Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984

An interview with Hermina Vlasopolos, a Holocaust survivor, conducted by Donna Miller. Hermina Vlasopolos born in Bucharest, Romania in 1919. Her mother died when Hermina was just two and a half years old. Her father, who worked in the lumber business until he died at the age of 49, sent his daughter to boarding school. After her father's death, Hermina moved in with her grandmother in Chernowitz, finished high school, went to college and got a degree in teaching. Hermina moved to Oradea to become a teacher and became engaged to a Jewish lawyer who was sent to the Russian front. After the ghetto was started in Oradea, Hermina was sent to Auschwitz. She was then sent to a camp called Langenbielau-Biewala (a sub-camp of Gross Rosen) near Reichenbach and then sent to Parschnitz. The last camp she was sent to was in the Sudetenland and she worked in a factory making airplane parts. After the Russians liberated the camp, Hermina started her long journey back home to Oradea where she found out her fiancé had died on his way home to see her. She acquired a job translating Hungarian movies left behind after the war into Romanian. She married a Gentile Greek professor and had one daughter. The Communists imprisoned her husband after he told two jokes in his classroom that offended the regime. Weakened by his ordeal, he died in 1957, three years after being released. Hermina applied for a passport out of Communist Romania after his death. She was granted the passport and moved first to Paris, then Belgium, Germany and finally to the United States.

Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Hermina Vlasopolos - April 9, 1984

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