Countries through which people fled: Romania

Ed Arno was born in Innsbruck in 1916 as Arnold Edelstein. Shortly after his birth, he moved with his parents to Chernivtsi/Czernowitz. Between 1936 and 1939 Arno studied art in Paris. After his return he experienced the Soviet occupation of Chernivtsi before being forced into a ghetto created by Romania, who collaborated with Nazi Germany. Later, he carried out forced labour in several camps. After his liberation in 1944 he went to Bucharest, where he worked as a caricaturist and children’s book illustrator. In 1964 he emigrated to Italy, then in 1965 to the US, where he was living at the time of his interview.  

Rachel Gross was born in 1915 as Rose Brock and lived with her family in Gols, Burgenland. She attended elementary school there, later a school in Vienna, and then finally a convent school in Neusiedl am See. In April 1938, Gross and her family were forced to leave Austria by SS and SA men who brought them to the Hungarian border and forced them through some woods and over the border. They were able to get a ship to Palestine via Romania. Gross ran a café with her husband in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Baruch Milrom was born in 1921 in Baden bei Wien where his parents ran a grocery shop. After the 'Anschluss', the shop was looted by SA men and the family had to leave Baden shortly after. He was able to flee to Palestine with the help of a Zionist youth organisation. His brother was also able to escape, but his parents were murdered in the Shoah. In Israel he worked for an international shipping company, amongst others. At the time of the interview he lived in Haifa. 

Yitzak Rosner was born Jacques Rosner in 1926 in Romanian Moldoviţa in Bukovina, which was formally part of the Habsburg monarchy, and grew up in a German-speaking family. After the outbreak of World War Two, the Rosner family had to leave Moldoviţa, later they were deported to the Sharhorod Ghetto where they were interned until 1944. After being liberated by the Red Army, Rosner worked for them as a translator in Bucharest. After many failed attempts, Rosner was able to emigrate to Israel via Vienna in 1968, where he was living at the time of the interview.

Mordechai Sella was born Viktor Kopfstein in Vienna in 1933. He grew up in Pilgersdorf in Burgenland, where his family ran a shop. After the ‘Anschluss’ in 1938, they had to move to Vienna, where the father was arrested during the November Pogrom and deported to Dachau. In 1940, the family managed to flee on a ship and land illegally in Palestine. Upon arrival, they were sent by the British authorities to Mauritius, where they were interned until the end of the war. In 1945, they emigrated to Palestine, where Sella was initially placed in a children’s home. He later lived in a kibbutz. At the time of his interview, he was living in Jerusalem.