Ester B. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Ester B., who was born in Chmiňany, Czechoslovakia (presently Slovakia) in 1930, one of twelve children. She recounts her family's relative affluence in the village, where they owned a sawmill and farm; her father's orthodoxy (he was a rabbi); attending a Jewish school in Prešov; her older siblings' marriages; her father receiving exemptions from deportation due to their business; staying with her sister in Prešov; her parents' deportation; staying with her aunt in Prešov; joining her brother and his family; deportation to Poprad; receipt of a telegram exempting her brother and his family; returning to Chmiňany with them; staying with her aunt in Košice; hiding during round-ups; traveling to Budapest; staying with a cousin; returning to Košice; arrival of the Germans; deportation to Auschwitz in June 1944; transfer to Kaiserwald; slave labor in a factory; transfer to Stutthof; slave labor digging anti-tank trenches; hospitalization; liberation by Soviet troops; avoiding rape by the Soviets; traveling to Uz︠h︡horod via Warsaw; living with a cousin; returning to Košice, then Prešov; reunion with a sister and her husband; recuperating in the Tatra Mountains; illegal emigration to Palestine immediately prior to the 1948 war; and living on a kibbutz. Ms. B. discusses her belief in camps that she would stay alive, to which she attributes her survival, and denigration of survivors by native Israelis for a long time.

1 videocassette