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 44,201 to 44,220 of 55,818
Search result ordering

  1. Christine C. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Christine C., who was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1940. She recounts escaping with her mother from the ghetto in 1942; living in a village using false papers; her mother receiving warnings from a German soldier and a Polish nobleman prior to German searches; living with a very kind family in another village; her mother's return to Warsaw after the war; reluctance to join her mother due to fondness for their rescuers; her mother's remarriage; fondness for her new father and finally feeling like she had a family; learning she was Jewish at age seven (she was raised as a C...

  2. Justin R. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Justin R., who was born in 1929 in Horstein, Germany, the older of two brothers. He recounts his family's orthodoxy; their affluence; attending a Jewish school; a neighbor shooting their dog when the Nazis came to power; vandalism against Jewish property and beatings of Jews; confiscation of his father's store; his father's beating by a man he knew, resulting in his decision to emigrate; he and his brother being sent to a Jewish boarding school; threats by SS to shoot all the children in the school on Kristallnacht; his parents retrieving him and his brother; living i...

  3. Raymond W. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Raymond W., a non-Jew, who was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1923. He recounts participating in a Communist youth group; his family housing refugees from Germany; disrupting Rexist meetings; German invasion; being wounded in an air raid in Boulogne en route to enlist; hanging anti-German posters in the streets; returning to Brussels; joining the resistance; helping to sabotage production and organize strikes; hiding belongings of Jewish deportees to prevent appropriation by Germans; warning Jews to go into hiding; his mother compelling him to volunteer to work in Germa...

  4. Ilse W. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Ilse W., who was born in Berlin, Germany in 1915. She recounts her father's service in World War I; her parents' prosperous businesses; celebrating Jewish holidays with her large and close extended family; destruction of their synagogue on Kristallnacht; arrest and immediate release; her brother's emigration to Palestine and her sister's to England in 1939; obtaining visas for Shanghai; traveling to Genoa to board a ship; being prevented from leaving by the outbreak of war; marriage; internment with her mother in San Fele and Potenza (men were interned elsewhere); her...

  5. Coenraad R. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Coenraad R., who was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1917, one of six children. He recalls being the only Jew in his public school; training as a tailor; military draft in 1939; German invasion in 1940; his father's death; marriage in September; organizing resistance through his socialist youth group; forced labor in 1942; transfer to Westerbork; deportation to Cosel (his wife, mother, and sister had already been deported), then Gleiwitz; staying with Dutch prisoners (there were conflicts with Poles); a higher death rate for the Dutch; remaining with one neighborhoo...

  6. Renate R. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Renate R., who was born in Berlin in 1923. Mrs. R. describes her family background; life in Germany; and their move to Yugoslavia in 1933; her father's illness and death in 1940; the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941; and the forced move with her mother and brother to a Jewish section. She describes living with a Yugoslav family and her mother's imprisonment by the Gestapo. Mrs. R. recounts working for the partisans; having to leave the Yugoslav family due to fear of betrayal; thinking of suicide; and being aided by the mother of a school friend who helped arrange...

  7. Samuel D. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Samuel D., who was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1928. He recounts attending Polish and Jewish schools; German invasion; excitement due to his childish perspective; gradually increasing anti-Jewish restrictions; ghettoization; starvation; his father's escape to his childhood village; his father sending a Pole to bring him, his sister, and mother to the village near Magnuszew in spring 1942; incarceration with his father in Jedlin?sk; Russian POWs joining German forces; realizing the arbitrary cruelty after his first beating; his father protecting him; their transfer after...

  8. Louis M. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Louis M., who was born in approximately 1925. He recounts living in Bucharest; his family's poverty and orthodoxy; abandonment by his father; living with his grandmother; attending Jewish and public schools; antisemitic harassment; his brother fleeing to Soviet-occupied territory; a tailor's apprenticeship in Budapest; German invasion in March 1944; draft into a Hungarian slave labor battalion; railroad work in various locations; escaping with others in December; liberation by Soviet troops; compulsory labor for the Soviets; escaping; returning to Bucharest via Yugosl...

  9. Jakub R. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Jakub R., who was born in 1926 in ?o?dz?, Poland. He describes his father's active participation in the Bund; good personal relations with Germans and Poles despite public, antisemitic incidents; German invasion in September 1939; synagogue burnings and round-ups; formation of the Judenrat headed by Mordecai Rumkowski; ghettoization in spring 1940; belonging to a group which tried to sabotage work done for Germans; his father's death; relationships between national groups; hiding during round-ups; deportation with his family to Birkenau as part of a Siemens factory; s...

  10. Frank A. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Frank A., who served in the United States Army in World War II. He recounts mobilization; transfer to England; landing in Normandy; being wounded by friendly fire; liberating Dachau; observing unburied corpses; taking photographs of the corpses and emaciated survivors; United States officers forcing local German civilians to walk through the camp (they denied knowledge of what happened there), to dig graves, and to bury the corpses; and his departure two hours later. Mr. A. notes sending his photographs of Dachau to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and show...

  11. Aaron E. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Aaron E., who was born in Soko?o?w Podlaski, Poland in 1933. He describes his father's non-kosher butcher shop; German occupation; ghettoization; smuggling out of the ghetto to deliver meat; selections from which no one returned; fear of death from overhearing adult conversations; forced labor on a farm with his family in 1942; being discovered while hiding with his family during the ghetto's liquidation; escaping; his younger sister's deportation to Treblinka; his mother sending him to his other sister to hide with a Polish woman; hiding in her attic until liberation...

  12. Charles A. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Charles A., who was born in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1917. He describes his father's work as an engineer constructing church cupolas; attending a private gymnasium; restrictions on Jewish participation in government; Lithuanians organizing mass killings of Jews immediately prior to the arrival of German troops; and the return to the Jewish community of the bodies of twenty-three girls who had been rounded-up, including his girlfriend. Mr. A. details life in the ghetto from 1941 to 1944: the round-up and disappearance of community leaders, including his father; election of...

  13. Hila B. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Hila B., who was born in Jędrzejów, Poland in 1919, the seventh of eight children. She recounts her family's move to Łódź when she was six months old; their orthodoxy and relative affluence; participating in Gordonyah and Maccabi; her father's death in 1936; working to help support the family; marriage in March 1939; her brothers' and husband's military draft; German invasion; return of three brothers and her husband; visiting her injured brother in Skierniewice; his return; several of her siblings moving to Warsaw and her mother to Piotrków Trybunalski; joining ...

  14. Isaac F. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Isaac F., who was born in Cie?z?kowice, Poland in 1892. He recalls growing up in a religious family; fleeing to Germany to escape military service; working in a shoe store in Berlin; serving in the German army during World War I; marriage in Cologne after the war; the birth of his two sons; recognizing the danger as the Nazis came to power and emigrating to Holland in 1933; establishing a leather business in Zaandam; German invasion in 1940; unsuccessful attempts to emigrate; obtaining Palestine visas; deportation with his family to Westerbork; cleaning streets; and w...

  15. Shmuel S. and Dora R. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Shmuel S., who was born in Czernowitz, Romania, in 1916 and his sister Dora R., who was born in 1926. Mr. S. relates pleasant aspects of his prewar life: a happy family, ease in being Jewish, work in a clothing factory. He describes the German re-occupation of Czernowitz; the forced march to Bershad;? forced labor in and near the Bershad ?ghetto; and the cruel treatment which he suffered. He tells of fleeing to Balta with his sister and of their journey after the Russian takeover through the woods back to Bershad ?to rejoin the rest of their family. Also recalled are ...

  16. Maliette W. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Maliette W., who was born in Strasbourg, France in 1929, one of two children of Polish e?migre?s. She recounts her family's orthodoxy; visiting her grandmother in Poland and other relatives in Germany; attending a French school; vacationing with relatives, but without her father, in Paris-Plage when the war broke out; her father bringing a few possessions from Strasbourg after its ordered evacuation; moving to Vichy; attending school; her relatives leaving for Spain; her family's departure for Marseille; obtaining visas to Martinique; interdiction of their ship by the...

  17. Alfred K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Alfred K., who was born in Vienna, Austria in 1921, the youngest of three brothers. He recounts attending public school; antisemitic harassment; participating in socialist and Zionist organizations; Austrians welcoming the Germans during the Anschluss; one brother emigrating to relatives in the United States, the other, as a physician with a Kindertransport, to England; the concierge protecting him and his parents during Kristallnacht; fleeing with an aunt and uncle to Belgium; living in Antwerp; placement in Merksplas refugee camp; German invasion; fleeing to France;...

  18. Barbara L. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Barbara L., who was born in Guben, Germany in 1927, the oldest of four children. She recounts her maternal grandparents' conversions to Christianity; baptism of all their children, including her mother (her father was Protestant); their affluence; a beautiful childhood on their estate in Neuzelle; becoming antisemitic due to stereotypes in school; being classified as a "mischling first degree" by the Nuremberg laws; her maternal uncle's emigration to South Africa in 1937; her grandparents visiting him and deciding not to stay; dismay when students accused her of havin...

  19. Raymond D. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Raymond D., who was born in approximately 1938, an orphan. He recounts being hidden in Brussels in 1942 (he recalls a house, but does not remember with whom he was hiding); being moved to a convent in Borsbeek; transfer to Antwerp, then Malines; release with eleven other children to an Association des juifs de Belgique (AJB) children's home in Vlezenbeek, then to another elsewhere; the Resistance hiding him in a convent in Rixensart; liberation; placement in an AJB home in Aische-en-Rafail; living with a family of survivors who wanted to adopt him; transfer to an AJB ...

  20. Iser R. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Iser R., who was born in Pia?tek, Poland in 1923, one of nine children. He recalls German bombardment in September 1939; moving to the Warsaw ghetto; being smuggled to the Wegrow ghetto; escaping the liquidation in September 1942; a Polish family hiding him in their attic for two years; his hostess being killed and host injured by German bombing; liberation by Soviet troops; vouching to the Soviets for his rescuers; traveling to ?o?dz?; learning no relatives had survived; living in Fo?hrenwald displaced persons camp, Munich, and Netherlands; emigration to Israel in 19...