Edita K. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Edita K., who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1928, one of five children. She recounts her family's orthodoxy; her large extended family; cordial relations with non-Jews; a round-up to Dunajská Streda in 1944; entrusting their possessions to non-Jewish neighbors; deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau two weeks later; a women from her hometown, who had been there some time, advising her and her sister to separate from their parents and younger siblings (she never saw them again); she and her sister being tattooed with consecutive numbers; remaining with her sister, aunt, and three cousins; her aunt trading bread for a Shabbat candle; transfer to Kraków after five weeks; slave labor paving roads with tombstones from the Jewish cemetery; sneaking out to obtain food from Poles; transfer to Ravensbrück; her sister becoming ill; separation from her; slave labor working with fruits and vegetables, sneaking food from their work place; transfer to Bergen-Belsen, during which her sister rejoined them; liberation by British troops; traveling to Plzeň; her sister's brief hospitalization; returning home; her aunt's reunion with her husband and son; the trauma of realizing none of her family survived; their neighbors returning their possessions; she and her sister leaving for Bratislava; living in a displaced persons camp; a one-year hospitalization during which her sister married a rabbi; and marriage to her brother-in-law's brother, also a rabbi. Ms. K. discusses attributing her and her sister's survival to the woman in Auschwitz/Birkenau who advised them to leave their family upon arrival; the importance of her aunt's faith to their survival and her own faith; and the Jewish communities in which she has lived.

1 videocassette