Miriam V. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Miriam V., who was born in a village in Hungary in 1928, one of six sisters. She recounts her family's move to Miskolc in 1932; attending Jewish school; participating in Betar; cordial relations with non-Jews; draft of men into Hungarian slave labor battalions; German invasion in 1944; forced labor; transfer to the Miskolc ghetto; her father's deportation (she never saw him again); deportation with her mother and sisters to Auschwitz/Birkenau; separation from her mother; transfer with four sisters to Allendorf (she never saw her other sister or mother again); slave labor in a munitions factory; assistance from a German guard; working on nearby farms; smuggling food to share with others; composing and singing songs and other cultural activities; brief hospitalization; fasting on Yom Kippur and not eating bread during Passover; a forced march; abandonment by the guards; liberation by United States troops; living in Niedergrenzbach; contacts with American Jewish soldiers in Ziegenhain; three sisters returning to Hungary; traveling with her other sister to the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp; assistance from the Jewish Brigade; sitting with David Ben-Gurion when he visited; relations between Zionist groups; failed attempts to cross national borders en route to illegal emigration to Palestine; staying in Düsseldorf; returning to Bergen-Belsen; two more sisters joining her; training for emigration to Palestine in Gersfeld, then in Landsberg; traveling to Milan; living in refugee camps in Rivoli, Ladispoli, and Bari; illegal emigration to Palestine by ship; interdiction by the British; incarceration on Cyprus; joining the Haganah; guarding Golda Meir when she visited; release; marriage; her children's births; and one son's death in 1977. Ms. V. discusses the importance of the sisters to each others' survival; events that challenged her and others' faith; the sisters shielding each other from postwar depressions; kibbutz life; and a reunion of Allendorf survivors. She shows photographs.

12 videocassettes