Shoshana D. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Shoshana D., who was born in Hajduböszörmény, Hungary in 1935, the youngest of five daughters. She recounts her family's affluence; her maternal grandparents' emigration to Palestine in 1936; attending Jewish, then public school; confiscation of her father's store; his draft into a Hungarian slave labor battalion; ghettoization; non-Jewish neighbors offering to take her and her sisters; her mother refusing, not wanting to be separated from them; their deportation to the Debrecen ghetto, then to Strasshof; being sent to Josefthal for agricultural slave labor; caring for the younger children while the others worked; transfer to a munitions factory in Altnagelberg; her mother giving her a spoon of sugar when she cried from starvation; placement in a hospital in Gmünd when she was ill; transfer with her family to Theresienstadt in March 1945; liberation by Soviet troops; traveling to Budapest; reunion with her father; returning to Hajduböszörmény; attending school; preparing to emigrate to Palestine through Hashomer Hatzair; illegal emigration with her family via Bratislava; interdiction by the British; nine months incarceration on Cyprus; joining her grandparents; marriage; and the births of four children. Ms. D. discusses her family's luck that they all survived; her orthodoxy; nightmares resulting from her experiences; not sharing her experiences with her children until recently; and her sense that her childhood and youth were stolen from her.

5 videocassettes