Eva F. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Eva F., who was born in Berlin, Germany in 1920, the oldest of four children. She recounts her parents' renouncing their religions upon marriage (her mother was Christian, her father Jewish); limited exposure to Judaism through relatives; her father's political career as a Social Democratic member of the local and national governments (streets are named for him in several cities); his vocal opposition to Nazism; visiting him with her mother and siblings when he was in Oranienburg in 1933 and in prison in 1935; expulsion from school; assistance from Quakers; being taught antisemitism in another school; volunteering for labor service, hoping to be admitted to university; finding a job despite her "racial" status; hiding Jews in their home; obtaining false papers for Jews; distributing protest flyers with her brother; her Jewish aunt's suicide; deportations of relatives; her father's death in Buchenwald; destruction of their home in April 1945 by Allied bombings; and participating in the founding of the Freie Universität Berlin. Ms. F. discusses individual German peers' refusal to recognize their tacit complicity in the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust; persistent antisemitism in Germany; difficult relations with her children dealing with issues of Jewish identity and antisemtism; studying the Holocaust; and a book by Else Rosenfeld, a Jew they hid. She shows photographs.

2 videocassettes