Sara M. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Sara M., who was born in Kaunas, Russia (presently Lithuania) in 1915, the oldest of three children. She recounts her family's move to Jurbarkas, then Ukmergė; attending a Russian school, then a Jewish school where Jacob Gens, the future head of the Vilna ghetto, was her teacher; moving to Kaunas in 1934 for a job; her brother joining her; her sister's emigration to Palestine in 1939; Soviet occupation; living with her aunt and grandmother; German invasion; local Lithuanians rounding up and killing Jewish men, including her brother; ghettoization; slave labor at an airfield; non-Jewish friends outside the ghetto giving her food for her family; arrest for smuggling; release after a friend bribed a German; her grandmother's death; hiding during round-ups; assignment to a farm from which smuggled food into the ghetto; transfer with her aunts to Kovno concentration camp, then six months later to the Šiauliai ghetto, Panevėžys, then Stutthof; separation from her aunts (they did not survive); assignment to a group of Hungarian women who lit Sabbath candles; a three-day beating as a scapegoat for the candle lighters; the Hungarian women not giving her food; transfer to a group digging ditches, then to a small group for farm work; eating the raw vegetable they harvested in summer 1944; death marches for months; liberation by Soviet troops near Berlin; traveling to Kaunas via Łódź, Hrodna, and Vilnius; being smuggled to Białystok in 1947; contact with Hashomer Hatzair; being sent by them to Warsaw, then to their kibbutz in Łódź; meeting her future husband; emigration to Palestine via Marseille in spring 1948; reunion with her sister; her death in 1958; and raising her sister's children. Ms. M. shows photographs.

6 videocassettes