Helen N. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Helen N., who was born in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, Poland in approximately 1925, one of seven children. She recounts her family's orthodoxy; attending public school; antisemitic harassment; German invasion in 1939; anti-Jewish restrictions; a public hanging; Germans confiscating their possessions and killing her grandfather; a round-up; selection for work (she never saw her family again); forced factory labor; obtaining false papers with assistance from her father's friend, a Jewish policeman; escaping with two other girls; traveling to Warsaw; living with a non-Jew; volunteering for work in Germany due to her fear of denouncement; transport to Stuttgart, then Fellbach; working in a restaurant; friendship with another "Polish" girl who worked in town; learning she too was Jewish; a fight with her boss resulting in a six-week incarceration in a juvenile detention facility in Rudersberg in December 1943; her friend visiting; assignment to another household; Allied bombings; reassignment to area farms; liberation by British troops; arrival of United States troops; moving to a Stuttgart displaced persons camp; traveling with a friend to Feldafing; a Jew warning them not to return to Poland (she later married him); a U.S. soldier publishing her name in the American-Jewish press; receiving emigration papers from an uncle in Toronto; her son's birth; and emigration to the United States with assistance from the Joint. Ms. N. discusses sharing some of her experiences with her sons, and difficulty condensing five years of experience into a short recording session.

1 videocassette