Edith C. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Edith C., who was born in Vienna, Austria in 1928, one of two children. She recounts her family's poverty; their orthodoxy; moving to Genoa in 1937; initiation of anti-Jewish "racial" laws after the German-Italian alliance; traveling to Nice illegally via Ventimiglia; obtaining political asylum in April 1939; assistance from a refugee committee; attending school; her father's incarceration as an enemy alien after the outbreak of war; German invasion; his release; his and her brother's incarceration in Gurs, then Rivesaltes; her brother's escape; hiding him on a nearby farm; arranging for his legal status as a foreign worker; his assignment to a quarry in Montlaur; joining him with her mother; working in a nearby vineyard; accompanying her brother when he was transferred to Agde in August 1942; returning to Montlaur; obtaining false papers from a Jewish resistance unit; working as a seamstress in Carcassonne; separation from her mother when she was placed in a convent in Castelnaudary, then a Jewish children's home in Moissac; hospitalization; attending school; a teacher promoting her membership in the scouts and mentoring her; a positive experience at a camp run by Sixie?me? for hidden children during Christmas vacation; transfer to a school in Pe?zenas, briefly to a children's home, a vocational school, then a home for developmentally disabled girls; being moved with other children to Clermont in May 1944 to be smuggled to Switzerland; placement in a transport camp, a quarantine camp in Champe?ry, then with the Red Cross in Geneva when she was ill; quarantine in Chesie?res for tuberculosis; living in an orphanage in Speicher; learning her father and brother had been deported to Auschwitz (they did not survive); locating her mother through the Red Cross; and joining her in Toulouse in July 1945. Ms. C. discusses staying in contact with her mother until leaving for Switzerland, and becoming very religious in Switzerland, but losing her faith after the war upon learning of Nazi atrocities and the genocide against Jews. She shows documents and photographs.

2 videocassettes