Rita W. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Rita W., who was born in Mukachevo, Czechoslovakia in 1924. Mrs. W. recalls living in a Czech colony in the Carpathian mountains with very few Jews; high school membership in a Zionist organization; Hungarian occupation; anti-Jewish measures; her father assisting Polish refugees; his arrest and return six months later; his stories of Hungarian brutality; ghettoization in April 1944 for four weeks; and deportation to Auschwitz. She recounts her arrival to an unknown place, but sensing danger; one sister giving her baby to their mother (that sister survived); another sister choosing to go with her three year old son; staying with four sisters; learning about the chimneys, where their mother had gone, and refusal to believe this; selection for transport in September 1944 (a sister perished then); forced labor digging ditches until December 1944 (she was still with three sisters); a death march; and their escape. She describes posing as eastern workers; she and her sisters working in area farms; becoming ill with typhus; hospitalization; never admitting she was Jewish; liberation on May 1, 1945; learning her sisters had left for Czechoslovakia two weeks before; reunion in Prague with her sisters and her youngest brother; and emigration to the United States in 1947.

2 videocassettes