Archival Descriptions

Advanced query tips

There are several ways to be more specific in your search query:

"Phrase"
Search an exact match of your query, e.g. "Member lists"
+Phrase
Given word has to be in the result, e.g. +Gestapo
-Phrase
Exclude given word from search, e.g. -Gestapo

Use the following syntax to restrict the search to specific fields:

field:"phrase"
For instance, you can find all descriptions that have the phrase "Auschwitz Birkenau" in their titles by searching for title:"Auschwitz Birkenau".

The following fields are currently available:

  • identifier
  • title
  • creator
  • person
  • place
  • subject
  • address
Displaying items 30,921 to 30,940 of 33,375
Search result ordering
Language of Description: English

  1. June F. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of June F., who was born in ?o?dz?, Poland in 1922. She recounts her comfortable childhood and loving family; joining her grandmother in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941; escaping with false papers to the Aryan side; assistance from a German in obtaining a job in the Tomaszo?w ghetto; transfer with her husband to Bliz?yn in 1943, three months after their marriage; deportation with her husband to Auschwitz; communicating with him until his deportation to another camp; selections and meaningless slave labor; public hanging of those who tried to escape; cleaning sewers as a punish...

  2. William R. Holocaust testimony

  3. Esther K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Esther K., who was born in Galicia, Poland in 1910. She speaks of her medical education in Czechoslovakia; her return to Poland in 1939 after the outbreak of the war; and her work in a Russian hospital during the Russian occupation of her town (1939-1941). She describes the ghettoization of her home town; life in the ghetto, where she lived with her family and worked as a physician; the liquidation of the ghetto hospital and her transfer to another town where she served as physician and dentist for the gentile population for nine months, until it became unsafe for her...

  4. Sara T. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Sara T., who was born in Middelburg, Netherlands in 1922, one of three children. In addition to information in a previously recorded testimony (HVT-3114), Ms. T. recounts attending public school; German invasion; Dutch police warning them to hide their belongings; incarceration in many camps, including Gross-Rosen; and prisoners freezing to death in open cattle cars. She shows photographs.

  5. Alice B. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Alice B., who was born in Hungary, the youngest of three children. She recounts her family's export business and their farm in the country; harassment by non-Jews; visiting a cousin in Budapest; her brother's draft into a Hungarian slave labor battalion; completing high school; German invasion in March 1944; ghettoization; deportation with her family to Auschwitz-Birkenau; separation with her sister and cousins from their parents; reciting poetry, singing, and discussing their previous lives to raise their morale; her sister protecting her; their separation (she never...

  6. Allegra K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Allegra K., who was born in Kastoria, Greece in 1927, one of seven children. She recounts cordial relations with non-Jews; warm family life; one brother's emigration to the United States; benign Italian occupation; her father's arrest and escape from Thessalonike? in 1943; German invasion; her father refusing offers from non-Jewish friends to hide some of them in order to keep the family together; deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau via Thessalonike?; separation from her family upon arrival; slave labor digging potatoes; hospitalization; a prisoner expelling her from th...

  7. Rachel M. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Rachel M., who was born in Sighet, Romania in 1929, one of six children. She recalls Hungarian occupation; her father's service in a forced labor battalion; his return over a year later; ghettoization; non-Jewish neighbors bringing them food; deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau in summer 1944; separation from her family; finding her sister; volunteering for work; her sister's selection for transfer; trading with another set of sisters to remain together; their transfer to Christianstadt after seven weeks; improved conditions; slave labor in a munitions factory and her s...

  8. Shulamit L. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Shulamit L., who was born in Vienna, Austria in 1927. She recounts her family's poverty; attending public school; her parents' divorce; living with her mother; the Anschluss; anti-Jewish restrictions resulting in expulsion from school; participating in a Zionist youth group; her father's remarriage; Kristallnacht; her father's emigration to the United States; her emigration with other children via Trieste to Palestine in 1940; receiving a postcard from her mother in Theresienstadt; living with a family in Jerusalem, then at a children's village; learning after the war...

  9. Miriam T. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Miriam T., who was born in Znojmo, Czechoslovakia in 1924, the older of two sisters. She recounts living in Pohořelice; attending Czech public school; her mother's illness in 1931; wonderful visits to her maternal grandmother; participating in Makabi ha-tsaʻir; her mother's death in 1936; attending boarding school in Brno; fleeing with her father to Luhačovice two days prior to the German invasion; returning to school in Brno; anti-Jewish restrictions, including her expulsion from school; participating in hachsharahs in Mělník, Prague, and another town; a brief fa...

  10. Vincent Z. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Vincent Z., who served with the United States Army in World War II. He recounts speaking fluent Polish; deployment to London; working in a press unit publishing Polish newspapers; contacts with the Polish government-in-exile and Polish resistants; transfer to Paris, then to Germany; visiting Dachau in November 1945; observing the gas chambers and crematorium; speaking with a Catholic priest and other liberated prisoners; working with UNRRA in Bad Nauheim to publish newspapers for the displaced persons camps; and assisting with displaced persons camp education programs...

  11. Dora Z. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Dora Z., who was born in P?on?sk, Poland in 1921. She recalls chaos as the war began; anti-Jewish restrictions; ghettoization; frequent atrocities; seeing her parents for the last time when they were evacuated from the ghetto; and deportation with her three sisters to Auschwitz in 1942. Mrs. Z. describes the arrival routine including shaving and tattooing; meaningless forced labor; supporting each other during selections; the deaths of her sisters; friendships with other prisoners; new arrivals being herded to the gas chambers; the pervasive stench and smoke from the ...

  12. Ervin S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Ervin S., a twin, who was born in Topol̕čany, Slovakia in 1940. He recounts that his father had been a bank executive prior to Slovak anti-Jewish laws; his maternal grandfather supporting them; riding scooters with his twin brother; round-up by Germans on September 5, 1944, his worst memory seeing his father frightened and vulnerable; deportation to Sered; his father becoming part of the Jewish camp leadership; their transfer to Theresienstadt in December 1944; living together with his parents and brother; spending days in the Kinderheim; inadequate food and sanitati...

  13. Michael J. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Michael J., who was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1907. He describes family life before World War I; the Bolshevik revolution in 1917; famine, civil war, and pogroms which followed the revolution; his family's escape to ?o?dz?, Poland in 1922; entering an engineering school of the Polish army in 1928; and working in his uncle's textile factory in ?o?dz? until he was drafted in August 1939. He recalls the German bombings; the Polish army's retreat to Modlin; his arrest and transfer to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany with his fellow officers; transfer to a camp in Prenzlau...

  14. Israel Z. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Israel Z., who was born in S?omniki, Poland in 1922, the youngest of four children and only son. He recalls his family's affluence; their Hasidic orthodoxy; attending public school and cheder; antisemitic harassment; attending high school in Krako?w; German invasion; arrest with his father; transfer to Miecho?w; execution of his father and another man; burying them; returning home; his mother and sisters hiding with non-Jews, obtaining false papers, and living as non-Jews; deportation to Bierzano?w; death losing meaning for him; mass killings as reprisals for escape a...

  15. Philip P. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Phillip P., who was born in approximately 1922 and served in the United States Army. He recounts military draft in 1942; deployment to England in 1943; arrival on Omaha Beach on D-Day; crossing through France into Germany; the Battle of the Bulge; liberating Leipzig, and a nearby camp; emaciated prisoners; many corpses; and moving south. He notes that prior to this, he had been skeptical when hearing about concentration camps, but realizing for what he had been fighting having liberated a camp. He shows photographs.

  16. Irving F. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Irving F., who was born in Stepangorodok, Poland in 1915. He recalls his youth in an observant family; attending yeshiva in Baranowicze in 1932; returning there later to marry and live; the birth of a child in 1940; and a decrease in antisemitic acts after the Soviet occupation. He describes the German invasion; imposition of anti-Jewish measures; ghettoization and formation of the Judenrat; forced labor for Organisation Todt; and the disappearance of some 6,000 Jews in a March 1942 Aktion. Mr. F. tells of constructing hideouts for use during round-ups; the killing of...

  17. Ilsa C. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Ilsa C., who was born in Hamm, Germany in 1916 and raised in Geilenkirchen. She recounts a large, extended family, their strong German identity; cordial relations with non-Jews until Hitler came to power; attending Catholic school; studying in Aachen and Berlin; official hiding of overt antisemitism during the 1936 Olympics; meeting her future husband in Cologne; obtaining papers to emigrate to the United States; returning home for a few months; going to the railroad station with her family during Kristallnacht; traveling to Cologne; visiting her parents in Aachen (th...

  18. Sophie K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Sophie K., who was born in Bursztyn, Poland (presently Ukraine), the second youngest of seven children. She recounts her mother's death when she was three; her father's death shortly before German invasion; forced labor; transfer to Bukachevtsy; her siblings and their families being deported or killed; transfer to Rohatyn; escaping by swimming across a river; a Polish couple informing her there were Jews in the woods; finding a man she knew (he was killed soon after), then her cousin; digging and living in a bunker; receiving food from a nearby farmer; liberation by S...

  19. Gertrud B. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Gertrud B., a Romani. She recalls childhood in Prussia, then Danzig; arrest and incarceration in a camp; deportation by cattle car to Auschwitz at age fifteen; the trauma of being tattooed; becoming ill; nine weeks in the infirmary; her sister feigning an injury to join her; being thrown on a pile of corpses; her sister retrieving and nursing her; her father playing music for the barrack elder; transfer to Flossenbürg after two years, then Graslitz; forced labor in a munitions factory; severe punishments and beatings (she shows her scars); liberation by United States...

  20. Hadassah C. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Hadassah C., who was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1939, the daughter of Polish immigrants. She recounts her maternal grandparents' emigration to Palestine in 1933; German invasion; being hidden with a family in Hengelo; her parents' clandestine visits; her mother determining she was being neglected; transfer to another family; attending church (she had not been told she was Jewish); a parade at liberation; her foster parents' fondness for her resulting in their reluctance to return her; returning to her parents; learning she was a Jew; her sister's birth in 1946;...