George Bodner was born on April 13, 1919 in Portland, to Jacob and Hannah Mihlstin Bodner. He had two brothers, Herbert and Robert. George’s father owned his own tailoring business on NW 23rd and Savier, and as a child George lived in a mixed gentile/Jewish neighborhood behind the tailor shop. The family moved to New York …
Read MoreAnneke Bloomfield was born on April 19, 1935, in The Hague in the Netherlands. Anneke’s father worked for Shell Oil, while her mother (a retired schoolteacher) stayed at home with Anneke and her three brothers. Anneke also had a younger sister who was born right at the end of the war. When Anneke’s father realized …
Read MoreHans’ father, Wolfe Ruben Biglajzer, originally came from Poland. Wolfe was drafted into the Russian Army during the First World War. He was a prisoner of war in Germany where he met his wife Julia Nathan, who was from Bonnheim. They were married in 1918. Wolfe was a tailor and furrier, as was his father …
Read MoreJacques Bergman was born in Vienna, Austria to Ceciel and Ignatz Bergman in 1923. He had one brother named Leo who was four years older than he. On December 10, 1938, at age 15, Jacques’s parents were able to put him on a Kindertransport to Holland in the hopes of escaping Nazi extremism. Jacques was …
Read MoreJan Baross was born on February 5, 1943 in Bakersfield, California; she had one brother, Dr. Thomas Meadoff. Her fatherDr. Nathan Meadoff was born in Gomel (now in Belarus) and came to the US as a young child. Her mother Estelle Kaplan Meadoff was born in Memphis, Tennessee. They metat UCLA. The household was a secular …
Read MoreEvelyn Diamont Banko was born January 21, 1936 in Vienna, Austria. Her father, Joseph, was an engineer and her mother, Frieda, a housewife. In March 1938, when the Nazi’s annexed Austria and enacted numerous anti-Jewish laws, it became increasingly clear to Evelyn’s family that they could not remain in Austria. In August 1938, a Nazi who …
Read MoreJoy Levy Alkalay was born in 1920 in Vienna, Austria, the only child in a Sephardic family. Perceiving the German threat, the family was permitted to leave Austria because they were Yugoslav nationals. Joy’s family went first to Zagreb and from there to Sarajevo and Split. Later she was interned by the Italians on the island …
Read MoreLeslie “Les” Aigner, one of three children, was born Ladislav Aigner in 1929 in Nové Zámky, Czechoslovakia. In the early 1940s his family moved to Csepel, Hungary on the outskirts of Budapest in the hope of escaping oppressive Nazi discrimination against Jews. But in 1943, the Nazis forced Les’s father into a slave labor camp …
Read MoreBorn in 1927 in Portland, Martin Zell was a second-generation manager of the successful Zell Brother’s jewelry business. Martin’s father, Julius, was one of four brothers who emigrated from Austria to the Pacific Northwest around the time of the First World War. Julius and his brother, Harry, took over the drugstore of their cousin, Mike …
Read MoreKaren Irwin (nee Evelyn Aronson) was born on July 4, 1924 in Halberstadt Germany to Franziska (Emanuel) and Félix Aronson. Franziska was a chemist, born in Hedemuenden and grew up in Kassel. Félix was a businessman whose family came from Konigsberg, Prussia and grew up in Paris. Karen had no siblings. Karen’s parents moved several times …
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