Suzanne R. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Suzanne R., who was born in Paris, France in 1933, the daughter of Hungarian-Czech immigrants. She recounts visiting her mother's large family in Hungary where she learned Hungarian; speaking Yiddish at home; learning French in school; her father leaving for a year fearing the Germans; her mother working as a seamstress; her father's return; his arrest in May 1941; receiving his letters from Beaune-la-Roland; anti-Jewish harassment and restrictions; learning of a round-up July 1942; hiding with Mamie, a non-Jewish customer of her mother; being sent by herself to another woman outside Paris, then to a Jewish children's home in Montreuil; visiting her mother and Mamie; living on a farm for a few weeks, then in a convent in Parthenay; staying in a dormitory with five other Jewish girls; attending school; learning Catholic prayers and rituals; visiting her mother a year later; she and her mother joining an aunt and cousin in Valenciennes; moving to Bruay-sur-l'Escaut with help from the resistance; the mayor, a resistant, giving them false papers; liberation by United States troops; returning to Paris; learning of the death camps; meeting trains daily hoping for her father's return (she did not accept his death until she was an adult); not being able to get their apartment back from French citizens who occupied it; living with Mamie; returning to school; visiting cousins in Czechoslovakia in 1947 (they survived the camps); receiving care packages from a Jewish family in the United States; emigrating in 1950 at their invitation; and her mother's death in 1959. Ms. R. discusses the loss of her large extended family in the Holocaust, and not discussing the war years with her mother. She shows photographs.

1 videocassette