Frieda R. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Frieda R., who was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1920, one of three children of Polish émigrés. She recounts her paternal grandmother joining them from Poland; attending public school and a Bund school (her father was a Bundist); participating in Maccabi; her father's death in 1932; leaving school to help support the family; joining the Yiddisher Arbayter Sport Klub (YASK); friendships with young German refugees through the Freie Deutsche Jugend; her fiancé emigrating to the United States in 1939; fleeing to Baisieux with his family when the war began intending to go to England; placement in Rieucros for a year; her fiancé's unsuccessful attempts to facilitate her emigration to the United States; transfer to Marseille, then an Alpine village; an unsuccessful attempt with a cousin to enter Switzerland; joining her fiancé's family in Corrèze; becoming a courier for the Francs-tireurs et partisans de la Main d'œuvre immigrée de Paris (FTP MOI); using false papers; assignment to Toulouse; helping to blow up trains; arrest; interrogations and beatings; deportation to Ravensbrück as a political prisoner three months later; remaining with four friends from FTP MOI; never admitting she was Jewish; assistance from Belgian prisoners; slave labor in a Siemens factory; hospitalization for typhus; a doctor saving her from selection; transfer to Sweden via Denmark by Swedish Red Cross busses; convalescing; repatriation to Melsbroek, Brussels, then Antwerp; reunion with her brother in Rixensart (her sister and mother did not survive); marriage to a camp survivor; and her daughter's birth in 1949. Ms. R. discusses attending an FTP MOI reunion in Toulouse; participating in a Ravensbrück survivor group; visiting there several times; sharing her experiences with her daughter; and attributing her survival to prisoner solidarity.

3 videocassettes