Helga K. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Helga K., who was born in Cologne, Germany in 1922. She recalls her family's comfortable, middle-class life in Godesberg; attending church; Nazi ascent to power; learning her father was half-Jewish and her mother Jewish; her family's baptism in 1933; antisemitic measures; expulsion from school; her parents' futile efforts to emigrate; her father's arrest and release during Kristallnacht; her brother's emigration to the United States; her emigration to England in July 1939 to work as a domestic; the outbreak of war; internment as an enemy alien; learning of her father's suicide; loneliness and isolation; war's end; applying for work in Germany to try to find her mother (she had perished); working in the American censorship office in Germany, then as an interpreter in Nuremberg for the war crime trials in 1946; meeting her future husband; and emigration to the United States. Mrs. K. discusses the defendants' absence of remorse at the trials; the importance of standing up for moral issues; her strong ethnic Jewish identity; her brother's identity as a Christian; discussing her past with her children; frequent trips to Germany; and increased understanding of the Holocaust and her bereavement following her son's death. She shows photographs and documents.

1 videocassette