Since 1979, Vida “Sister” Goldman Prince has been Chairman of the Oral Histories Project, at the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum. The project is dedicated to recording and preserving audio interviews of not only Holocaust Survivors, but also liberators of Nazi concentration camps and other non-Jewish witnesses living in Europe during World War II.

The museum was one of the first to begin gathering oral history projects so  these voices and photographs will be displayed and future generations will continue to be witnesses to this catastrophic period of world history.

In partnership with the Jewish Light, The St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum is allowing us to republish a portion of these Oral Histories project as a celebration of life and a crucial part of honoring and remembering the past. Please follow the provided links to additional recordings.

A Brief Bio

Pearl Asher was born in Sokolow-Podlaski, Poland on May 26, 1918. The town had a population of 12,000 with a Jewish population of 5,000. She graduated grade school before the war and was a member of Hashomer Hatzair (Zionist Youth organization) and worked as a seamstress both before and after the war.

She was in the Sokolow-Podlaski ghetto from 1940-1942 and obtained false papers as a non-Jewish Pole. She spent the years 1942-45 in hiding as a non-Jewish Pole doing forced labor on a farm near Peenemünde, a municipality on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany.

Listen to Tape 1 / Side 1 of Pearl’s Oral History