Started in 2013, the Legacy Series oral history program preserves the experiences of Holocaust survivors, World War II veterans, home front workers, and other individuals who lived during the Second World War. Preserved on film in the KSU Archives, the oral history interviews support education, exhibitions, and public programs
at the Museum of History and Holocaust Education.
For more information on how you can contribute to the Legacy Series, please contact:
Born in Brooklyn in 1948, Susan Berman is the daughter of German Holocaust survivors.
Her mother Ruth took the Kindertransport to England in 1939, a few months before other
members of her family boarded the ill-fated ship, the St. Louis. Berman's father Manfred
was arrested on Kristallnacht, but after his release he fled Germany and immigrated
to the United States, where he served in the U.S. Army.
Edward Francell was born into a secular Jewish family in Paris, France, in 1934. After the Nazis came to power in Germany, Francell and his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Los Angeles. At school Francell participated in fundraisers for refugees fleeing Europe. Francell graduated from Columbia University in 1956.
Born in Poland in 1922, Norbert Friedman was forced into the Mielec concentration camp after the German invasion. He would survive eleven camps throughout the war building airplane engines for the German air force. After liberation Friedman completed his college education in Germany and immigrated to the United States in 1950.
Born in Ukraine in 1941, Hershel Greenblat spent the first two years of his life hiding in underground caves. His parents were resistance fighters who left him in the care of friends when they carried out attacks on the Nazis. After the war Greenblat’s family lived in a succession of displaced person camps before immigrating to the United States.
Born in 1962, David Jacobi is a lifelong resident of Atlanta. His father's family
survived the Holocaust in Germany, and his mother's family survived the Blitz in England.
After the death of his grandparents, Jacobi began researching his family's wartime
experience and cataloging the artifacts they left behind.
Born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1940, Andre Kessler attributes his survival during the Second World War to the landlord of his building who enabled his family to go into hiding for sixteen months. After the war Kessler escaped from behind the Iron Curtain to Austria and immigrated to the United States in 1951.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, six-year-old Herbert Kohn was forced to leave public school in Frankfurt, Germany. The Nazis imprisoned Kohn’s father after Kristallnacht but released him a few weeks later because of his service in World War I. Kohn and his family immigrated to the United States in 1940.
Born in Poland in 1929, Rochelle Lawrence immigrated to Palestine with her family in 1936. After two years of bombings and food shortages in Tel Aviv, Lawrence’s family moved to the United States with the support of relatives. In 1949, Lawrence married a veteran of World War II and eventually had three children. She made her home on Long Island before retiring to Georgia to be closer to her daughter.
Murray Lynn was born in Hungary in 1930. As a teenager he was deported to Auschwitz
and forced to work as a slave laborer for more than a year. After liberation Lynn
returned to his hometown and found few survivors of the Jewish community. He immigrated
to the United States in 1948.
Born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1952, Sarah Popowski is the daughter of Holocaust
survivors Paula Kornblum Popowski and Henry Popowski of Kaluszcyn, Poland. Having
avoided deportation by volunteering for hard labor in 1942, Paula escaped from the
labor camp with aid from a righteous gentile and hid with her sister in southern Poland
under a false identity. After marrying in a DP camp, Paula and Henry emigrated to
the United States in 1949. Sarah Popowski lives in Atlanta and recorded her oral history
interview at Kennesaw State University in August 2022.
Tosia Schneider was born in Poland in 1928. During the Second World War, her family
was forced into the Tluste ghetto, where her mother held a secret school for Jewish
children in defiance of the Nazis. Schneider was eventually deported to a labor camp.
The only survivor in her family, Schneider immigrated to the United States in 1950.
Born in Denmark in 1952, Gitte Toben immigrated to the United States in 1979. She
volunteers at the Museum of History and Holocaust Education because her father, Kjeld
Johansen, was a member of the Danish resistance during World War II. He was injured
during an attack on the Nazis and went underground to avoid capture.
Born in Latvia in 1928, Sheva Vapne grew up speaking Latvian, Russian, and Yiddish.
When the Germans invaded in 1941, Vapne escaped to Russia where she worked on a collective
farm until winter forced her south to Uzbekistan. After the war Vapne returned to
Latvia, then part of the Soviet Union. She immigrated to the United States in the
1970s.
Born in Massachusetts in 1925, Henry Ahola was the son of Finnish immigrants. During World War II, he volunteered to serve in the Army Air Corps and shipped out to Guam, where he worked in a telephone office circulating messages among military units stationed in the Pacific. After the war he worked for the Lockheed corporation in Georgia.
Born in Ohio in 1928, Roger Amidon served as part of an occupational force in Nagoya,
Japan, after World War II. His military unit helped to restore power to the city,
where many Japanese remained homeless a year after the war. Amidon repaired radio
teletype machines on the night shift and spent much of his free time traveling around
the country. He moved to Georgia in the 1970s.
Born in Minnesota in 1923, Harry Anton volunteered to serve in a supply unit recruited through the General Motors Company during World War II. He spent two years on a base in North Africa before transferring to the infantry during the Battle of the Bulge. While crossing into Germany, Anton was struck by a German bullet and spent several weeks in recovery.
Born in New York in 1922, Richard Bailey worked as a toolmaker’s apprentice for General Electric before enlisting in the Army Air Corps. He served as a B-26 pilot during World War II, leading crews of six on pre-invasion bombing missions over Europe. By the end of the war, Bailey had flown 65 missions including three on D-Day.
Born in southwest Georgia in 1921, Edith Bond worked at St. Johns River Shipbuilding
Company in Jacksonville during World War II. In 1944 she enlisted in the Navy as an
officer in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). She had postings
at the Bureau of Ships in Washington, D.C., and the Pensacola Naval Air Station. After
the war she enjoyed a long career in social work.
Born in North Augusta, South Carolina in 1925, Theodore Roosevelt Britton, Jr., moved
to New York City when he was ten years old. Britton joined the Marine Corps in 1943
and maintained the muster roll for his military unit in the Pacific. He attended New
York University and served as ambassador to Barbados and Grenada under President Ford.
Born on a farm in Troup County, Georgia in 1924, Alton Cadenhead enlisted in the Marine Corps after the Pearl Harbor attack. Serving as a corporal in the Third Marine Division, Cadenhead was injured in the battles of Guam and Iwo Jima. After the war he worked as a mechanical engineer.
Born in New Jersey in 1928, Robert Chester entered the Navy in the final year of the war. He served as a gunner's mate aboard the USS Ludlow, which convoyed ships into Japanese ports during the American occupation. After returning to the United States, Chester took a long-term job in the explosives and chemical industry.
Born in 1944, Michael Cox grew up in the small town of Molina, Georgia, close to his World War II veteran uncles, George Mack Hamlett and Alvie Lowell Hamlett. While “Mack” served in the Army in Europe and “Lowell” served in the Navy off the Florida coast, both Hamletts documented their experiences with letters and photographs.
Born in Oxnard, California in 1925, Jimmy Doi was the son of Japanese parents who emigrated from Japan in the early 20th century. He spent two years in the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona, before he was drafted into the U.S. Army as a member of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. After the war Doi moved to Georgia to work in the poultry industry.
Harper Dolvin was born in Atlanta in 1923. Drafted into the military during his first semester at the University of Georgia, Dolvin trained as an aircraft mechanic and gunner in the Army Air Corps. Stationed in England from 1942 to 1946, Dolvin flew 13 bombing missions over Germany as a replacement for soldiers who were injured. After the war he opened a used car business in Atlanta.
Born in a coal mining town in West Virginia in 1923, Faye Edwards took a job at a defense plant in Baltimore during World War II. In 1944 she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) and completed two tours of duty in Europe before transferring to Japan. There she met her husband and started a family. She currently lives in Newnan, Georgia.
Born in rural southwest Georgia in 1923, Reuben Griffin was initially deferred by his local draft board because he was considered more useful as a farmer than a soldier. By 1944 the need for soldiers was so great that Griffin had to leave his farm behind. He completed training at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, and spent a year as part of an occupational force in Japan.
Born in 1918, Guy Gunter grew up in Atlanta, where he worked as a salesman for General
Electric before World War II. In 1942 he completed glider pilot training and shipped
out to North Africa. He piloted gliders during the invasions of Italy, France, and
the Netherlands. After the war Gunter founded an appliance company.
Born in Cincinnati in 1926, Al Hall begged his mother to sign his enlistment papers when he was only 17. A signalman in the Navy, Hall served in a secret mission to Le Havre, France, during the D-Day Invasion. He was part of a unit that erected a flashing light to signal Liberty ships approaching the coast with supplies. After the war Hall was transferred to Atlanta in his sales job.
Born in New Jersey in 1924, Elizabeth Hickcox lived with her grandparents during the Depression. After high school she worked for Standard Oil before joining the Navy in 1944. Stationed in Washington, D.C., Hickcox worked as a Navy cook preparing hundreds of meals each day. Later in life she moved to Georgia to be closer to her children.
Born in Kentucky in 1921, Crawford Hicks piloted a B-17 Flying Fortress on nine missions over Germany during World War II. On his tenth mission Hicks was shot down and imprisoned in Stalag Luft III. Liberated by General George Patton’s Third Army in 1945, Hicks worked for the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigation (OSI) after the war.
Born in 1925, Joseph Hudson grew up in his grandfather’s home in Virginia. During World War II, Hudson worked at the Richmond Army Depot before joining the Army in 1944. He trained at Fort Lee and spent two years in India, where he sorted used materiel en route from the Burma Road. After the war, Hudson reenlisted and spent several years in postwar Germany.
Born in Alabama in 1926, Alonza Jones grew up in Columbus, Georgia. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1943 and served over two years in the Pacific, both on Guadalcanal and Okinawa. After the war he built airplanes for the Lockheed Corporation and later obtained a job with the United States Postal Service.
Born in 1952, Joanna Kimling Stubbs grew up in Marietta, Georgia, where her father,
Eugene Kimling, was an engineer at Lockheed. Although born in New York City, Eugene
Kimling spent the World War II years in Germany, trapped there after visiting his
grandmother in September 1939. A mandatory member of the Hitler Youth, he survived
Allied bombings and joined the U.S. Army after the war.
Born in Baltimore in 1920, Harry Kone worked as a welder while attending the University
of Wisconsin. In 1942 Kone enlisted in the Marine Corps and sustained injuries while
unloading a ship at Guadalcanal later that year. He recovered in a military hospital
before serving in the Bougainville Campaign in 1943. After the war Kone taught English
in Chicago city schools.
Born in 1923, James Pack grew up in East Liverpool, Ohio. After his military enlistment in 1943, Pack chose to enter the Marine Corps. He served in the 20th depot company, taking part in the invasions of Saipan and Okinawa. After the war Pack worked as a civil servant for the city of Detroit before retiring to Georgia.
Born in 1922, Hillard Pouncy grew up in Eufaula, Alabama. After graduating from high school, he attended Tuskegee Institute, where he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and became a bombardier in the Tuskegee Air Squadron. After the war Pouncy earned a Ph.D. from Syracuse University and worked as a chemist for Union Carbide.
Born in West Virginia in 1925, James Russell joined the Navy during World War II and served on the USS John D. Henley, or “Lucky John D,” in the Pacific. The ship provided offshore support during six major battles: Saipan, Guam, Tinian, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. After the war Russell started working for a telephone company and settled in Georgia.
Born in Atlanta in 1949, M. Alexis Scott is a journalist whose family founded the Atlanta Daily World in 1928. Scott’s father, William A. Scott III, served as an army reconnaissance sergeant and photographer during World War II. In April 1945, he was one of the first Allied soldiers to enter and photograph survivors of Buchenwald concentration camp. President George H.W. Bush appointed him to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 1991.
Born in Atlanta in 1919, Lorenzo Wallace graduated from Booker T. Washington High School and Morehouse College. In 1942 he joined the Marine Corps and shipped out to the Marshall Islands as a part of a radar group. After the war Wallace worked for the United States Postal Service and later served as doorkeeper and sergeant-at-arms for the Georgia State Senate.
Born in Macon, Georgia, in 1954, William Wallace, Jr. joined a family with a strong
Christian faith and deep roots in the state. Wallace's father, William Wallace, Sr.
was a veteran of World War II and survivor of the Bataan Death March perpetrated by
the Japanese government against American prisoners of war in the Philippines.
Born outside of Buffalo, New York in 1926, Richard Weber worked in an airplane factory before joining the Army Air Corps in 1944. He served as a teletype operator on the islands of Saipan and Guam. During his service, Weber memorized Bible verses in his tent at night and went on to become a pastor after World War II.
Born in Bartow County, Georgia, in 1927, Geraldine Anthony worked as a janitor at
Bell Aircraft in Marietta during World War II. She swept the factory floor of metal
shavings and debris that fell from B-29 planes during construction. After the war,
she worked on a cotton farm before taking a job with Goodyear Tire in Rome, Georgia.
Born in Michigan in 1924, Dolores “Tooken” Richardson Cade earned her nickname while working the photo booth at the United Service Organizations (USO) in Detroit. She met a sailor who gave her a bracelet etched with the word “Tooken” to signify their engagement. Married in 1944, they were parents to four sons by the time they moved to Georgia in the 1960s.
Born in Oklahoma in 1937, William Campbell moved to Oklahoma City when his father was drafted into the military during World War II. For two years, Campbell lived in an abandoned barber shop with his mother and sister and depended on his grandparents for financial support. After college, Campbell got a job with the Lockheed corporation and moved to Georgia.
Born in 1935, June Chandler grew up outside London in the borough of Enfield. During
World War II, her neighborhood sustained heavy German bombing, and Chandler had to
evacuate to the north. After the war she married an American serviceman stationed
in England, and they moved to Georgia where he took a job with the Lockheed corporation.
Born in Exton, England, in 1938, Deryck Cook could not remember a time before the
world was at war. Although the worst bombings of the Battle of Britain had ended by
the time Cook was in school, gas masks remained compulsory and air raids were common.
Cook recalls how his family played host to three evacuated children from Coventry,
how ration stamps were required for purchases in the village shop run by his mother
and aunt, and how the village children begged chewing gum from American troops stationed
there between 1943 and 1944. Cook left England in 1982 with his wife and three children,
moving first to Toronto, Canada, and then to Detroit, Michigan, and finally to Georgia
where he has lived for more than thirty years.
Born in the East End of London in 1932, Alan Davies was evacuated to the English countryside
during World War II because of German air raids. As an adult Davies worked for the
Air Force Exchange Service on an American military base in Germany. After transferring
to the United States with his job, Davies retired in 1993.
Born in Ohio in 1926, Paula Fidler got a job as a secretary for Air Materiel Command
at Wright-Patterson Air Field during World War II. One of her assignments included
recording the experiences of military officials who helped develop the atomic bomb.
After the war Fidler married a paratrooper and lived in Europe and Asia before retiring
to Georgia.
Born in Texas in 1919, Lee Foringer married at the start of World War II and moved to Long Beach, California. When her husband joined the Army Air Corps, she found a job at Douglas Aircraft as a riveter building B-17s and B-19s. Foringer continued to work after she became pregnant with her first child. After the war she worked as a buyer for women’s dress shops.
Born in Mississippi in 1925, Earline Gaither married as a teenager and moved to Michigan during World War II. She got a job on the assembly line at Willow Run airplane factory, where she oiled the guns, installed the flying instruction manual, and added the night-flying curtains. After the war she settled in Marietta, Georgia, and enjoyed a long term career as a manager at Sears.
Born in Canton, Georgia, in 1925, Edith Gray met her future husband in high school. Before he shipped out to the Pacific in World War II, Gray accepted his marriage proposal. In his absence, she attended business school and worked as a secretary at Canton Cotton Mills. After the war they settled in Rome, Georgia, and Gray worked as a homemaker.
Born in 1930, Edna Hicks grew up in Harrow, a suburb of London that sustained considerable bombing from German planes during World War II. After the war Hicks got a job at a post exchange on a military base and met an American pilot. They married in 1956 and lived on six bases in the United States before retiring to Warner Robins, Georgia.
Louvinia Jordan was born on a farm in North Carolina in 1922. During the Second World War, Jordan became a cryptographic clerk or “codebreaker” in the Signal Corps and deciphered top secret Japanese codes. After the war she married a veteran of the Pacific War and worked as a bookkeeper for a newspaper.
Marcel Kohler was born in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 1950, five years after the
end of World War II. He is the youngest of three siblings, with an older brother born
three years after the war, and an older sister who was a child during the Nazi occupation
of the Netherlands. His family experienced hardships during the occupation, including
food shortages and threats to their property by the occupying forces. During the war,
they hid their valuables in secret cabinets, and his sister later shared stories with
him of Jewish people hidden in the attic. The Kohler family immigrated to the United
States in 1955 and settled in Lansing, Michigan.
Born in Kentucky in 1936, Lori Lee spent her earliest years in southern China, where
her parents worked as missionaries among the boat people on the Pearl River. In December
1941, Lee and her family were forced into confinement by Japanese occupational forces.
They eventually repatriated to the United States. After attending boarding school
in Canada, Lee lived in California and Great Britain before retiring to Georgia.
Born in Tennessee in 1935, Clay Manley spent his childhood moving throughout the Southeast.
His father was a supervisor for the Blair Construction company which took government
contracts, first as a part of the New Deal, and then as a result of wartime production.
After graduating from Mercer University, Manley attended Union Theological Seminary
in New York and became a Baptist minister in Georgia.
Born in 1921, Bettye McCubbin grew up in Kansas City. She left college to work for the United States Employment Service and later got a clerical job with Pratt & Whitney, a manufacturer of airplane engines. After the war McCubbin wrote for the Kansas City Star and married her high school sweetheart, a World War II pilot. They moved to Georgia in 2004.
Born in Rome, Georgia in 1921, Mary McJunkin quit school to care for her younger siblings after her mother’s death. At 20, she married a serviceman who was transferred to a military base in California. McJunkin worked the night shift at an airplane factory outside Los Angeles. She followed her husband to bases around the country until he went overseas in 1944.
Born in Rome, Georgia, in 1925, Joy Mitchell worked at the city's newly constructed
Battey Hospital during World War II. Posted at the front desk, Mitchell wrote passes
for family members and friends visiting soldiers who were recovering from injuries
sustained in Europe and Asia. After the war Mitchell became a university librarian.
Born in Forsyth County, Georgia in 1918, Jessie Moss took a job at Bell Aircraft Corporation during World War II. She worked on a team building fuselages for B-29 bombers. When her husband returned from fighting in the Pacific, Moss paid for the construction of their first home with money saved from her job at Bell Aircraft.
Born in 1929, Anna Ostergaard grew up on a farm in Denmark. After Germany invaded
in 1940, she stayed away from the cities, where air raids sent people fleeing into
bomb shelters. Ostergaard's family survived on a consistent supply of vegetables from
the garden. Ostergaard married after the war and immigrated to the United States in
1955.
Born in 1945, Jean Ousley met her father for the first time after he returned from service in World War II. Her mother worked at the Kellogg Plant in Battle Creek, Michigan, and then as a welder at a factory in California. As an adult, Ousley led the Georgia chapter of the American Rosie the Riveter Association because of her mother’s contributions to the war effort.
Born in 1933, Mary D'Souza Sequeira grew up under British rule in India. A prodigious track and field athlete from childhood, she competed in the First and Second Asian Games and the 1952 Olympics. She later represented India's National Railways system before immigrating to the United States in 1991.
Born in Lineville, Alabama in 1927, Jane Tucker moved to Savannah to get a job at
Southeastern Shipbuilding Corporation during World War II. She became a rod welder
and made $1.20 an hour. After the war she attended Northwestern University and became
a dental hygienist. In 2010 she started the Rome, Georgia, chapter of the American
Rosie the Riveter Association.
Jane Tucker's Georgia Focus Interview (air date: June 2016):
Hank Van Driel
Born in Schiedam in 1934, Hank Van Driel was celebrating his sixth birthday when the
Nazis marched into the Netherlands. He and his family endured five years of hardship
and near-starvation rations during the German occupation. After the war, Van Driel
studied to become a chef and worked at hotels and restaurants in Rotterdam, eventually
landing a job on the Holland America line of cruise ships in 1962. Attracted by steady
work in the American resort industry, Van Driel immigrated to the United States in
1964. He has remained a citizen of the Netherlands and travels frequently between
the countries. Hank Van Driel recorded his Legacy Series oral history interview at
the Museum of History and Holocaust Education on February 28, 2020.
