Mira V. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Mira V., who was born in Vilna, Poland (presently Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1919, the older of two children. She recounts her family's affluence; summering at their vacation home in Nemenčinė; attending a Bund, then another Yiddish school; participating in Hashomer Hatzair; attending lectures by Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Vladimir Jabotinsky; her father's dismissal from his government job in 1938 due to increasing antisemitisim; living on a hachsharah in Częstochowa; German invasion in 1939; fleeing to Kovelʹ; Soviet occupation; returning home; German invasion; anti-Jewish restrictions; learning of her father's murder in Ponary from a non-Jewish friend who witnessed it; moving to the ghetto in September; hiding with her mother and sister during a round-up, assisted by a Jewish policeman; her sister's friend, who had a life-saving certificate, marrying her sister to save the family; hiding her mother in a bunker (they were discovered); an unsuccessful attempt to bribe Salk Dessler, a Judenrat official, to save her mother; doing agricultural work outside the ghetto; her civilian supervisor taking her to work as a domestic in his home; a Polish friend giving her food; bringing extra food to her sister; her sister's husband being beaten to death; joining the ghetto resistance (Fareyniḳṭe parṭizaner organizatsye); learning to shoot; working with Abba Kovner, Yiżḣak Wittenburg, Joseph Glazman, and others; and meetings with Jacob Gens and partisan couriers Ḥaiḳah Grosman and Tossia Altman.

9 videocassettes