Survivor stories: One man's mission to preserve Holocaust histories

Back in 2005, Brad Zarlin, then a Huntington resident, called Chaim Wolgroch, a Holocaust survivor who lived in Charleston, South Carolina. Zarlin asked if Wolgroch — whose name he found in a registry of Holocaust survivors in a Long Island law library — would talk about his experiences.

“He agreed, and we talked for about four hours,” Zarlin said. “He was from Poland and lost almost every member of his family.”

Wolgroch, then 81, told Zarlin about the horrors of concentration camps and how he lived through nearly unimaginable adversity.

“Chaim went on several death marches,” Zarlin recalled from their conversation. “He would always march in the front row because he noticed that the people in front were treated better.”

“I looked up at the heaven. It was red from fire,” Wolgroch says in the interview that Zarlin recorded 15 years ago. “The crematorium was working day and night. I looked up and said, ‘This is my brothers and sisters.’”

Though Wolgroch died in 2010, his story of life amid death and eventual liberation has been preserved.

And as harrowing as Wolgroch’s testimony was, it was his answer to Zarlin’s last question that would move his interviewer to action.

“At the end of his interview I asked him how many times he had been interviewed,” Zarlin said. “He said, ‘Never,’ and I was shocked.” Zarlin said he assumed that all Holocaust survivors had been interviewed, that somehow their stories had become part of the historical record.

Zarlin put down the phone and took up what would become a massive project, calling other Holocaust survivors and recording their stories. He started with the names in the directory, but soon found that survivors referred him to other survivors.

“I interviewed about 1,740 people plus [made] another 200 to 300 incomplete interviews,” he said. The interviews average three hours, with some running as long as 16 hours. Zarlin said that about a third of the people whose oral histories he recorded had never been interviewed about their experiences during the Holocaust.

The recordings — called the Brad Zarlin collection — are now part of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The collection, available online, is the museum’s largest assemblage of interviews by a single person, including 1,945 of Zarlin’s interviews with survivors, from Ruth Aach to Imre Zwiebel, recorded by phone since 2005, and Zarlin is continuing the project.

“The ways they survived were powerful,” Zarlin, 58, a hedge fund manager now living in Oyster Bay, said of those interviewed, including more than 50 Long Islanders. Zarlin said he has observed the survivors’ “ability to tell their story at such an advanced age is a very empowering thing.”

Said Martin Domansky, whose mother, Sophie, an Auschwitz survivor who lived in Manhasset Hills until her death in 2012, was interviewed: “Anything that makes historical evidence about the Holocaust for any of the survivors is extremely important, especially in our day and age where you have Holocaust deniers.”

A race against time

With Jan. 27 marking 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, Zarlin talks about his work during the past 15 years as a kind of race to rescue voices before survivors are no longer alive.

The collection provides accounts of surviving Auschwitz, where more than 1 million people, mostly Jews, were killed, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Zarlin also interviewed people who survived Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Theresienstadt, Ravensbrück (a camp for women) and more. There are also accounts of those who hid or escaped, sometimes joining partisans who fought back.

While such groups as the USC Shoah Foundation specialize in video interviews, Zarlin’s project, done without a budget or an organization, comprises vivid audio histories. Zarlin’s interviews are painstaking in their attention to detail, often leading a subject through an entire lifetime. He doesn’t simply focus on the onset of the Holocaust but takes time to find out about everything from the family business, for example, to how people traveled to school and work before the Nazis came to power. The result mixes mundane and historic events, the details of ordinary lives and routines ruptured by the Holocaust.

“The broad range of experiences that Brad recorded adds a great deal of breadth and depth to the content of our oral history collection,” said James Gilmore, archives specialist at the National Institute for Holocaust Documentation at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. “His interviews reveal what it was like for an individual to survive trauma and live through persecution by the Nazis and their collaborators.”

Holocaust testimonies, he added, are “invaluable to both researchers and family members of survivors, and these recordings will be even more precious once the eyewitness generation is no longer available to tell its own story.”

Anti-Semitic incidents today make these voices — victorious in their survival — more relevant and important, survivors and their family members said.

In their own words

Interviewees talk about going from citizen to outcast, being forced to leave their homes after the Nazis came to power in Germany. “My father had a lot of friends his age,” Terri Frankenberg, 84, of East Meadow, said, recounting her interview. Her family, she said, escaped Germany in 1936 for Paraguay then settled in the United States. “All of a sudden, they didn’t want to have anything to do with him [my father] anymore.”

“They said you’ll be going through the chimney. You’ll get gassed and burned,” Werner Reich, a 92-year-old Smithtown resident who is active in Holocaust educational efforts, recalled other prisoners at Auschwitz saying. “We were constantly on a daily threat of being exterminated. There was the constant smell of burning flesh and clothing in the air,” he said, detailing his interview with Zarlin.

The survivors’ stories have also been illuminating for family members who have listened using their computers and cellphones.

“There were things I hadn’t known before,” said Arleen Hess, whose parents, Werner, 98, and Lottie Hess, 94, of Kings Park, narrowly avoided being sent to concentration camps from their homes in Germany and later met at a dance in Manhattan when Lottie was 16. “It’s live testimony. It’s good to hear their voices, telling their story,” she said of listening to her parents’ oral history on her home computer.

Frankenberg’s daughter Carrie Polnyj, a Wayne, New Jersey, resident, sees Zarlin, who interviewed both of her parents, as engaged in a kind of heroic mission, using technology to triumph over the effort to erase humans.

“I’m very grateful that I have both of those interviews,” said Polnyj, one of Frankenberg's three adult children along with Judie Anderson and Nathan Frankenberg.

To understand the significance and scope of Zarlin’s work, one need only listen to the interviews, a mix of the appalling and the amazing now accessible online.

“I saw Jews being marched through the streets,” Werner Hess says in his interview. “And the population stood on the sidelines throwing stones and spitting at them and harassing them.”

Werner Reich, who survived Auschwitz and other camps, talked about being interviewed by the Gestapo at age 15. His family was from Berlin, but moved to Yugoslavia when the Nazis came to power in 1933. “I thought that I’ll be out instantly,” he says in his interview. “Some guy questioned me. He wanted to know what people were doing. I played hero and said I didn’t know what they were doing. I didn’t know anything about it. The guy just beat me up. I still have a couple of scars. One is on my face. Another is on my arm.”

In her interview, Clara Markowitz Mermelstein, an Auschwitz survivor who lived in Smithtown and died at the age 90 in 2015, describes the sweep of the genocide. “My whole town was taken at the same time. Everybody was silent, because you were afraid to talk to anybody.”

Like many others, Mermelstein’s oral history shines a light on evil perpetrated in a seemingly ordinary way.

“I heard music when I went off the train. I said, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’” Mermelstein, whose family lived in Czechoslovakia, says in her interview. “They had an orchestra there. We were so happy to hear music. It made us feel better.”

Soon, however, those who arrived were sorted into two lines with one going to gas chambers, she goes on to say.

“The SS man kept approaching my mom to go faster. I said, ‘You don’t have a heart. Don’t you see they’re old people?’” Mermelstein says. “He said, ‘Go back there where you belong. You can’t go back on this line.’ That’s the last time I saw her. I didn’t say goodbye.”

In her recording, Sophie Domansky recounts hiding and the capture that led to a concentration camp. “There was a closet. They covered the entry. We were in that room,” says Domansky, who had lived in Lodz, Poland. “They saw the closet. My father got the first beating. They took us to Auschwitz.”

She recalls how her father, who had injured his leg before the war, did his best to walk without a limp at Auschwitz. “When they selected, my father went straight. Afterward, he forgot himself, so he started to limp,” Domansky says. “They took him with the neck and to the other side. I never saw my father.”

Chasing the past

A hedge fund manager who grew up in Roslyn, Zarlin, 58, wasn’t always interested in the past. He graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and got an MBA in finance from the University of Chicago in 1986. He went on to become an investor and then manage a hedge fund.

“I didn’t have any relatives who died in the Holocaust,” he said recently in his Oyster Bay home. “I never liked history in school.”

Zarlin became aware of the existence of a multitude of aging Holocaust survivors, including many who had not recorded interviews, and believed he could save their stories.

“The people that were most helpful to my project were generally the survivors themselves as well as some of their kids,” he said. Survivors would tell other survivors about his project, leading Zarlin to still more interview subjects.

Fueled by purpose and passion, Zarlin recorded interviews on traditional tape rather than digital files, which he felt could easily be erased.

“I used cassette tapes and a cheap tape recorder from Radio Shack,” Zarlin explained. “Then I bought a machine to digitize the tapes.”

He devoted thousands of hours to the interviews, often interviewing one to two people each day, and storing the tapes in his home.

As Zarlin completed more interviews, he realized they would need a permanent home — a place where the voices could also be heard. He knew about the Holocaust museum in Washington and heard that it was continuing to collect and preserve stories.

“I contacted the D.C. museum and they took them,” he said.

“We want the next generation to remember what happened and why,” Terri Frankenberg said. “Who would listen to these? Historians hopefully. Hopefully our great-grandchildren.”

Family members also said that remembering what occurred is crucial to seeking to prevent history from repeating itself.

“I’m very fearful that it could happen again,” said Martin Domansky of Manhattan. “I’m very concerned about the spread of anti-Semitism.”

Archivist Gilmore said the interviews provide valuable, firsthand accounts. “We are making his interviews available to a global audience through our online catalog,” he said. “The impact of these recordings will be revealed in years to come.”