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Displaying items 101 to 120 of 4,487
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Holding Institution: Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies

  1. Marcel D. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Marcel D., who was born in Ans, Belgium in 1920, one of two children. He recounts his parents' staunch Catholicism; attending school in Liège; joining a socialist youth group in 1937; volunteering to fight in Spain; rejection due to his age, but working there with children in a refugee camp for two months in 1938; German invasion in 1940; fleeing with his brother to Aube; returning home; some of his friends wearing yellow stars to protest anti-Jewish measures; joining the Front de l'Indépendance; obtaining weapons; sabotaging phone and rail lines; his brother's arre...

  2. Gregor S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Gregor S., the only survivor of a family of twenty-two, who grew up in Libau, Latvia. He speaks of his prewar life in a close-knit Hasidic family; his childhood education; his musical education in Vienna and his career as an opera singer (he is now a cantor.) He tells of his return from Switzerland to Latvia, shortly before the Russian occupation, where he was employed by the state opera; the rapidly worsening situation for the Jews following the German occupation; and the willing collaboration of the Latvians. He relates his internment in the large ghetto and, upon i...

  3. Klara B. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Klara B., who was born in Sombor, Yugoslavia, one of two sisters. She recounts studying ballet with her father, who was head of the dance teachers and a choreographer; their move to Budapest when she was nine so she could study under a prominent teacher/choreographer; returning to Sombor a year later; continuing to study with her father; attending gymnasium; participating in Hashomer Hatzair; attending university in Zagreb; returning home; Hungarian occupation; antisemitic violence by Hungarian soldiers; giving private dance lessons to help support her family; German ...

  4. Moshe V. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Moshe V., who was born in Pinsk, Russia (presently Belarus), one of three children. He recalls his family's relative affluence; his father's career as a teacher and his mother's as a physician; attending cheder and a Russian primary school; his mother's death in 1924; attending gymnasium starting in 1926; private lessons from a rabbi; attending engineering school in Warsaw; antisemitic harassment; living and working at the orphanage of Janusz Korczak; a summer at Korczak's camp in Gocławek; Korczak's influence leading him to change from engineering to become Korczak's...

  5. George K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of George K., who was born in Katowice, Poland in 1926. He recalls his childhood in an assimilated home in Radomsko; increased antisemitism after 1938; the outbreak of war; fleeing with his parents to Lublin; returning to Radomsko; ghettoization; helping Jews forced into the ghetto from surrounding villages; hiding with his parents during the first action; worsening conditions; his parents' arrest; desperate attempts to escape, including to Warsaw; acquiring false papers; and traveling to Munich as a non-Jewish slave laborer. Dr. K. describes posing as a Polish fighter; ...

  6. Louise S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Louise S., who was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands in 1929. She recalls her extended family; their assimilated lifestyle; moving to Bussum; attending school in Amsterdam; plans to emigrate; German invasion prior to their departure date; fleeing to IJmuiden; returning home; anti-Jewish laws including expulsion from school; forced relocation to Amsterdam; attending a Jewish school; obtaining false papers; going into hiding in January 1943; hiding with a relative in Bussum who was connected to the resistance; being sent by herself to a family in Hilversum; transfer three ...

  7. Lipa T. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Lipa T. who was born in Dukla, Poland in 1926. He recalls his family's orthodoxy; antisemitic violence; attending Polish school and cheder; enjoying Shabbat and holiday observances; his parents both working; their relative affluence; his father's military draft; German invasion; forced relocation with his mother and sister to Rymano?w; returning home; finding all their possessions looted by neighbors; forced quarry labor; his father's return after Germany invaded the Soviet Union; being sent to Krako?w with the quarry workers (he never saw his family again); slave lab...

  8. Regina G. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Regina G., who was born in Drobin, Poland in 1925. She recalls antisemitism in public school; German invasion; immediate imposition of anti-Jewish measures; taking her father's place for forced labor; formation of a Judenrat; ghettoization; transfer to another ghetto; overcrowded conditions resulting in a typhus epidemic; deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau in November 1942; her sister's execution when another prisoner attempted escape; her own wish to die then; the pervasive stench of the crematorium; working in the hospital and Zigeunerlager (Gypsy Lager); constructio...

  9. Jacob R. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Jacob R., who was born in Dobromyl?, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (presently Ukraine) in 1906. He recalls speaking Yiddish and German at home; his mother's death; his father's service in the first World War; abuse by Russian forces; becoming part of Poland after the war; antisemitism; moving to Berlin in 1926; the emigration of two siblings to Palestine; living in Ostende and Antwerp; expulsion because he was Polish; moving to Barcelona; burying dead from the civil war; moving to Paris in April 1939; German invasion; traveling to Orle?ans, Bordeaux, and Toulouse; arrest ...

  10. Samuel G. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Samuel G., who was born in Vinkovci, Croatia in 1920. He recounts cordial relations between ethnic groups; drastic change with the independence of Croatia in 1941; fifteen days imprisonment; anti-Jewish regulations; forced labor; destruction of the synagogue by Ustas?a members and local Germans; re-arrest; helping prisoners targeted for crueler treatment (e.g., the rabbi); release; helping the Jewish community supply food for women and children in Djakovo; organizing the release of fifty-seven children from Djakovo (his family took two); deportation to Jasenovac in Ap...

  11. Johannes S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Johannes S., a non-Jew who was born in 's-Gravenzande, Netherlands in 1923. He describes growing up in a predominantly Protestant town with little awareness of the situation of European Jewry; the influx of Jewish refugees to the Netherlands following Crystal Night; the relief efforts organized by his school; the outbreak of war, bombing, and the German victory over the Netherlands in four days; and the German occupation with its anti-Jewish decrees. He recalls acts of active and passive resistance; hiding on a farm in Deurningen to avoid conscription into the army; t...

  12. Adele R. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Adele R., who was born in Hajduböszörmény, Hungary in 1931, the fifth of seven children. She recalls antisemitic harassment in school; ghettoization in 1944; draft of her father and two older brothers into a slave labor battalion; transfer with her family to a brick factory in Debrecen, then to Strasshof; slave labor shoveling snow and coal; her mother bringing them extra food; fasting on Yom Kippur; a forced march to Mauthausen; piles of corpses and starvation; transfer to Gunskirchen; liberation by United States troops; hospitalization; escaping with others to fi...

  13. Harry U. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Harry U., who was born in approximately 1909, to an Orthodox family of nine children. He recalls living in Zakopane; draft into the Polish military in 1928; recall in August 1939; German invasion; retreating to Przasnysz; returning home briefly; fleeing to Soviet-occupied L?viv via Cieszano?w, then to Pidhai?t?s?i; Soviet deportation by train to Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg), then a forced labor camp; release due to his Polish citizenship; learning of a Polish exile army organizing in Kazakhstan; traveling with other Poles to Alma-Ata, Samarqand, Tashkent and Bukhoro to e...

  14. Esther B. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Esther B., who was born in ?o?dz?, Poland in 1928, the youngest of three children. She recounts her family's secularism; her father's leadership position in the Bund; attending a Bund school; antisemitic harassment; German invasion; one brother fleeing to the Soviet zone (she never saw him again); her father fleeing after a warning from his pro-Nazi friend (she never saw him again); ghettoization; attending a ghetto school; eating at public kitchens funded by the Joint; participating in SKIF, the Bund youth group; her mother's hospitalization; hiding during round-ups;...

  15. Sonya S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Sonia S., who was born in 1912. She recalls living in Klimonto?w with her parents and sisters; teaching in a Jewish school with her father; German occupation; difficulty dealing with her father's illness; finally finding a doctor to amputate his leg; secretly teaching with her father; hiding during round-ups; reluctance to believe rumors of extermination; deportation; escaping from the cattle car with her sisters; hiding for two years with assistance from non-Jews; liberation by Soviet troops; marriage; antisemitic incidents in Rzeszo?w; moving to Krako?w; traveling v...

  16. Lilly M. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Lilly M., who was born in Most (Most-Brux), Czechoslovakia in 1918. She remembers meeting Jewish children from Germany in 1938 and not believing their stories; attending medical school in Prague; the outbreak of war; anti-Jewish restrictions; deportation to Terezi?n; seeing her parents for the last time before their deportation from Terezi?n; volunteering to work with the elderly; deportation to Auschwitz; separation from her husband (she never saw him again); appells, beatings, and selections; forced labor in Birnbaumel; liberation by Soviet troops; and remaining wit...

  17. Emrich O. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Emrich O., who was born in Tiszapüspöki, Hungary in 1925. He recounts his family's move to Törökszentmiklós; their extreme poverty; his father's death after his bar mitzvah; his mother begging relatives for funds so he could attend high school; apprenticeship to a baker; working at a bakery in Budapest; his brother working in leather goods; notice to report to a Hungarian slave labor battalion; visiting his mother and grandmother in Törökszentmiklós (he never saw them again); slave labor in Püspökladány; transfer to Budapest; clearing body parts from the Da...

  18. Bernard O. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Bernard O., who was born in Łódź, Poland in 1937, an only child. He recalls his familys' affluence; their insistence he speak only Polish; German invasion; his father's mother giving them gold coins; joining relatives in Warsaw; moving to the Piotrków ghetto; his mother obtaining false papers for herself and him; taking a train with her (his father was hidden with non-Jews); observing Gestapo inspecting papers; jumping off the train without their documents; entering the nearby Radom ghetto; his mother contacting his father; his father joining them; hiding during de...

  19. Erwin S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Erwin S., who was born in Sa?rospatak, Hungary in 1924, the oldest of four sons. He recalls German invasion in spring 1944; train transport to a ghetto; deportation to Auschwitz; remaining with his next youngest brother; transfer to Dachau after a week, then to Rothswaige the next day; reciting prayers to himself during appell; assistance from a Greek prisoner; receiving extra food from some German guards; transfer to Allach; hospitalization; being saved from selections due to his brother's privileged position; prisoners singing Kol Nidrei on Yom Kippur; liberation fr...

  20. Julian L. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Julian L., who enlisted in the United States Army on December 7, 1942. He recounts landing in Marseille; serving as an ammunition bearer; entering Germany; fear of being captured and mistreated as a Jewish soldier; encountering masses of Polish forced laborers; in April 1945 encountering weak, emaciated prisoners in stripped uniforms who spoke Yiddish; giving them their rations; guarding Polish displaced persons; and returning to the United States in March 1946. Mr. L. notes a book his military unit published; that parts of his unit (not his company) entered concentra...