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AHC interview with Fred Shinagel
No full textMay 7, 2014Digital recordingFred Shinagel (Schinagel) was born on May 11, 1931 in Vienna, Austria, where he grew up with a younger brother in walking distance from their school. They lived in Gersthof, a section of Vienna’s 18th District, Währing. Fred and his family witnessed the Anschluss and left Austria for Lipnik, Czechoslovakia in May 1938. In September they moved on to Brussels, where their father had a brother. In May 1940 their father was interned in the detention camp Saint Cyprien in southern France, while their mother and the two boys went on to Antwerp. As soon as the father’s brothers in America signed affidavits, the whole family immigrated to the U.S., where they arrived in June 1941. Fred and his brother went to public school in New York. Fred went on to an engineering school and earned a master’s degree in business at MIT, which enabled him to pursue a career on Wall Street. Fred Shinagel and his wife Francis got married in 1961; they had two daughters.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Marcell Gerhard Klein
No full textNovember 25, 2014Digital recordingMarcell Gerhard Klein was born 1933 in Vienna, Austria. His mother Anna Klein, born 1906, was a home keeper, and his father Sigmund Klein, born 1900, worked in the fur business. Marcell had a brother and a sister. The family liked to take walks in the wooded areas surrounding Vienna. After the Anschluss, the family experienced a variety of anti-Semitic actions first hand: Sigmund Klein was denied permission to work, the family's apartment was searched by the SS and Anna Klein was put on trial for mistreating their maid. She also was made to scrub the street. Marcell Klein's maternal grandparents, owners of an apartment building that was later confiscated by the Nazis, decided not to escape; they were deported and murdered in Theresienstadt (Their apartment building was returned to the family after the war and sold.) The Klein family managed to obtain visas for the UK with the help of an uncle who was a British citizen. They left Vienna in 1938 by train. It was stopped and searched on the way to the English Channel. His father Sigmund was taken away and beaten up in the process, but was able to continue the journey. The family lived in London from 1938 until being detained as "enemy aliens" in 1940 in the Rushen internment camp, where living conditions were quite comfortable. They were released in 1943 and went back to London, where they endured the bombing raids, only protected by a so-called Morrison shelter: a steel table designed to hide underneath. The Klein family immigrated to the United States in 1946, settling at first on 190th Street in Manhattan. Marcell Klein started working at age 16. He was with Witco Corporation for most of his career as a technical salesman.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Erika Koeppel
No full textDecember 10, 2014Erika Koeppel, née Waldmann, was born 1932 in Vienna, Austria. The family lived in Moosbierbaum, Lower Austria, 20 miles northwest of Vienna. Her father was a chemist. In 1938, Erika was sent to her aunt in Paris, France, where she went to Elementary school until November 1939. She then joined her parents in England, two weeks prior to their departure to the U.S. on the HMS Brittanic. Erika attended Brooklyn college from 1949 until 1953 and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in biology. From 1965 until 1970 she studied for her Masters degree in education at Hofstra University. She worked as an elementary school teacher until 1994, when she retired to Queens, New York.Austrian Heritage Collectio
My recollections : 1872-1962 /
No full textEnglish translation of 'Meine Erinnerungen 1872-1962' by the author's grandnephew, Leon Chameides.digitizedMeier Koenigshoefer was born 1872 in Fuerth, Germany, son of the director of the local Jewish orphanage. He and his eleven siblings grew up together with the orphans in the orphanage. After serving in the Bavarian army, he and his brothers founded a leather and textile business in Fuerth. Koenigshoefer was the only orthodox member in the communal executive board and a co-founder of the orthodox association Ohev Tora. In 1933 he emigrated via England to Palestine, where he died in 1962
Interview with Joel Ackerman
No full textOral history interview with Joel Ackerman, a lawyer active in the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco, Marin and the Peninsula and chairman of its Soviet Jewry Commission. Ackerman also took an active part in the work of the Northern California Lawyers Committee for Soviet Jews.Digital recordingDigital finding aid
AHC interview with Ernest Haim
No full textOctober 21, 2014Digital recordingErnest H. Haim was born 7/2/1932 in Vienna, Austria. He grew up in the mainly non-Jewish third district of Vienna, Landstrasse. Ernest Haim attended grade school in Vienna until the age of seven. He and his family were smuggled out of Austria into Germany and subsequently via a double partitioned truck ferried into Belgium by the underground. The Haim family left Belgium on December 29, 1939, only two months before it was invaded by Nazi Germany. They arrived in the U.S. on March, 21, 1940. Others in his extended family emigrated to France and settled there. –In the U.S, the Haims lived at their uncle's apartment in Newark, New Jersey until 1950, when Ernest graduated from high school. Afterwards, he moved to Brooklyn and studied at the Pratt Institute. During the Korean war, Ernest Haim was drafted into the army and stationed in France. 1959-1967, he returned to France as an army instructor. He then worked as a freelancer on the digitization of graphic design for numerous publishing houses and magazines both in England and the U.S., settling in Warwick, NY.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Hedy Bertan
No full textDigital recordingApril 1, 2014Hedy Bertan (née Hedwig Einig) was born on June 2nd, 1932 in Vienna, Austria, where the family lived in the 2nd District (Leopoldstadt) on Praterstrasse. In the summer of 1938 her parents managed to obtaine US immigration visas for the end of October, but when her father was told by a Nazi patient of his that he would be on the deportation list to Dachau the next day, he left right away for London, with his wife and daughter following a week later. Hedy started school in London but later was evacuated. After a year and a half in England, the family went to the U.S., where she eventually became a pharmacist.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Morris Lewinter
No full textDigital recordingFebruary 9, 2014Morris (Moses) Lewinter was born on March 21, 1923 in Vienna, Austria, where he lived with his parents and his sister in Universumstrasse 40 in Vienna’s 20th District, Brigittenau. His parents had a grocery store. Moses studied at Chajes Realgymnasium and at the Polnische Schul synagogue, and after Anschluss he went for a short time to a school in Staudingergasse. On Dec. 10, 1938 he was sent via Kindertransport to England and temporarily accommodated in a summer camp in Lowestoft, which was unsuitable for winter occupation. Later he was brought to a kind of hostel with a young leader in Leeds. He eventually received his visa for the U.S. thanks to an uncle’s affidavit, and he arrived in New York on April 1st, 1940. He found shelter with his former Viennese neighbors, who got him a job cutting ladies' undergarments. The next summer he learned diamond cutting. Morris Lewinter studied shortly at a U.S. high school and graduated City College with a Bachelor of Business Administration.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Edith Miedzinski
No full textDigital recordingMarch 12, 2014Edith Miedzinski, née Beck, was born on Jan. 26th, 1924 in Vienna, Austria. When Edith's brother was brought to England on a Kindertransport, and her father fled to Palestine in 1938, she stayed with her mother behind; they were deported to Bergen-Belsen. - After their liberation, Edith and her mother were brought to Sweden, where she worked in a factory. She met her husband in Sweden, and they had two sons; they immigrated to the United States in 1957.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Manfred Seeman
No full textDigital recordingApril 3, 2014Manfred Seeman (Seemann) was born to Polish parents on March 7th, 1924, in Vienna, Austria, where he went to Realgymnasium. Shortly after Anschluss the family left Vienna for the United States, having been granted immigration papers on the Polish visa quota. They arrived in New York on June 19th 1938, where the father had four sisters. Manfred Seeman went to High School in New York and then attended City College at nights, working during the day. In 1943 he was drafted into the army and joined the US 37th infantry division in the Pacific, where he was wounded in the fight for Manila. He went back to College on the GI Bill, graduated in 1947 and then went to the Harvard Graduate Business School. He subsequently entered a long lasting career in the furnishing business. Manfred Seeman retired in Mystic, Connecticut.Austrian Heritage Collectio