sachsenhausen. I arrived there in January 1940. Most prisoners were German. They did hard labor, had extra food, and slept in bunks. “Dangerous” individuals were isolated in special barracks and worked in so-called Strafkommando (punishment units). Jehovah’s Witnesses were usually assigned to the Strafkommando upon their arrival in the camp. Jews