Catharina K. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Catharina K., who was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1929. She recounts that her father was a widower with two children when he married her mother; their diamond business; being spoiled until the war; their assimilated lifestyle and large extended family; attending a French public school; German invasion; fleeing to Ostend, Paris, Roaillan, then Lisbon; their emigration to Jakarta a few months later to join her half-brother; living in Bandung; her father and brother starting a diamond business; attending a Christian school; Japanese invasion; confiscation of their possessions, then imprisonment in a camp; forced labor; a Japanese beating a friend to death when she did not bow properly; creating sixty-seven small books of sketches; transfer with her mother to another camp near Jakarta; her father's transfer elsewhere; women lighting candles on Sabbath; assistance from her mother's friend who was a nurse; Japanese torturing women who smuggled goods over the fence; many people dying from disease; her mother's illness; liberation in 1945; assistance from British troops; reunion with her father in Bandung; living in Salvation Army quarters; repatriation by the Red Cross via Singapore to Amsterdam; learning almost their entire extended families were killed, including her half-sister; her father's mental illness resulting from the war; his death in 1950; marriage; emigration to the United States with her mother; and their return to Antwerp. Ms. K. discusses the Iraqi Jewish women having the lowest status in the camps; nightmares and physical illnesses resulting from her experiences; sharing her story with her children; identifying herself as a humanist religiously, but ethnically as a Jew; and her artwork, which reflects her war experiences. She shows some of the books she made in the concentration camps.

3 videocassettes