Erica S. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Erica S., who was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1909, one of two children. She recounts attending boarding school in Frankfurt am Main; meeting her future husband in Wiesbaden; marriage in 1932 after he completed dental school; the births of two children; laws prohibiting her husband from practicing; his trip to London to arrange for their emigration; sending their children to stay with her parents in September 1938; Kristallnacht; her father's arrest; her husband's deportation to Buchenwald when she went to get the children; obtaining his release (her uncle died there); boarding a ship in Hamburg with her children, husband, his two sisters, and a dental technician; traveling to Amsterdam, then Dover; visiting her former governess, who later assisted her brother and his family to leave Germany for England; a four-week journey to British Honduras (presently Belize); bringing her parents, other relatives, and friends from Germany; arrest as enemy aliens; transfer to Panama; her father suffering a stroke; her husband's transfer to a prisoner of war camp in Tennessee; transfer with her children and parents to Ellis Island, then to an internment camp in Texas; minimizing her contact with the non-Jewish, German prisoners; visits from a local rabbi; her children's bar and bat mitzvahs; her husband's arrival; their release; and her father's death in 1943. Ms. S. notes her husband's inability to practice in the United States and his reluctance to discuss his time in Buchenwald. She shows documents.

2 videocassettes