Bernard Brown was born in Viseul-de-Sus, Romania to a religious family. He had an older brother and three younger sisters. During the Second World War he was sent to several concentration and work camps and was the only member of his family to survive. He married his wife Libby after they both survived the camps. They …
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 MoreMax Birnbach was born in Vienna, Austria. His father came from Poland, which he left to avoid the army draft. Max’s mother also came from Poland, from a small shtetl and moved to Vienna when she was young. They were married in 1911. Max went to school and began working. Soon the Nazis invaded Austria Max …
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 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 MoreAlfred Apsler was born in Vienna, Austria to Hermann and Helene Pasternak Apsler. Hermann was an accountant. He studied German and history at the Matura on Erzherzog-Rainer-Gymnasium and received a PhD in education in 1930 from the University of Vienna’s College of Education. While still in high school, Alfred became very active with a group of Socialist students …
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 January 20, 1916, Leonard Zawacki was a Polish Catholic serving as a lieutenant in the Polish army at the time of the German invasion. In September 1939, he was taken as a prisoner of war but escaped. He immediately began working with the underground resistance movement in Warsaw until he was arrested again, this time by …
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