Search below to view digital records and find material that you can access at our library and at the Shapell Center. Search this record's additional resources, such as finding aids, documents, or transcripts. No results match this search term. Check spelling and try again. The interviews in the collection date from to with two new additions in , and as an ongoing project, additional interviews will be added.
The interviews are recorded in a variety of languages including Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and French. Interviews include survivors of the Holocaust who immigrated to Israel. Raphael Rudy Abarbanel, born in , discusses his family and his childhood in Pirot, Serbia; moving to Belgrade, Serbia; his religious upbringing; joining the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement; his disbelief about events in Germany; the German bombings of Belgrade; being taken from his home; his work in a forced labor group under German control and his attempts to join Communist partisans; escaping from a train in Lom, Bulgaria; joining other refugees in Sofia, Bulgaria; being caught and interned in Albania; forging documents; escaping by boat in February ; landing in a British camp for refugees in Bari, Italy; immigrating to Palestine; and settling in a kibbutz in Israel.
Moshe Alpan born Moshe Elefant discusses the antisemitism in Vranov, Slovakia before the war; joining Hashomer Hatzair; the anti-Jewish measures and violence; the disbelief of his community at what was happening; becoming active in the Zionist movement as a way to help; organizing the Hashomer Hatzair underground movement in Budapest, Hungary in February ; the German occupation of Budapest in March ; the Jewish resistance groups; partisan rescue missions; working with the communist underground movement; helping Polish Jews cross into Slovakia; his emotional responses to the events; immigrating to Israel in July ; and his philosophical ideas about heroism, being a victim, and resistance.
Tzvi Aviram b. Zvi Azaria b. Genya Batasheva, born in in Kiev, Ukraine, discusses her childhood; the famine in ; going to school for accounting and becoming a bookkeeper; the German occupation of Kiev, Ukraine; constructing defense positions in the suburbs of Kiev; the round ups of Jews; the massacre at Babi Yar and the murder of her family; telling guards she was Russian; getting fake identity papers; leaving for Kharkiv, Ukraine with her friend Olga Zacharovna Rozhchenko; working in Omsk, Russia for two years; hearing the news that the Soviets liberated Kiev; receiving a letter from her father and joining him in Barnaul, Russia; daily life in Barnaul; her post-war life; and her immigration to Israel due to Russian anti-Semitism.
Sonia Berenshtein, born in , discusses her childhood in Zheludok, Poland present day Belarus ; her family; joining the underground movement in the Dzyatlava ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto in August ; hiding in the forest with a partisan group under Hirsch Kaplinski; participating in partisan actions; a typhoid epidemic; liberation by the Soviets; immigrating to Palestine; and her life in Israel. Josef Binenshtok, born in Wadowice, Poland, describes the beginning of the war and the racial laws; building barracks in Auschwitz; traveling to the labor camp Ottmuth to build the Berlin Moskva autobahn; arrival of other Jews from Holland, Belgium, and Greece; the shutting down of labor camps and mass extermination camps; traveling to Blechhammer and working to build gas chambers in Blechhammer; traveling by train to Gross Rosen, Buchenwald, Dora, and Sachsenhausen; liberation near Schwerin Skwierzyna, Poland ; living in a displaced persons camp near Bergen-Belsen; and immigrating to Palestine.
