Hanna F. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Hanna F., who was born in Czemierniki, near Lublin, Poland in 1923. She mentions prewar life in a mixed neighborhood and details the changes which occurred in the wake of the German occuption, including her slave labor. She relates her family's evacuation to Parczew in 1942; their hiding during round-ups for deportation; and the splitting up of her family (she alone survived the Holocaust). She tells of escaping from a slave labor camp near Parczew, securing false papers, and joining a Polish (non-Jewish) labor transport to Germany, where she remained from October, 1942 until May, 1943, when, betrayed by a fellow worker, she and the other Jews were imprisoned by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz. Relating how at each turn her continued denial of her Jewish identity and a succession of slip-ups in the German bureaucracy enabled her to survive, she describes her life in Auschwitz, first in a block for non-Jewish Polish prisoners and later in the hospital barrack; her transfer to and life in the camps of Majdanek, P?aszo?w, Auschwitz (again), and finally back to Germany, where she worked again as a (non-Jewish) Pole; her feelings upon liberation in Czechoslovakia; and her postwar resumption of her Jewish name and identity. Mrs. F.'s testimony includes unusually frank depictions of the dehumanizing conditions to which she was subjected and of the actions to which she and other prisoners were driven during the Holocaust.

2 videocassettes (3/4" u-matic)