Maria W. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Maria W., who was born in Košice, Czechoslovakia in 1933. She recounts moving to Zvolen at age four; expulsion from school as a Jew; her parents being warned they were listed for deportation; paying to be smuggled from Lučenec to Hungary in September 1942; being robbed by smugglers except for their gold in her dress buttons; traveling to Budapest; her grandmother joining them; obtaining false papers; attending a Jewish school; her father's deportation to a labor camp in 1943; moving to a yellow star house; hiding with a non-Jewish friend during an Arrow Cross round-up; the friend's daughter bringing her and her grandmother to Hatvan; hiding with another family; her grandmother's illness, hospitalization, and death; living in the hospital; liberation by Soviet troops; reunion with her father; living briefly in Törökszentmiklós; their return to Zvolen to join her mother; moving to Bratislava; attending gymnasium; antisemitic harassment; and graduating from university in 1958. Ms. W. discusses continuing guilt because she does not know where her grandmother was buried; the deaths of many relatives during the war; her sense of belonging in Slovakia; and her children's sense of Jewish identity.

2 videocassettes