Ilse L. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Ilse L. who was born in Breslau, Germany in 1915. Mrs. L. recalls her sheltered childhood in a bourgeois family; her father's death when she was thirteen; expulsion from school in 1933; her uncle's desire for the children to leave Germany; finding a job in Hungary; joining her sister in Scheveningen, Netherlands in 1934 (her mother and brother also emigrated); her niece Renee's birth in 1937; German invasion in May 1940; anti-Jewish regulations; joining the resistance; hiding separately, with family or resistance members in Amsterdam, Bilthoven, Apeldoorn and Loosdrechtsche Plassen; and hiding Renee with a Dutch family. She recalls her brother's arrest and execution; visiting Renee; liberation; learning of her sister's and brother-in-law's deaths in Auschwitz; Renee's difficulty adjusting to a "new" family and understanding her parents' fate; meeting a cousin from the United States; emigration to the United States in 1947; marriage to her cousin; arrival of her mother and Renee; and adopting Renee. Mrs. L. discusses Renee's former reluctance to talk about her past and renewing her relationship with her Dutch family as an adult, and her own constant thoughts of the past and her compulsion to read abut the Holocaust.

2 videocassettes (3/4" u-matic)