Chawka R. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Chawka R., who was born in approximately 1925. She recalls living in Warsaw in a secular, Zionist home; bombings during the German invasion; ghettoization; organizing a Deror school; joining the underground; circulating clandestine papers; an aunt leaving her baby outside of the ghetto; nuns sheltering the baby, who survived; living in a Zionist commune; her father's displeasure that she did not stay with the family; leaving the ghetto as an underground courier using false papers; bringing food back for her family; smuggling papers and weapons; observing a mass killing of Jews while outside the ghetto; hearing non-Jews on trains discussing Jews being burned alive; declining to be hidden outside the ghetto due to her loyalty to her group; being sent to observe what was occurring at Treblinka; traveling with Yitzhak Zuckerman to Krako?w for a meeting of the underground; being warned of a round-up by Marek Edelman; being caught and beaten by Germans; identifying herself as a Polish communist; deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau as a non-Jew; members of the Polish underground helping each other; improved conditions in Harme?z?e; a death march to Ravensbru?ck; liberation; transfer to Malmo?, Sweden, via Denmark, then to Lund; returning to Poland with Yitzhak Zuckerman; learning her brothers and father had been killed; the painful realization that despite her survival, almost every one else had been killed; her mother's emigration to Israel; and joining her and other relatives 1947. Ms. R. attributes her thirty-month survival in Auschwitz/Birkenau to her sense of purpose and friendships with other prisoners.

4 videocassettes