MEMOIRIST:                      ANNA GRINZAID

                                           SAMUEL GRINZAID           

INTERVIEWER:                 SANDRA BERMAN

                                           RUTH EINSTEIN

LOCATION:                       ATLANTA, GEORGIA

DATE:                                NOVEMBER 7, 2011

Transcript (PDF)

Biography

Anna Grinzaid was born in the city of Odessa (which at that point was a part of the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine) in 1928. She first learned the meaning of the concept of Anti-Semitism at the beginning of World War II in 1941 (When she was twelve or thirteen years old). Her Father ( an Austrian emigrant named Moritz Mihel Mintzer was a tailor and her mother Tzilla Kuperschmidt  Mintzer was a bookkeeper

Scope of Interview

The interview covers the time between 1928 (the year of her birth) and 1979 (the year of her official emigration to the United States). She recounts many challenges which she and her family had endured during World war II including being evacuated out of the war zone twice (once away from Odessa inland to the city of Kharkov and the second time out of the Ukraine entirely to the coast of the Caspian Sea in the Republic of Uzbekistan). She had first Job at a garment factory in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. at the age of fifteen. She later returned to Odessa at the age of sixteen and learned that her extended family (two aunts and a grandmother) had been murdered during the war. She married for the first time At the age of seventeen and that marriage resulted in the birth of her oldest son. She met and married her current husband Samuel Grinzaid (a Nuclear Machine design engineer) at the age of twenty-two. Together thy have a son named Jimmy. She further describes how she, Samuel and Jimmy had emigrated to the United States in 1979 with the help of HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). She also describes the feeling of celebrating the Jewish High Holidays such as Purim, Passover and Hanukkah in the US for the first time ever.