Lea F. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Lea F., who was born in Rome, Italy in 1925, one of four children. She recounts her family moving to Anzio in approximately 1927; her parents' positions as school teachers; moving to Rhodes in 1936; her father serving as director of the Jewish school; his death; her mother taking his position; she and her older sister teaching there; her brother having to work at age thirteen; food shortages; German occupation; round-up of all Jews; deportation with her family by ship to Piraeus, then by train to Auschwitz/Birkenau; separation of men and women; separation with her sister from their mother, grandmother, and baby brother (they never saw them again); initially not believing what they were told about the crematoria; slave labor weaving plastic and carrying bricks; speaking with her brother a few times through the barbed wire; several hospitalizations; strained relations between Polish and Italian prisoners; losing her belief in God; abandonment by the Germans in January 1945; liberation days later by Soviet troops; placement in a sanatorium with her sister and two other women from Rhodes; repatriation to Rome in August; learning her brother had been killed; staying with their aunt; working in a Jewish orphanage; and marriage to a survivor from Rhodes. Ms. F. discusses nightmares resulting from her experiences and not sharing her stories with her children.

3 videocassettes