Maryla D. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Maryla D., who was born in Będzin, Poland in 1919, the elder of two children. She recounts attending a secular private high school; Vladimir Jabotinsky visiting their home; participating in Noʻar ha-Tsiyoni; increasing antisemitism in the 1930s; German invasion; working for the Judenrat; ghettoization; delivering weapons for the ghetto underground; visiting an aunt in the Sosnowiec ghetto; a German warning her of her brother's imminent arrest; hiding him; hiding in a bunker with others; capture; deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau in August 1943; starvation; slave labor sorting clothing; contracting typhus; a German saving her from selection; assignment as a translator for Dr. Josef Mengele; slave labor building barracks; friends obtaining medicine for her; a death march and train transfer to Ravensbrück; receiving food from a Polish woman; transfer to Malchow; agricultural slave labor; punishment for insulting a guard; a forced march to Finkenwerder; abandonment by German guards; liberation by Soviet troops; escaping from a Soviet soldier's rape attempt; traveling with a group to Waren; marriage to a survivor; returning home; traveling to Germany; working in a displaced persons camp; emigration to Belgium; and her daughter's birth. Ms. D. discusses learning her brother did not survive; relations among prisoner groups in camps; her will to live despite thoughts of suicide; difficulties "coming back from the dead" after the war; not sharing her experiences for some time; visiting Auschwitz five years ago, then speaking in schools and on several visits to Auschwitz; her daughters' refusal to accompany her there; and an emotional chance encounter with a Ravensbrück survivor she had saved.

5 videocassettes