Fredka M. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Fredka M., who was born in Sosnowiec, Poland, in approximately 1921, one of two sisters. She recounts her family's affluence; attending public school; participating in No?ar ha-Tsiyoni; skiing in Zakopane; working with Moshe Merin (future head of the Judenrat) to assist refugees from Germany; German invasion; her father fleeing east; fleeing with her mother, sister, and aunt; returning when overtaken by German troops; her father's return; working for the Judenrat, then in the Jewish hospital; organizing educational activities and food for children; traveling to Os?wie?cim to observe what was occuring; a clandestine meeting with Zionists in the Cze?stochowa ghetto; visits from resistance leaders Eleazar Geller and Mordecai Anielewicz; contact with Polish underground members; arranging escapes from a mass round-up in August 1942; capture; release with assistance from Merin, despite his opposition to their efforts; forming an underground cell; obtaining weapons; ghettoization in March 1943; marriage to Yis?ra?el K?oz'ukh, a youth leader; arrest by the Jewish police; release; arranging to send Jews via Krako?w to Germany as volunteer laborers; attending a Nazi cocktail party in Tarno?w when establishing smuggling routes; meeting Armia Krajowa members in Warsaw, who helped them obtain weapons; hiding in a bunker with her parents; learning her husband was shot; finding and burying him; deportation of many underground colleagues; escaping; Poles hiding her, her husband's brother, and others; arranging for Jews to volunteer to work in Germany, posing as Poles; arrest; imprisonment in Trzebinia, then Katowice, posing as a Pole using her false papers; being recognized as a Jew; attempting suicide; transfer to Mas?owice, then Sosnowiec concentration camp; escaping; being smuggled to Z?ilina, then to Budapest in late 1943; reunion with Zionist underground members; obtaining legal emigration papers; emigrating to Palestine in 1944, stopping en route in Istanbul and Beirut; and working for UNRRA in Turin, then for the Jewish Agency in Paris after the war. Ms. M. discusses many people involved in Zionist movements and the ghetto as well as relations between groups. She shows a photograph of her murdered husband.

11 videocassettes