Joseph Berger papers

The Joseph Berger papers consist of a brief memoir, identification papers, ration tickets, business permits, immigration documents, restitution paperwork, and a photograph documenting Joseph Berger and his family, the Lwów ghetto, surviving the Holocaust under a false identity, and immigrating to the United States. The brief memoir describes the Lwów ghetto, the murder of Berger’s first wife and older daughter, saving his younger daughter by giving her a false name and abandoning her in a park, escaping from the ghetto with his second wife, surviving the rest of the war using false identification papers, and finding his younger daughter after the war. His memoir also describes a six week transfer to Buchenwald, being marked with a prisoner number, and surviving a selection, but these events cannot be confirmed. The remaining material documents Berger’s survival of the last two years of the war using false papers, his status as a Holocaust victim, efforts to retrieve property, his postwar life and work in Berlin, his immigration to the United States, efforts to receive compensation for lost property, and his return visit to the Lwów/Janowska camp. Joseph Berger was born in Lemberg (L’viv) in 1907 to Jakob and Syla Berger and worked in the lumber industry. He married Anna Lax in 1936 and had two daughters, Janina (b. 1937) and Celina (b. 1940), and his family was forced into the local ghetto following the German occupation. His wife and older daughter were killed, but his younger daughter was smuggled out and survived the Holocaust in hiding under the name Mary. Joseph escaped in 1943 with Anna Astman, whom he married in 1944. He found Celina after the war and immigrated to the United States in 1947 with her, his new wife, and their son Kesil (b. 1946).