Aranka S. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Aranka S., who was born in Berehovo, Czechoslovakia in 1930 to a family of six children. She describes prewar family life; her grandmother's unwillingness to leave home; her father's mobilization into a Hungarian labor battalion; learning her sister and grandmother were sent to a ghetto and Auschwitz; her older sister's deportation to Poland with her husband and child; her mother's journey to Poland in an unsuccessful attempt to find them; ghettoization in a brick factory; her mother's efforts to create stability and comfort, and to help others; trying to be a child and lead a normal life in an abnormal place; failed attempts by the underground to prevent deportation; separation from her mother and youngest siblings upon arrival in Auschwitz (she never saw them again); constant fear of separation from her sister Violet; transfer with Violet to Christianstadt; kitchen work; losing a tooth trying to avoid a German guard; and experiencing dehumanization and starvation, and witnessing public hanging of escapees during the two and a half month death march to Bergen-Belsen. Mrs. S. reflects on the "responsibility of surviving"; her nightmares; revealing the past in her books; and her children's difficulties in learning of her experience.

2 videocassettes (3/4" u-matic)