Ruth T. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Ruth T., who was born in Hrubieszów, Poland in the early 1930s. She recounts her family's affluence; summer vacations in Krasnobród; German invasion; her father's military draft; brief Soviet occupation; German invasion; delivering messages for her father to his colleagues in Hashomer Hatzair; hiding during round-ups; deportation of her parents and brother; escaping; a non-Jewish teacher hiding her; bringing food to her grandmother and two aunts in hiding; later seeing them killed; witnessing a mass shooting; being assigned to gather valuables from abandoned Jewish homes; transfer to Budzyń; slave labor in an airplane factory; sharing extra food received from her supervisor; transfer to Mielec, Wieliczka, then Płászów; assignment to a quarry; transfer to Auschwitz/Birkenau; hospitalization; volunteering as an artist, copying signatures from existing documents unto new ones; transfer to Mülhausen; improved conditions; a privileged position building models in an underground factory; Allied bombings; transfer to Bergen-Belsen; starvation, filth, and pervasive deaths; liberation by British troops; transfer to the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp; friends from Hrubieszów bringing her to the Frankfurt displaced persons camp; joining a kibbutz; feeling a sense of revenge when she was in a motorcycle accident in which a German was killed; emigration to Palestine; marriage; and the births of two children. Ms. T. discusses her state of mind in the camps; not discussing her experiences with anyone, including her children, until recently; attributing her survival to luck; the impossibility of conveying her experiences in words; negative responses to survivors in Israel; a painful visit to Hrubieszów; organizing the erection of a memorial with other survivors; expressions of the Holocaust in her art; and learning that Fred O., a Jewish physician in the Hrubieszów ghetto had been concerned about her.

7 videocassettes