Linda B. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Linda B., who was born in Stropkov, Czechoslovakia (presently Slovakia) in 1924, a twin and one of six children. She recalls cordial relations with non-Jews prior to 1939; attending tailoring school in Bratislava in 1940; forced expulsion; moving to Prešov; arrest on March 24, 1942; deportation to Auschwitz (the first Jewish females there) via Poprad; transfer to Birkenau; slave labor building roads; starvation, suicides, frequent killings by guards and corpses everywhere; transfer to Canada Kommando, where she could obtain extra food; being forced to give blood for German soldiers; the uprising in October 1944; public execution of the women who provided the explosive powder; a death march and train transport to Ravensbrück, then weeks later to Retzow (Rechlin); repairing airport runways; prisoner deaths from Allied bombings; a march to Neubrandenburg; liberation by Soviet troops on May 5, 1945; a month's quarantine; repatriation to Bratislava; returning home; learning she was the sole survivor of her family; being turned away from her house by the present occupant; assistance from the Joint in Bratislava; marriage; the births of two children; antisemitic discrimination; applying for exit permits for twenty years; emigration to the United States in 1966; and satisfaction from testifying against a sadistic camp guard in a 1987 trial in Germany. Ms. B. discusses the collaboration of the Hlinka guards with Nazis and their continuing role in the postwar government; losing her belief in God and never thinking in the camps; only ten surviving from her original transport of hundreds; and the loss of her family - not even having a photograph of any of them.

1 videocassette