Fele F. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Fele F., who was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1921, one of four children. She recounts attending a Jewish school; her father's death in 1933; participating in Betar where Menachem Begin was one of her leaders; visits from Vladimir Jabotinsky; her brother's Polish military draft; German invasion; working on a farm with her other brother in Hrubieszów as part of Betar; returning to Warsaw in small groups; all the other groups being killed en route, including her brother; ghettoization; working in a leather factory; her mother's round-up (she never saw her again); participating in the ghetto underground; purchasing weapons from Poles; the ghetto uprising; hiding in a bunker; organizing a hospital; escaping through the sewers; capture; deportation to Majdanek; slave labor carrying stones and felling trees; transfer to Auschwitz/Birkenau in May 1943; contracting typhus; the block leader hiding her and bringing her soup; organizing a seder and fasting on Yom Kippur; assignment to the Union Kommando; escaping with others from the death march in January 1945; a Polish women hiding them; liberation by Soviet troops; returning home; encountering antisemitism; traveling to Łódź, then Venice; illegal emigration to Palestine in 1946; and marriage to a survivor. Ms. F. discusses national differences among Jewish prisoners; the importance of her youth group training and connections to her survival; and never believing she would survive while in the camps.

6 videocassettes