Lilli S. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Lilli S., who was born in Zehlendorf, Germany in 1913, the youngest of three children. She recounts being raised as a Christian (her parents were Jewish); her father's service in World War I; his status as a doctor; living briefly with grandparents in Dresden; her mother's death when she was six; her father's remarriage to a non-Jew; studying agriculture; antisemitic harassment; surveillance of her father's clinic by Nazi troops in 1933; his suicide; emigrating to France; attending the University of Toulouse; marriage to a Lithuanian Jew in 1935; moving to Paris; frequent trips to Germany using her Lithuanian passport; her siblings' emigration to the United States; German invasion; obtaining French papers; involvement with the Resistance; her son's birth in 1941; placing him with a French family; arrest and imprisonment for Resistance activities in 1944; assistance from the prisoner pastor; deportation to Drancy, then Auschwitz; camaraderie among the political prisoners providing hope for survival; relations between national groups; singing resistance songs; transfer to Kratzau; slave labor in a munitions factory; assistance from Czech civilian workers; hospitalization; a Jewish doctor saving her from selection; escaping with a friend; being hidden by French forced laborers, then by nuns in a Dresden children's home (she had stayed there as a child); she and her friend smuggling themselves to Switzerland; brief imprisonment; reunion with her husband and son in Paris after the war; the birth of a second son; emigrating to East Berlin in 1953; working for Walter Ulbricht's wife; maintaining contact with the nuns from the children's home; her son's death in France; attending a reunion of Auschwitz survivors; and obtaining German citizenship in 1992. Ms. S. sings a song she wrote in camp and mentions her three books. She shows photographs.

2 videocassettes