Frank Ephraim

“The way the trip went was we left one evening, went to the local railroad station in Berlin, that at that time was called Anhalterbahnhof. It no longer exists as such. Hopped on a train. It was a sleeper. We went overnight, changed in Munich, next morning, and from there we began to head toward Italy, the border. We went through Austria, and the train was stopped in Brenner, Brenner pass, which is the border between Austria and Italy. There everybody had to get out. The German side, we were searched, body search, all the luggage was searched. That delayed everything. The train left without us. We had to wait another six hours for the next train.”
(postwar testimony)

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Survivor Volunteers

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Born June 22, 1926, Roznava, Slovakia
Died September 5, 2008

We note with sadness the death of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Survivor Volunteer Susan Berlin, who passed away September 5, 2008. Susan was a dedicated volunteer with the Museum’s Archives and Education departments, and served as a Museum tour guide.

Susan was born an only child to a conservative Jewish family in Roznava, Slovakia. Her mother and father owned a dry-goods store. Susan was thirteen years old when the war began. News of the evils of the concentration camps reached Roznava and Susan’s father decided to take his family out of Slovakia as fast as possible. Her father had a brother in the United States that would assist her family in receiving Visas. They sailed into New York City on the S.S. Washington on August 3, 1939.

Susan was placed into an all female public school. Her English was very poor and her peers ridiculed her because she was an immigrant. She was an outstanding student and furthered her education at Brooklyn College. She moved to Washington, DC in 1948 when a close college friend found her a job in the US Army Map Service; she read documents in Hungarian and summarized them into English. She met her husband in the Service and was later married in 1950. Susan is a retired elementary school art teacher.

As a museum volunteer, she gives tours of the Permanent Exhibition to groups from the program Brining the Lessons Home: Holocaust Education in the Community.