Not online: the recording is held by the project and is not on Media Collections Online, YouTube or archive.org. Everything below is a paraphrase of a machine transcript, the weaker of this site's two transcript layers — see how it was made.
Audio recording made on 27 May 2012 (the eve of Shavuot) in Beregsaz with Vilmos Godinger, an elderly man who gives his birth year as 1928. It is the first of two consecutive files. Kerler first talks Russian and Yiddish with a woman in the room about bee products, then recalls his previous visit with Godinger, and Godinger recites a Purim-shpil text. After that come Shavuot memories, childhood, deportation to Auschwitz, army service and postwar life.
Informal opening in Russian and Yiddish. Kerler and a woman talk about bee milk (royal jelly) and where to buy it, then about a woman who speaks good Yiddish and her Jewish friends in Chernivtsi (Bukovina). There is also talk of someone called Katie.
Kerler notes that the date is the eve of Shavuot and recalls meeting Godinger three years earlier in the synagogue. They discuss the Purim-shpil Kerler had written down on that visit and Godinger's recollection of rabbis, including Mendl Teichmann and Yankl Bleich. Godinger then recites a Purim-shpil text from memory: a Purim beggar's rhyme with a wife's cooking pot as the closing motif.
Russian talk about Purim and Yiddish, then Kerler asks Godinger to repeat the final verse of the Purim text. They discuss the meaning of a dialect verb in the verse, which Godinger glosses with another word. A weather exchange about lightning and rain follows, along with a request to repeat the third verse.
Kerler asks what Godinger remembers of Shavuot before the war. He recalls fetching leaves to decorate the house as a boy and the dairy foods eaten: milk, cheese with noodles, kreplach and pancakes. He says meat is not eaten on the holiday.
Godinger says he did not play as a child because the years were hard. He was one of six children and worked at the railway station carrying parcels. His grandson Andrey arrives from Israel and is introduced to Kerler, and they talk about languages known (Russian, Hungarian, English).
Explanation in Russian and Yiddish of the project: an archive, not a film, to be published at an American university, with the interviewer's card shown. There is also talk of rain and a blessing over rain.
Godinger recalls a poor childhood: dragging dry wood from the forest and sawing wood with his father in winter. He then speaks of the deportation of the Jews, with eighty people crammed into wagons, a ghetto of four weeks and the transport after Shavuot to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the crematorium. He gives his birth year as 1928, and says Jews wore yellow stars and could shop only after nine.
Kerler asks about the town name, which Godinger gives as Seleush in Yiddish, Vynohradiv in the Ukrainian usage. Godinger talks about a tailor named Rosenthal, a communist and deputy under the Soviets who was hidden by a non-Jew, and about his brothers' deaths. Kerler passes on a greeting from Perele in America.
Godinger recalls passing through Birobidzhan and Khabarovsk by train. He was drafted into the army in 1949 and served in the Far East without meeting antisemitism. He returned home, stayed with an uncle, married and became widowed. His sister lived in Haifa and a brother, a teacher, has died.
Kerler asks about kosher meat after the war, and Godinger names a shochet, Shmuel Kushles (?). Godinger describes cheder until age 16 and the five synagogues of Seleush, one a Hasidic prayer house visited with his father. He recalls a tsadik who prayed all night and died in Auschwitz, and he says few Jews are left in the town. Kerler's greeting from Perele and some rain talk interrupt.