Linked Agent(s)
Interviewer: David P. Boder
Recordist: David P. Boder
Transcriber: Stefan Meuser
Translator: Stefan Meuser
Writer of added commentary: Eben E. English
Identifier
lipschitzM_9-21A
Date Created
1946-08-04
Language
Physical Form
Extent
14:10
Resource Type
Local Identifier
lipschitzM
Creation Location
Spool
9-21
SOLR query
Aviary identifier
17644

Interview Commentary

In this short interview, Boder speaks with Dr. Maximilian Lipschitz, a Czech-born Jew who spent most of the war in the Kraków Ghetto, one of the main ghettos created within the General Government area of Nazi-occupied Poland. Lipschitz provides a detailed description of the overcrowded living conditions in the ghetto (15,000 Jews were forced to live in an area in which only 3,000 people had previously lived). As a laborer in German military factories, Lipschitz and much of his family were spared the initial deportations to the Belzec extermination camp, and he claims that he was able to save his sister and children.

Unfortunately, the interview ends abruptly before Lipschitz can finish his story, so the rest of his experiences are unknown. (It is unlikely that he stayed in Kraków for much longer—the ghetto was liquidated in March 1943, and all remaining inhabitants were either sent to various concentration camps or killed outright.) This interview was among the many that Boder was unable to transcribe before his death in 1961. The short duration (less than fifteen minutes) and the fact that it was interrupted may have made it less of a priority.

—Eben E. English