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Displaying items 181 to 200 of 4,487
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Holding Institution: Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies

  1. Vladka M. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Vladka M., who was born in Warsaw, Poland. She speaks of her prewar family life; the beatings of her father and brother by the German police; and the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940. She recalls her involvement in a socialist youth organization which was forming illegal groups; her job as an underground courier between Warsaw and Tomaszo?w Mazowiecki, a nearby ghetto; the establishment of an illegal Jewish cultural group in the Warsaw ghetto; and the maintenance of illegal schools and public kitchens there. She discusses the Judenrat; the Jewish po...

  2. Hilde C. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Hilde C., who was born in the village of Nieder Ohmen, Germany, in 1924. She discusses her family life and memories of prewar Germany and the rise of Nazism; her transfer in 1935 to a Jewish Orthodox school in nearby Frankfurt; studying in Wu?rzburg; and her flight after Kristallnacht to join her family in Frankfurt. She tells of her deportation to ?o?dz? in 1940; the year she spent in the ghetto, where her parents, grandparents, and fiance perished; and the differing reactions of men and women to the conditions there. She recounts her transport to Auschwitz in 1944 a...

  3. Laszlo T. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Laszlo T., who was born in Budapest in 1915. He describes his early childhood in the Jewish section of Budapest; post World War I antisemitism in Hungary; his interest in Zionism; his entry into medical school in June 1932; and prejudice in medical school. He recounts working as a physician in a Jewish hospital in 1938-1939; working in the central hospital of Budapest until April 1942; and the deportation and death of his brother. He recalls his work as a conscript in a hospital in Sopron (O?denburg) from April 1942 until June 1944; and the fate of Sopron's Jewish com...

  4. Philip B. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Philip B., who was born in Izbica, near Lublin, Poland, in 1925. He describes his prewar family life; the wartime transfer of German and Czech Jews to Izbica, a railroad center; and a typhus epidemic there. He recounts the beginning of deportations to Be?z?ec, a nearby extermination camp, in 1941; his family's life in hiding; and the deportations of his father and other family members. Mr. B. relates his own capture by Polish police and his transfer to Gestapo headquarters; his feigned death in front of a firing squad; hiding with siblings and his mother; and his moth...

  5. Adrienne K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Adrienne K., who was born in Cluj, Romania in 1923. She recounts her childhood; anti-Semitic discrimination following the Hungarian occupation in 1940; and her attendance at medical school in Budapest from September 1943 until the German occupation in March 1944. She describes the jailing of the men of the family and the transport of the family to Auschwitz in July 1944. She relates her separation from her parents and sister, who did not survive; camp conditions; her job in the "Scheisskommando," carting away excrement; and the burning of the Zigeunerlager (Gypsy Lage...

  6. Victor E. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Victor E. who was born in Petrograd in 1914. His parents were Sophia Dubnow Erlich, Russian poet and daughter of Simon Dubnow, and Henryk Ehrlich, Menshevik leader. He recounts his father's protest against the Bolsheviks; his family's emigration to Poland in 1917; staying in Lublin with his paternal grandparents; moving to Warsaw; and his father becoming a leader in the Polish Bund. He recalls visiting Simon Dubnow in Berlin in 1921 and discusses the political situation, and Dubnow's emigration from Berlin to Ri?ga due to the Nazis. He relates the family leaving Warsa...

  7. Klara A. and Donald W. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Klara A., who was born in Amsterdam in 1915, and her son Donald W., who was born circa 1939. Mrs. A. describes her family and community life before the war; anti-Jewish legislation; the deportation of her husband to Westerbork in 1942; her decision to entrust Donald, then three years old, and her eight-week-old younger son to the underground for hiding; her work for the Jewish organization in Amsterdam; and her deportation to Westerbork in 1943, where she was reunited with her husband and where both remained for one year. She discusses conditions in Westerbork; its li...

  8. Terrence D. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Terrence D., a professor at Colgate University who was born in Effingham, Illinois in 1939. He describes his first awareness of the Holocaust as a child; his own childhood experience of loss and displacement; his undergraduate and graduate concern with martyred heroes in literature; his interest in factual accounts of personal experience in extreme situations; and his authorship of The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. He discusses the post-Holocaust need for new definitions of conventional terms such as conscience, dignity, and witness and details the ...

  9. Ellen S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Ellen S., a non-Jew who was born in Bohemia. Mrs. S. describes her life in Plzen?; her limited yet positive contact with Jews; the German occupation and increasing restrictions on her freedom; her apprenticeship to a dressmaker; and her peripheral knowledge of the Jewish situation. She relates the shock of seeing a deportation train full of abused prisoners, and her thwarted attempts to feed them; her subsequent attempts to aid people when possible; and the inability of the church to address the immediate situation. She also speaks of meeting the American G.I. who was...

  10. Hans L. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Hans L., who was born in Colmar, Alsace (then Germany, now France) in 1906. He discusses the death of his father shortly after his birth; his childhood in Kassel, Germany and then, from the age of five, in Berlin; and his feelings of Jewish identity within an assimilated family. He recalls the atmosphere in Berlin during World War I; the post-war political instability; and the Nazi rise to power. He speaks of his education as a philosophy student under Martin Heidegger; his pursuit of a medical degree; the anti-Jewish order resulting in his dismissal from his internsh...

  11. Bessie and Jacob K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Bessie K. and Jacob K. Mr. K. was born in Zwolen?, Poland in 1923. Mr. K. describes his childhood in a close-knit, observant family; celebration of Jewish holidays; social closeness of the community; attending a Polish school; anti-Semitic incidents; the beginning of the war; and the destruction caused by bombing, including his home. He recounts increasing tension; anti-Jewish legislation; forced labor; extreme hunger and hardship; atrocities committed against the Jews; the final deportation from Zwolen? (which he and his brothers avoided); their work in Zwolen? clean...

  12. Leon Z. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Leon Z., who was born in Poland. He speaks of the German takeover in 1941; daily incidents in the ghetto such as a massacre of fifty people in the town center while an orchestra was playing; and his escape from the ghetto and hiding in the woods with his brother to avoid a round-up for deportation. He relates his later transfer to a labor camp, where he was reunited with his brother; avoiding a selection in the camp by hiding in a barrel and being spared by the Nazi who found him there; his escape from the camp back to the ghetto; and his escape from the ghetto to joi...

  13. Jerrit A. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Jerrit A., who was born in Amsterdam in 1909. He describes aspects of prewar life in the Jewish section of Amsterdam; the beginnings of anti-Jewish legislation and forced labor; being rounded up, with his wife and three children, by the SA and taken to Westerbork; his separation from his wife and children, when he was forcibly removed from the deportation train (which continued to Auschwitz, where his family was killed); and being taken as a slave laborer to Cosel, in Silesia. He speaks of his transfer to Niederkirch, where most of the prisoners were also Dutch; to Se...

  14. Szaja L. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Szaja L., who was born in Skalbmierz, Poland, a small town near Krako?w, in 1915. He discusses his prewar childhood and work experiences after the family's move to Krako?w in 1926; the wartime German raid and the round-up for forced labor in his neighborhood; the ghettoization of Krako?w; and his move back to Skalbmierz with his family. He describes the roundup of the Jews of Skalbmierz and the killing of the town's elderly; the experiences of his family in hiding; the entrance of his mother and sister into the Krako?w ghetto; and his own experiences in a nearby labor...

  15. Alex H. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Alex H., who was born in Strzemieszyce, near Be?dzin, Poland, in 1923. He describes the antisemitism he experienced as a schoolboy; the German occupation of his town and the formation of a ghetto there; and his work as a forced laborer while he lived in the ghetto. He speaks of his deportation in 1943 to the slave labor camp of Blechhammer, where he worked in an I.G. Farben factory, and recounts in detail how he "organized" to get a little extra bread for his brother and himself. He tells of the death march from Blechhammer in December, 1944, during which his brother ...

  16. Judy F. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Judy F., who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929. She describes her childhood in a small, Hungarian-speaking town; the gathering of the town's Jews in a synagogue in April 1944; and her transport, with family members, to Auschwitz in a cattle car. She recalls conditions at Auschwitz; being taken to Birkenau, where she worked in the Canada kommando, sorting belongings; the camp's evacuation and liberation by Russians; and her emaciated condition upon liberation. She remembers returning to Budapest to search for her father; meeting her present husband and his sister; her...

  17. Sesha S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Sesha S., who was born in Łódź, Poland in 1922. She recalls her prewar family life; antisemitism in Poland; and the forced repatriation of a German relative to Łódź. She describes the family's move to the Łódź ghetto in 1939; ghetto conditions; the deaths of her parents; and her transport in 1944 to Auschwitz with her younger sister, with whom she survived the war. She tells of the camp's conditions; the prisoners' obsession with food; and prisoner dehumanization. Mrs. S. relates her and her sister's transport in a cattle car to the labor camp of Christianstadt;...

  18. Adele W. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Adele W., who was born in Secovce, Czechoslovakia, in 1930, the youngest of thirteen children. She discusses prewar family and religious life in Satu Mare, Romania; ghettoization during German occupation; and her deportation to Auschwitz, where she was separated from her father upon arrival and remained with her sister from May until October, 1943. She recalls the selection during which she was separated from her sister, who was chosen for death, while she was sent with a forced labor transport to Horneburg, where she worked in a factory until her liberation by the Ru...

  19. Rejsi K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Rejsi K., who was born in Botraj, in the Carpathian region of what was then Hungary, in 1914. She discusses her mother's death in 1935; her father's debilitation from a stroke in 1939 and his death in 1944; and, a few weeks later, the removal of the town's Jews to the town hall and their subsequent transfer to the Munk?acs ghetto. She describes her four week stay there with her sisters and other relatives; her transport to Auschwitz in May 1944; and the selections there, after which all of her relatives present were killed. She recounts her experiences in the camp, wh...

  20. Julius S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape of Julius S., who was born in Tluste (presently Tovste), a small town in Eastern Galicia, in 1918. He relates his childhood memories of Tluste; the Russian occupation in 1939; and the German occupation of Tluste in 1941, while he was in nearby L?vov. He recalls the murder of Jews in the villages surrounding Tluste by peasants; the initial protection of Tluste's Jews by priests; and the 1941 massacre of the Jews of Zaleszczyki. He recounts the beginning of transports from his area in summer 1942; his work in a labor camp in Lisowce; and the capture and murder of Tluste's Jews, incl...