Maria M. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Maria M., who was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1919. She recalls her family's assimilation; attending medical school in Paris and Tours due to Polish quotas against Jews; visiting home in summer 1939; German invasion; her parents retrieving all their assets from the bank (this later saved their lives); ghettoization in 1940; working at the Jewish hospital; starvation, epidemics and deaths; her father working for the Joint; deportations beginning in July 1942; her father encouraging her and her mother to escape (they did not look Jewish); her mother's refusal to leave him; his failed suicide attempt so they would leave; informing them he had arranged for their escape in September; obtaining false papers from the Polish resistance; traveling to Zakopane to join her aunt and cousin who were living as non-Jews; their discovery, arrest, and execution; briefly living in Rytro; returning to Warsaw; her mother obtaining housekeeping jobs, some for non-Jews who knew she was Jewish; tutoring children in French; working for the underground; witnessing the Jewish uprising from outside the ghetto; the Polish uprising; forced relocation from Pruszko?w to Soko?o?w Go?rny; her mother tutoring in one family and she in another village; and liberation by Soviet troops in December.

6 videocassettes