Search All 1 Records in Our Collections

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The Museum’s Collections document the fate of Holocaust victims, survivors, rescuers, liberators, and others through artifacts, documents, photos, films, books, personal stories, and more. Search below to view digital records and find material that you can access at our library and at the Shapell Center.

Oral history interviews with Esther Moses and Herbert Moses

Esther Moses (née Zelmanovic), born November 15, 1920, discusses her childhood in Tacovo, Czechoslovakia (now Tiachiv, Ukraine); her father’s early immigration to the United States; her family’s relocation to a ghetto where her older and younger sisters died; her deportation to Auschwitz with her mother and brother; staying in Lager 16 in Auschwitz; meeting one of her cousins in the camp; avoiding the gas chambers on multiple occasions; witnessing resistance fighters in Auschwitz blow up the crematorium; her experience with moving bodies from a pit into a warehouse that was stacked with corpses; seeing people thrown into flames; how, as the Allies advanced, she and other female prisoners were put into cattle cars where they were raped by an SS officer; her relocation to an underground factory where she was placed into forced labor; her transfer to a factory in Hamburg, Germany; being marched to Salzburg where she was liberated; learning the fates of her family members; moving to Belgium following liberation and staying in a displaced persons camp where she met her future husband Herbert Moses; how her father in the United States discovered she was still alive and sent money for her to fly to the US; how she used the money instead to help two other girls come to the US with her by boat; arriving in New York and then traveling to Wichita, Kansas to live with her father; encountering the former SS officer who had sexually assaulted her; and how Herbert Moses came to Kansas and asked her father’s permission to marry her.

Herbert Moses, born November 16, 1920, discusses his prewar life in Altwied, Germany; his family's attempts to leave Germany; living in hiding in Germany, France, and Belgium until their capture; his time in several concentration camps, including Drancy, Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, and Buchenwald; living conditions in the camps; forced labor and death marches; his liberation in 1945 and time in a transition camp in Belgium, where he met his future wife Esther Zelmanovic; his postwar life in New York City; and his marriage to Esther in Wichita, Kansas in 1948.

Learn about over 1,000 camps and ghettos in Volume I and II of this encyclopedia, which are available as a free PDF download. This reference provides text, photographs, charts, maps, and extensive indexes.