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.
Recording of Malke Rosenberg, a woman of about ninety-one, in Nagyvarad on 7 June 2012. The first hour begins with chat about her age and health, the room and a visit by a Danish scholar. It then turns to her Sighet youth: house, family, father's textile trade, religious observance, the Sighet rabbi's funeral and Elie Wiesel. It ends with how her parents met. Hungarian exchanges with other people present are mixed in. Second half of a recorded session in Nagyvarad (7 June 2012) with Malke Rosenberg, an elderly woman from Sighet who was in Auschwitz-Birkenau. She recalls her father's trip with her to Pest in the 1940s, Purim and Yom Kippur customs, poor and rich families of Sighet, and her deportation and survival. Later she and Kerler look through photographs, and the session ends with talk of her age, a request for a song, and chat about places Kerler visited.
Chat at the start about whether she is the last Yiddish speaker there and about her living alone. She recounts that a Danish visitor interviewed and photographed her and that his Hungarian wife, a professor of Jewish studies, wrote to her. Hungarian exchanges follow about a cleaning woman, her arthritic hands and her difficulty cooking, then talk with Kerler about telephones and family.
Discussion of Sighet, which once had fifteen thousand Jews, and the few left there. Kerler asks about a family named Kleinbart and about Goldi (?), and she recalls Wiesel (?) and a husband named Shlomo whose sister she went to school with. She says she left Sighet young. She then mentions going into the ghetto in April, after Passover.
She says she lived her first twenty-three years in Sighet until deportation. She describes her grandmother's house in what became the ghetto, where she was born with a midwife attending, and a Hungarian word for midwife is sought. She talks about the poor houses of the neighbourhood, her grandmother's death at 82 and the house passing to her pious uncle in Verdan (?). Her ailing mother, her mother's two daughters married in Slovakia, and her father's purchase of a house with her mother's brother, his partner in a textile business, are also covered. A two-family house is discussed.
She describes her father's textile trade, which he learned in Budapest before the First World War. He was clean-shaven, ran a small Zionist prayer room with a Torah scroll and prayed there on the Sabbath. She tells how she began fasting on Yom Kippur at thirteen and fasted until sixty, including in Auschwitz. She recalls two years in cheder and a tutor who taught the girls to pray, with her father as a hundred-percent Jew.
She talks about Elie Wiesel, whom she heard speak in Hungarian and who is younger than she is, and about his Sighet family. Kerler asks about a song about the messiah. Wiesel's French, Sorbonne and American career and his Yiddish writing are discussed. Her brother's family in Israel and America is shown in a photograph, and she is called on her birthday by her nephew Eli, who is named after her father. Kerler and she exchange phone numbers.
She tells of a Holocaust remembrance event in Sighet with Rabbi Moshe Rosen and Wiesel, which took her to Satu Mare (?) and a hotel in Verdan. At the hotel her friend Edit Fuchs and she waited to meet Wiesel, who was brusque with them. She recounts a Sighet woman from New York who told her of Wiesel's fee for speaking and says he lives from those who stayed behind. She adds his father's shop with its two flights of stairs, and the others in the room discuss Yiddish words for stairs.
She recalls the funeral of the young Sighet rabbi, Teitelbaum, who died when his wife was in childbirth, and which she attended as a six-year-old. She mentions his sister Hanele, a love affair with a boy named Hilman Leyzer, who died in Israel, and Hanele's later life in Los Angeles. She notes the rabbi's ties to the Satmar dynasty and that he remarried.
Hungarian exchanges about filming and the birthday flowers she received from the community. She talks about her late husband's yahrzeit, his Hungarian name and a dream about him. Kerler asks about her father Leyzer Rosenberg, who went clean-shaven in 'German' style, and the others discuss the word for this.
She talks about her father's army service in the First World War and about her grandmother Ester, who was 75 when taken to Auschwitz. She says she has lost her faith and only lights a candle and says yizkor. She tells how her parents met: her mother was sent to an aunt in Budapest, became engaged to a young man who died in the 1918 flu, and later married her father after he brought a parcel from Ester. She describes her mother as an excellent cook and housewife and recalls Purim in Sighet.
Rosenberg describes her father, a textile merchant in Sighet, taking her to Pest in the 1940s after the Hungarians came. He bought goods there and took her to a non-kosher restaurant, and made her promise to tell nobody. Her brother later told of a similar visit, and of her father fasting on Yom Kippur but not on another fast day (name unclear).
Kerler asks about Purim. Rosenberg recalls dressing up, visiting friends with gifts sent by her mother, and giving money to the poor. She tells of the old fiddler Mendelovitsch, who played after the Yom Kippur meal for money, and of his wife, a woman who washed the dead. Kerler asks about a word for this and about a Purim play.
Rosenberg speaks about the poor of Sighet and the generous rich family of Hana Rekhl Fuks on Timar Street, where nobody left hungry. She tells of a First World War veteran who ate huge portions and was later killed in Auschwitz, and of a half-mad Polish-speaking man living among animals near her uncle's house. Kerler asks what happened to him in 1944.
Kerler asks about the rich families of Sighet. Rosenberg speaks of Mendelovitsch, who became very rich, his son, who she says was in Israel, and his daughter-in-law who went to school with her. She then tells of the twin daughters of the family in Auschwitz, where Mengele selected twins.
Rosenberg recounts Auschwitz-Birkenau. She and her sister stayed with their mother to avoid selection, and Mengele took the mother. A block elder named Miri hid them, and they were later moved to another camp and issued clothes. Mengele again took young women, and Rosenberg reflects that her mother wanted her to survive.
Rosenberg tells of a friend from Sighet who visited by the window and predicted she would survive and marry her fiancé. She was sent to a munitions factory in Altenburg, Thuringia, and came home in July, finding her fiancé there. She also tells of the winter march to Bergen-Belsen, typhus, her sister-in-law who was block elder, and others from Sighet who met there.
Rosenberg shows Kerler a book and photographs of the Mendelovitsch family and others, including the twins. She recounts the death of a twin in a collapsed cellar and of a young man killed over his watch. She tells of Rabbi Dr. Dancig, who was a rabbi in Sighet, and his family. Kerler asks about Yiddish-speaking non-Jews in Sighet before the war.
Kerler and Rosenberg look through more photographs: schoolmates, teachers, her sister Berzsi (Brukhe), and her father and brother in Pest. She says she attended four gymnasium classes, and speaks of a consul in Budapest. Kerler asks to copy pictures; a Yiddish theater coming to Sighet and a Tisha b'Av custom are mentioned. They discuss her age, which she gives as 90 (born 1921).
Kerler asks for an old Yiddish song, and she names one about seven good years but says she cannot sing. He wishes her good health, and says he visited Munkatsh, Berehove, Khust, Sighet, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kolomea, Chernivtsi and Cluj. Rosenberg speaks of her health and household, and others speak in Hungarian or Romanian.