Archival Descriptions

Displaying items 101 to 116 of 116
Language of Description: German
Language of Description: English
Holding Institution: Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
  1. Saul C. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Saul C., who was born in Krako?w, Poland in 1925. He recalls his family's relative poverty; attending Bund summer camps; German occupation; the family's move to Cze?stochowa; forced labor in the ghetto; transformation of the ghetto into labor camps (his mother, sister, and one brother were deported to Treblinka); hiding during a round-up; capture and escape; rejoining his father in the camp; separation from his father; escaping with a friend; building a bunker in a forest; hostile Polish partisans (AK); returning to camp because he feared death; denunciation; imprison...

  2. Serge B. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Serge B., who was born in France in 1921. He recalls his parents were Russian immigrants; their assimilated, secular life in Paris; not feeling Jewish until German invasion; his father's escape from the July 1942 round-up with help from a police friend; being sent with his siblings to live with their uncle in Cannes; joining the Resistance; becoming head of his group; arrest in 1943; violent interrogations; the Gestapo discovering he was Jewish; transfer to a prison in Nice, then Drancy; digging an escape tunnel with fourteen prisoners; discovery of the tunnel; confin...

  3. Shmuel G. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Shmuel G., who was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (presently Slovakia) in 1923. He recounts attending a Jewish German language school; participating in the Bar Kochba swim club; his sister's emigration to England in 1939; participating in Hashomer Hatzair; studying plumbing; his father's death in 1940; slave labor for the Hlinka guard; release after four months; deportation to Sered; his mother hiding with non-Jews; bringing her to Sered with assistance from Alexander Pressburger, the head Jew of the camp; moving her out to a Czech family; his privileged position ...

  4. Simon M. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Simon M., who was born in Ziegenhals, Germany (now G?ucho?azy, Poland) in 1905. He recalls his impoverished childhood in a large family; his father's military service in World War I; completing eight grade; working as a peddler; marriage in 1928; his first son's birth in 1930; living in Breslau when Hitler came to power; serving as a liaison to the Gestapo; helping Jews emigrate; Kristallnacht; arrest and deportation to Buchenwald; release with assistance from an SS officer; receiving help from Jews in Leipzig; returning to Breslau; traveling to Shanghai via Italy in ...

  5. Simon R. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Simon R., who was born in Ozorko?w, Poland in 1916 to an orthodox family of six children. He recalls his family moving between Ozorko?w and ?owicz; working from age ten; disbelief that anything bad would occur; opening a store near Ozorko?w in 1939; German invasion; fleeing to Ozorko?w; learning the Gestapo was looking for him; hiding in a village; returning to Ozorko?w; and three months in jail in ?e?czyca. Mr. R. tells of his return to Ozorko?w; his brother's arrest; ghettoization; forced labor; the community saving a boy from public hanging for not wearing the yell...

  6. Simone C. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Simone C., who was born in Magdeburg, Germany in 1922. She recalls fleeing to Paris in 1933 when the Gestapo came to arrest her father and brother; participating in Hashomer Hatzair; her older brother's emigration to Palestine in 1934; German invasion; her father volunteering for the French military; fleeing with her mother and younger brother to Toulouse; their return to Paris; her internment in the Ve?lodrome d'Hiver, then Gurs; her mother and brother moving to be near her; a guard allowing her to visit them; not returning; living in Pe?rigueux with her family (her ...

  7. Sonia R. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Sonia R., who was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1929 of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father. She describes her father's anti-Nazi activities; Gestapo harassment; emigration to Italy, then France, in January 1933 because of her father's politics; her mother's art work; expulsion from France nine months later; her father's return to Germany and her mother's refusal, leading to their divorce; moving with her mother to San Remo; her third sibling's birth; receiving government orders in October 1939 to leave because they were foreigners; a German consular official helpin...

  8. Susan M. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Susan M., who was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1925. She describes her happy childhood as a performer in a successful children's theatre; her parent's divorce; her rejection from the art academy due to the Jewish quota; the nonchalant attitude of the Jewish community until the German occupation in 1944; anti-Semitic legislation; hiding with her father with the aid of his non-Jewish fiancee; the establishment of the ghetto; and the reign of the Hungarian Gestapo. She relates working as a nurse while hiding on false papers; being recognized by a non-Jewish friend who tu...

  9. Thea S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Thea S., who was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1935. Her mother was Catholic and her father Huguenot. She recalls little change during the first two years of German occupation; her father joining the Dutch underground and falsifying passports for Jews; hiding a Jewish woman and her son in their attic; frequently talking to the boy late at night; being told they would all be killed if she told anyone they were hiding Jews; her uncle's execution by the Germans as a spy; her sister's hospitalization and evacuation to Belgium after the hospital was bombed; her father'...

  10. Victor W. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Victor W., a Catholic, who was born in Belgium in approximately 1925, one of three brothers. He recounts living near Namur; his family's focus on religion, family, and patriotism; attending a Catholic school; participating in a Catholic youth group; German invasion; helping to bury Belgian soldiers; joining the Resistance in 1941; printing and distributing leaflets; obtaining weapons; a friend who worked for the Gestapo warning him of his imminent arrest; a futile attempt to escape to England via France; arrest in Buxy; interrogation and torture in Chalon-sur-Saone; t...

  11. Viliam G. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Viliam G., who was born in Hlohovec, Czechoslovakia (presently Slovakia) in 1923. He recalls his father was principal and taught in an orthodox school; increasingly severe restrictions on Jews under the Hlinka guard; his sister's deportation; his father's influence obtaining his (Viliam's) position sorting the confiscated property of deported Jews, thus exempting him from deportation until 1944; a non-Jewish woman hiding him after the arrival of German troops; arrest; interrogation by the Gestapo in Trenčin, then incarceration in Sered; deportation to Auschwitz/Birke...

  12. Walter S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Walter S., who was born in Steinbach, Germany in 1924. He recalls living in Mannheim from 1931 on; his strong sense of German identity; expulsion from school; attending Jewish school; Kristallnacht; learning his father was in Dachau; moving to a kibbutz near Berlin hoping to emigrate to Palestine; and Gestapo takeover of the kibbutz. Mr. S. describes extreme hunger while harvesting crops for the Germans; transfer to several camps; observing the bombing of Berlin; transport to Auschwitz; selection for work in Buna; being shaved and tattooed (#117,022); illness; transfe...

  13. Walter S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Walter S., who was born in Steinbach, Germany in 1924. This testimony includes all of the information in an earlier interview (HVT-146). Additional topics discussed include his father's release from Dachau; his sister's emigration to the United States under Quaker auspices in 1941; his parents' deportation to France; being beaten by the Gestapo (he could not speak of this for years); and being forced to submit to homosexual advances by veteran prisoners in a concentration camp. He recounts returning to Steinbach after liberation; meeting his wife in a displaced person...

  14. Werner R. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Werner R. who was born in Berlin, Germany in 1927. He recalls his father losing his job in 1933; moving to Zagreb; attending public school; their Zionist, rather than Jewish, identity; his father's death in 1940; German invasion in 1941; being baptized with his sister; living separately from his mother and sister because it seemed safer; his sister's escape to Italy; working with the partisans; and arrest by the Gestapo in 1943. Mr. R. tells of jails in Graz and Vienna; transport to Terezi?n; cabarets and opera; German efforts to preserve Jewish books; and transport t...

  15. Wili G. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Wili G., who was born in Olomuoc, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (presently Czech Republic) in 1914, the oldest of three brothers. He recounts his family's affluence; attending the local German gymnasium; completing engineering studies in Belgium; draft into the Czech military; German occupation; military discharge at the end of 1938; one brother's emigration to Palestine; moving to Prague with his grandmother; participating in Maccabi; teaching at a Zionist school; joining a hachsharah; marriage to a woman he met there in October 1941; joining his parents in Olomouc; a no...

  16. Zofia D. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Zofia D., who was born in Brzeziny, Poland, in 1923. Mrs. D. recalls her extended family; living with her aunt and uncle when her family moved to Tomaszo?w Mazowiecki; receiving anti-Semitic threats as the only Jew in school in Koluszki; a volksdeutsche girlfriend who later joined the Gestapo; German occupation; angering police by trying to conceal her yellow star; buying her uncle out of a Gestapo jail; and joining her parents in Tomaszo?w. She relates ghetto conditions; execution of the Judenrat head and his sons (one of whom was her boyfriend); escape with her aunt...