Irmgard K. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Irmgard K., who was born in Breslau (presently Wrocław, Poland), Germany in 1915, the youngest of five children of a Jewish father and Christian mother. She recounts attending synagogue and learning Hebrew; her father's death in 1924; antisemitic harassment; active participation in Social Democratic Party youth groups; her siblings' emigration to France in the early 1930s; her mother joining them; several arrests for anti-Nazi activities; engagement to a non-Jew; the Nuremberg laws prohibition against their marriage; her fiancé's arrest for anti-Nazi activities; one brother's death in the Spanish Civil War, and a sister's death from illness; compulsory wearing of the star in spite of not thinking of herself as a Jew; her fiancé's military draft; deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau; removing her star en route, which resulted in being categorized as a German political prisoner; slave labor sewing and transplanting trees; hospitalization for typhus; assistance from a Czech prisoner who saved many lives and allowed her to remain there to work; helping a sick French prisoner survive; assignment to the hospital kitchen; observing the drowning of infants after women gave birth; asking Dr. Werner Rhode to save her pregnant friend from death (he did); volunteering for a transport of half-Jews to Ravensbrück; living in France for two years after the war; and returning to Germany two years later to marry her fiancé. Ms. K. discusses not fearing death in the camps, and identifying a prisoner official who had been convicted at Nuremberg but fled. She shows photographs and documents.

4 videocassettes