Arie Bucheister and Annie Mass Interview (Part 2), July 13, 2025

the story and then of course it's in her testimony about when they came and moved them out of her house or told them to flee. Do you remember? I'd love to hear it from your perspective.

Well that's basically what you said. They had to, she said something about crossing a river.

The Seym river. The only thing I'd add, I don't have much to add to that except a source that might be helpful. I asked her, did she have any Christian friends? Normal question because my best friend was a Catholic lived across the street in Omaha. Guy I saw every day, played baseball in the summer and basketball in the winter. She said no and she looked at me like, you know, I was someone on another planet to even ask the question. And I said, were you ever in a church? And she said no. She said as a matter of fact whenever she would walk past the church she would go on the other side of the street out of fear of what would happen.

But not much more than that. The source I'm thinking of and again, you know, you have to kind of corroborate it with other things is I just looked at the application she made, without me, for compensation from Germany but through the claims conference and there were like two or three pages on what happened when the Nazis came into town. So I will, I have a copy that I can send that to you. I can't add more than there's there because that tells me what happened. She never told me that personally.

Let's take this.

By the way, just as a side thing, I suspect all of the brothers and their wives eventually may have made applications to the claims conference and in the application for at least a pension or one-time payment you have to indicate your persecution and your birth place and the date of your birth place. All the stuff that applications request. So I suspect you'll, if cousins don't have copies of those, I suspect you can get their permission to get copies of those. And if you can't you can ask me.

Great. That might give us a lot of information.

Yeah.

Just so interested in their activity during war. We'll talk about more in just a few minutes. But let's take a minute, Arie and, if you're comfortable to talk about this piece of your story that you discovered as a teen.

Yeah. I mean, my wife thinks deep down that I need some serious therapy about this because to me it's a story. Another interesting story. It happens to be about, you know, my mother and father and me. As I said, my stepfather to me was my father up until, and he raised my father. But when I think I was about 16, what is it, ninth grade, maybe eighth grade, 15 or 16, I went to the person, the lawyer who did the taxes for my father's butcher shop, asking him if he had any thoughts about a summer job. And in the course of speaking with me, I mentioned my stepfather.

Are you able to mention who that was or do you prefer not to?

It was, I think, Otto Spielhagen.

That's it. That's his name.

Spielhagen.

Was he in from the Jewish community?

Yeah. Yeah. And he was, look, everyone was old to me when I was 15 or 16, so I don't know how old he really could have been, like, you know, 35, 45, which is seems like awfully young to me now. I suspect he's not alive anymore. And once he mentioned that, you know, it clearly sparked some curiosity. And when I went home, I waited til my stepfather was out of the house, mowing the lawn, cutting the bushes, something, to ask my mother, you know, what was that about? And as I say, she started crying. And I think, I think I was able to get from her at that time, well, you know, your father died when he was very young. I don't know whether she told me he died when he was in Israel. I know for a fact she didn't tell me what he died of. And over time, I was able to piece together a little bit of the story, which I still don't know fully to this day. When I say fully, I suspect it's the other way around. I know very little about that story. There are a few pictures that I have of him.

Can I ask you, they met after the war?

No, Annie maybe you can corroborate this. I think they met in Wroclaw, but I'm not sure. What I do know, that handsome young guy is me in Israel, the youngster. That's my mother, must be in her late 20s, early 30s. That's Joseph Greenberg, the man we're talking about now. And that's again, my mother and Joseph Greenberg, my father. I don't know if the Greenberg's with a double E or an I-N or, you know, a U or E at the end. What I do know is when my mother came back, my mother came back from Siberia and from the Soviet Union.

And she'll actually, she mentions places in her application that I was talking about before. She eventually ended up, I don't know where the journey took her in the Soviet Union, but she eventually ended up where a lot of Jewish survivors from Poland ended up after the war in a town called Wroclaw, W-R-O-C-L-A-W, Wroclaw, exactly like it's spelled. Which was Breslau prior to the war.

Breslau was the city in Germany before the Second World War. But as they did replacements and displacements after the war, Breslau became part of Poland and was named Wroclaw. And in Wroclaw, she met Malina Tiefenbrunner, Mala Tiefenbrunner, right? Didn't know her before the war. But another refugee from the war, Malina or Mala, I'm going to refer to her as Mala. Mala's father was Herman Tiefenbrunner. Herman Tiefenbrunner, also in Siberia during the war, was one of the surviving brothers of Joseph Felik Tiefenbrunner Bucheister. So Freda befriended Mala. And I think they may have been in a sewing club together. I mean, that's what my mom did-

There's a photo of them.

Of them together?

Yeah.

So in some kind of thing where they're sewing together. And they would go to things together. And I don't know, again, which Jewish organization it was, but they held Purim parties and Chanukah parties. And at one of those parties, I think it was Mala, but when you listen to her testimony or her daughters speak to you, met her husband, Solomon, Shlomech Moses, whom she eventually married. And my mother met, or saw again, Joseph Greenberg. Again, I don't know. I don't know. I thought my mom told me that they knew each other before the war. But you know, I don't know. I don't. In any event, my mom reunited or met for the first time, Joseph Greenberg. They were married, I think in Poland. Not sure, but there are papers somewhere in my third floor that I will go through and see if that gives us any clue. But they immigrated to Israel.

So you don't know if they were in a DP camp of any kind?

I don't think they were in a DP camp. My mother never mentioned anything about it. I don't know if Joseph Greenberg was. I'm assuming their ages were pretty much the same, but I don't know. I don't know. He looks fairly young in the pictures. Anyway, how did I get those pictures? I got those pictures mostly after my mother died, because she gave me a picture too. But that's about it while she was alive. And most of the stories were after. Mala, who knew her, as I say, after the war in Wroclaw, knows a lot more about the story of my mother with Joseph Greenberg than I do. I don't know. I spoke with her a little bit about it. But again, there was this hesitancy while my mom was alive, because my mom was hesitant about talking about it. And it's a can of worms, I guess, for her. You know, I don't know so much these days, certainly not among people I know, my peers, and certainly among younger generations. You get divorced. It's like, you know, taking a shower. It happens all the time. To my mother, it's not that she got divorced. It's that her husband died. It was a thing you didn't talk about. It was this kind of sha, shtil things. In any event, I...

Where is your birth certificate from?

My birth certificate is from Israel.

So you were born in Israel?

Yeah, I was born in Haifa.

And I had always thought, I had always thought that because you make heroic things of people you care about, even if you don't know them well, I'd always thought my biological father was injured during the war, you know, and he died on the operation table for some reason in Israel, how that could be if he was injured at the war. Now, in any event, that's what I collapsed and thought. In fact, what I learned was he had a brain tumor and he died on the operating table. Not sure of the hospital, probably, I was told it was a Rothschild hospital, not in Haifa, but in Petah Tikvah, that he died there. And he is buried now in Petah Tikvah. One of the pictures I sent of the gravestones of all the brothers and their wives, there's one, you know, that's not a brother or wife. And that's of my, the gravestone of my biological father in the old cemetery Petah Tikvah. And in the foreground, you'll see another one of my grandsons, Jonah, the one from Johannesburg, kind of pointing to the gravestone. So that's, that's, that's pretty much the sum and substance of what I know about Joseph Greenberg. And it left, his death left, my mother and her mother, Esther Katz, with a young 10-month-old child in Haifa.

So in comes Mala Tiefenbrunner. What, how did you end up how did she end up marrying Joe Buchheister? Hold on one second. Do you have the other small one?

Yeah.

Yeah?

Yeah, but I'd rather do this.

Okay, continue, yeah. Go on, sorry.

Mala and my mother were best friends evidently, while they were in Israel. And my mother had lost her husband at this point. I think your dad had died already.

He died in October 1951.

So, and my father came to Israel to visit his brother, Herman Tiefenbrunner and also Sissy Malina. And so he was looking for a wife. And Mala thought that my mom would be a great match with, with Joe. And so he came and they, my father fell in love with her. I mean, head over heels in love. I don't know what her, her feelings were to him.

I heard, I heard a different story. My story is actually different. And it's exactly what you say. He came to Israel to see Herman. He hadn't seen him since, since the end of the war. And he also was very upset because he knew that Mala had gotten married and he wasn't able to go to the wedding. So he said, do you have any pictures of the wedding? And Mala showed him some pictures of the wedding. And from one of the pictures, he said, who's that? And she said, oh, that's my good friend, Freda, from Wroclaw. And he said, well, where is she now? And he says, well, she, she's in Haifa. He said, well, I'd like to meet her. To which Mala said, well, her husband has recently died. She's a single mother. She's really not interested in meeting anyway.

She's not interested. Your right, your right, your right about that.

That's okay. I'd like to meet her anyway. That was Joe Bucheister.

But he did think she was the most beautiful woman.

And then they met and he thought she was gorgeous and he wanted to marry her right then and bring her to the United States.

She wasn't. That's right. She wasn't interested at all.

Hard to know why she wouldn't be interested. He swept the floors at some meat market in Omaha, Nebraska.

Come on.

But yes, he was, he was, he was taken away by her. Didn't care whether she already had a child there and wanted to marry her. And she was absolutely not interested in the least. And I don't know how the conversation, that conversation ended.

I would love to know that.

But whatever it was, we can say, well, I'm going to keep contacting you. I don't know if that happened. And he did. And he did. I don't know if there were letters. I don't know if it was through Mala. But he went back to the United States, but came again. And when he came again, we can find out based on various records about when Mom and I went to the United States. And when they got married, I think they got married in Israel.

I think they did.

So I think we have, I think we have something.

Yeah.

There's something in Hebrew we have and there's a translation of that.

That's right.

So that'll tell us when he came back and re-initiated his golden offer to come to the United States.

Oh, I think he was just very persistent. He wants what he wants. And I don't blame him because she was gorgeous.

Remember, this is a guy who lived in the forest for six years, right? He is persistent. He is resilient.

And I bet you Mala worked on Mom and Esther, I'm sure, also working.

That one, I don't know. Esther came to visit us.

She came to live with us until I was five years old.

But anyway, they did get married in Israel. And now this is what we're trying to figure out because I was born in 55. He died and 1951 was...

Joe Greenberg died in 1951.

So somewhere between then, Joseph Greenberg died and my dad coming to pick up my mother with a wedding. I don't have anything that shows what the exact day was. I also can't remember if she came over by boat or by plane.

I think we came over by boat. I think we came over by boat. I'm not sure.

She was on some plane.

But you know, the Jewish Historical Institute has a lot of that stuff. You know, the people coming over and leaving but so what sounds right is if Annie was born in 55 in Omaha, right?

Right.

My father died, my biological father died in October of 1951 in Israel. So we got a four-year window of stuff going on with Joe Bucheister and Freda at the time, Katz Greenberg.