Dora S. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Dora S., who was born in Sighet, Romania in 1921, the only daughter of eight children. She recounts her father's World War I service; his first wife's death (they had three sons); his remarriage to her mother; their orthodoxy; high school graduation in June 1940; Hungarian occupation in September; anti-Jewish restrictions; one brother escaping to the Soviet Union; another's draft into a Hungarian slave labor battalion; her younger brother remaining home (the others left); German invasion in March 1944; ghettoization; her brother's return from slave labor; deportation to Auschwitz with her parents and two brothers in May 1944; separation from her family (she never saw them again); staying with her boyfriend's sister; disbelief upon learning of the gas chambers and crematoria; slave labor; hospitalization for frost bite; transfer to Weisswasser in December 1944; improved conditions; slave labor in a factory; assistance from French POWs; liberation by Soviet troops in May 1945; traveling to Budapest; reunion with a brother and her boyfriend; marriage in Sighet; learning four other brothers had survived; completing medical school in Timis?oara; the births of two children; moving to Hunedoara; the birth of her third child; discrimination after registering for emigration in 1958; joining her brother in Italy in 1961, then two others in Brazil; and emigration to the United States in 1964. Ms. S. discusses details of camp life; haunting memories of her last encounter with her older brother in Auschwitz; postwar indifference to the Holocaust in Romania; sharing her experiences with her children and grandchildren, including in through her book; learning of her father's writing career; and futile attempts to save his wartime writings. She shows photographs.

3 videocassettes