Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust

When Nazi troops seized the Polish farm where Celia Kassow was in hiding, she fled once again—this time into the forest, where she joined the Soviet partisans.

When Nazi bombs fell from the sky, Celia Kassow fled her Polish boarding school and sought help from a classmate who lived nearby. The response? “Get away from here, you dirty Jew.”

Leonard Linton's story spans half the globe—from Japan to Germany, France, New York, and back to Germany, where as a 23-year-old U.S. soldier he happened upon a concentration camp called Woebbelin.

Renee Hartman was just a child when the Nazis swept into Czechoslovakia.  Her parents and sister were deaf, so she became her family’s ears, alert to the sound of the Gestapo’s boots.

Eighteen-year-old Arne Brun Lie answered the patriotic call to join the Norwegian resistance.  But instead of fighting for his nation’s freedom, he found himself in the hands of the Nazis, fighting for his life.

After liberation from a slave labor camp, Sally Finkelstein Horwitz and her sister returned to Poland where anti-Jewish pogroms forced them to seek refuge in Germany.

When Heda Kovaly was deported from Prague to the Lodz ghetto, along with thousands of other Jews, she never imagined that of her entire extended family, only she and her husband would return alive.

  Leon Bass faced racism growing up in Philadelphia, confronted it in the Army, and discovered its “ultimate” endpoint at a German concentration camp called Buchenwald.

As a little boy, Martin Schiller was sent to a slave labor camp in Poland along with his family. Separated from his mother, Martin never lost hope of being reunited with her after liberation.  This is his story of survival.

Meet host Eleanor Reissa and hear excerpts of upcoming episodes featuring first-hand accounts of the Holocaust—drawn from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University.