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 141 to 160 of 4,487
Search result ordering
Language of Description: English
Language of Description: Multiple
Holding Institution: Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies

  1. Jenny L. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Jenny L., who was born in Aleksinac, Yugoslavia in 1927, the younger of two children. She recounts a kind kindergarten teacher; moving to Belgrade; her father's military conscription in spring 1941; German invasion; anti-Jewish restrictions; a public execution; her brother's escape to Italian-occupied Croatia; reporting to a German round-up; escaping when she saw her friend killed, leaving her mother and grandmother; traveling to an aunt's home in Niš (she worked for the underground); obtaining false papers; living with her former kindergarten teacher; hiding partisa...

  2. Aba P. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Aba P., who was born in Miecho?w, Poland in 1922, the oldest of five children. He recalls German invasion; forced labor; a German supervisor providing him with extra food; ghettoization; smuggling food to his family; a Jewish policeman saving him from execution; volunteering for slave labor in Krako?w, hoping to protect his family; working as a cook; occasionally visiting home; deportation of his mother and one sister (they did not survive); arranging for one brother to join him; learning his other sister and cousins had been killed; transfer to Pionki; encountering h...

  3. Ed H. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Ed H., who was born in Stanislav, Poland (presently Ukraine) in 1929, an only child. He recalls attending Hebrew school; his grandmother joining them from Nazi-occupied Austria; Soviet occupation in 1939; his father's draft into the fire brigade; German invasion in 1941; ghettoization; forced labor; a mass killing; narrowly escaping with his mother from a round-up (his grandparents were deported); returning to find his father had been shot; his mother making contacts with non-Jews when they worked outside the ghetto; smuggling themselves out of the ghetto with assista...

  4. Mark N. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Mark N., who was born in Soymy, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (Czechoslovakia after World War I, presently Ukraine), in 1908, one of eight children. He recounts cordial relations with non-Jews; joining the Czech army in 1928; serving for two years; Zionist agricultural training in Ostrava in 1936; emigrating to Haifa; returning home at his parents' request; military service in 1938; Hungarian occupation; draft into a Hungarian slave labor battalion in 1940; slave labor at various locations; returning home on leave in 1941; learning that his family had been deported; findi...

  5. Sarah W. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Sarah W., who was born in Kovno, Lithuania in 1905. She recalls moving to Antwerp with her family; her mother's death; attending Hebrew school; marriage in 1927; her son's birth in 1928; moving to Luxembourg where her husband was a rabbi; German invasion in 1940; anti-Jewish measures; fleeing to Paris with her husband and three children; traveling by train through Spain to the Portuguese border; futile attempts to enter Portugal with assistance from the Joint; returning to France; internment with her family in Bayonne; her son's bar mitzvah in a local synagogue; trave...

  6. Peter S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Peter S., who was born in Berlin, Germany in 1938. He recounts moving to Prague with his parents in 1933, then to Amsterdam in 1938; attending a Dutch school; German invasion; anti-Jewish measures including expulsion from school, wearing the star, and having to move; obtaining Ecuadorian passports from relatives in Sweden; deportation to Westerbork in January 1944, then to Bergen-Belsen three months later; forced labor in a shoe commando; deteriorating conditions after prisoners arrived from Auschwitz; their transfer, three months prior to war's end, to Algeria as par...

  7. Shlomo P. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Shlomo P., who was born in Peine, Germany in 1925. He recalls cordial relations with non-Jews until 1933; expulsion from school after the Nuremberg laws; the family's move to ?o?dz? in 1936; German invasion; fleeing to the Soviet Union with one brother; their separation; placement in an orphanage in Hrodna; draft into the Soviet military; capture by Germans in 1941; identifying himself as a Volksdeutsche while waiting in line to be shot in a mass killing; working as a translator/interrogator for the German 12th Armored Division; interrogating Stalin's son, Iakob Jug?a...

  8. Mario B. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Mario B., who was born in London, England in 1926, the older of two brothers. He recounts his parents were Catholic, Italian emigre?es; he, his mother, and brother visiting his grandmother in Piacenza in May 1939; not being able to return to England after the war started; living in Cadeo; Italian capitulation; German occupation; local hostility to Germans; contacts with partisans; hiding to avoid military draft in 1944; arrest with his brother and uncle when visiting his mother; imprisonment in Piacenza; separation from his relatives when he was transferred to Milan (...

  9. Ann R. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Ann R., who was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1929. She recalls early happy memories; German bombardment; wearing the yellow star; expulsion from school; watching the Gestapo round-up her parents; and their wanton destruction, including the "evisceration" of a doll. She remembers informing the sanitarium where her brother was hospitalized that her parents had been taken away (they would not keep him anymore since there was no one to pay); giving him to a strange woman; wandering the streets with her sister; a nun offering to help them; moving many times; a visit from h...

  10. Elisabeth K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Elisabeth K., a German non-Jew, who was born in Insterburg, Germany (presently Cherni?a?khovsk, Russia) in approximately 1931. She recalls her father was a career military officer; moving to Berlin in 1935, then to a village in 1937; her parents' "Prussian" lack of communication and formal child rearing (she learned not to ask questions); playing with Jewish children; observing destruction after Kristallnacht; learning her beloved Jewish pediatrician had committed suicide; frequent marching and the boredom of Hitler Youth meetings; the focus on girls as producers of f...

  11. Herbert K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Herbert K., who was born in Borken, Germany in 1920, the youngest of six children. He recalls his family's strong German identity and their Jewish orthodoxy; expulsion from gymnasium in 1933; attending school in Winterswijk, Netherlands from 1937 on; learning of his parents' arrest on Kristallnacht; emigration of two brothers to the United States; bringing two brothers and his sister to the Netherlands with assistance from his uncle in Amsterdam; their incarceration in Westerbork as illegal immigrants; working on a farm from 1939 through the spring of 1943; hiding wit...

  12. George W. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of George W., who was born in Tarnogro?d, Poland in 1921. He recounts moving to L'viv when he was two; his mother's death when he was six; attending commercial school; working in his father's dairy business; antisemitism; membership in Betar; seeing Vladimir Jabotinsky twice; working as a diamond setter; Russian occupation; German invasion in June 1941; seeing bodies of massacred Jews; deportation to a nearby camp; slave labor building roads; cruel German and Ukrainian guards; contracting typhoid; escaping after two years; briefly hiding with a Ukrainian family, then a P...

  13. Henri G. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Henri G., who was born in Poland in 1925, one of four children. He recalls moving with his family to Danzig when he was about five, then to Paris in 1932 due to an antisemitic attack on his father; forming lifelong friendships in his Jewish neighborhood; attending public school; learning Yiddish and German songs from his father; evacuation when war began in 1939, then returning home; evacuation with his family to Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne after German invasion in 1940; returning to Paris in early 1941; his father's arrest in May; visiting him once in Pithiviers; his older...

  14. Louis S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Louis S., who was born in Grodisk Mazowiecki, Poland in 1927, one of three children. He recounts attending school; anti-Jewish boycotts; attending soccer games in Warsaw with his father; German invasion; fleeing to Warsaw; bombings; returning home; his father's arrest and imprisonment for six weeks; his bar mitzvah; deportation to the Warsaw ghetto; his father arranging their departure; traveling to Zamos?c?, Hrubieszo?w, Kock, and Lubarto?w; his father fleeing back to Warsaw; he and a sister joining him (they never saw their mother or other sister again); living with...

  15. Jean H. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Jean H., who was born in Danzig, Germany in 1920. She describes family and community life during the 1930s, noting the integration of Jews and non-Jews before 1933; the strong German identity of her father and the rest of her relatives; the beginning of anti-Jewish legislation, which prompted the Jewish community to establish its own schools; her involvement in a Jewish youth group until 1936; increasingly violent displays of antisemitism; and the general deterioration of the Jewish situation. She relates hearing stories of concentration camps in Germany and recalls t...

  16. Liselotte K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Liselotte K., who was born in Berlin, Germany in 1918. She describes her affluent childhood; a close, extended family; antisemitism in school; educating herself about Judaism; erosion of relationships with non-Jews after the Nuremberg laws; expulsion from school; vacationing in Germany; working in a department store; nurses training at a Jewish hospital; viewing the destruction after Kristallnacht; applying through Bloomsbury House to emigrate to England; moving to Midlands, England in 1939; learning of her parents' deportation to Theresienstadt and their subsequent d...

  17. Hannah H. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Hannah H., who was born in Sosnowiec, Poland in 1924. She recalls attending public school and business school; celebrating Jewish holidays; German invasion; ghettoization with her family in the Srodula section; forced labor; hiding in a bunker during round-ups; her brother being caught and killed; foregoing an escape opportunity to save her parents from deportation (they were not released); deportation to Auschwitz in 1944; being shaved and tattooed; slave labor in a munitions factory; transfer to a German camp in January 1945; liberation by the Red Cross in April; tr...

  18. Nadine H. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Nadine H., who was born in France in 1928. She relates living in Strasbourg; moving to Eure-et-loir with her mother when the war began; joining her father in Nancy in 1940; German invasion; fleeing with her mother to a village near Pau, then Vichy; living in Cusset from 1940 to 1941; moving to Valence, then Lyon in October 1941; arrest with her parents on May 13, 1944; Gestapo interrogations; incarceration in Montluc prison; transfer to Drancy; her parents meeting with Commander Brunner; and deportation to Auschwitz in May 1944. Dr. H. recounts her father's last words...

  19. Herman L. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Herman L., a non-Jew, who was born in Tienen, Belgium in 1919. He recalls his father's commitment to Marxism; his parents' divorce when he was thirteen; attending schools and universities in Brussels, Charleroi, Ghent, and Cologne; observing persecution of Jews in Germany; his mother assisting Jewish refugees; German invasion; biking to France; encountering his father; going with him to Limoges, Dijon, and Paris; returning to university in Ghent; arrest in 1943 for communist and union activities; imprisonment in Breendonk; meaningless forced labor; being forced to par...

  20. Fanny G. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Fanny G., who was born in Paris, France in 1921 to Polish immigrants. She recalls her three brothers; moving with her family to Cantal in 1940, then to Lyon; resistance activities with the MUR; visiting her parents and brothers who were hiding in Savoie; arrest in June 1944; imprisonment in Montluçon; Gestapo torture and beatings; friendships with prisoners that endure to the present; transfer to Drancy; deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau in August; frequent appels and selections; transfer with friends to Krautau; slave labor in an airplane factory; sabotaging the par...