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 2,821 to 2,840 of 55,771
Search result ordering

  1. Liane R. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Liane R., who was born in Vienna, Austria in 1934. She recalls the Anschluss; her father's apparent suicide in September 1938 after he was forced to close his dental practice; Kristallnacht; embarking on the St. Louis with her mother and brother in 1939; being denied entry to Cuba; sailing between Cuba and Florida while efforts were made to find refuge; and having to return to Europe. Mrs. R. recounts living in Loudun, France for over two years; German invasion; fleeing to Limoges; Jewish organizations which arranged their schooling and her brother's violin lessons an...

  2. Irving B. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Irving B., who was born in Khust, Czechoslovakia in 1924. He recalls his large, orthodox family; attending public school; Hungarian occupation in 1938; his father's death; anti-Jewish laws; fleeing to Budapest in 1943; brief arrest; fleeing to Nyi?regyha?za, then Szeged, in 1944; ghettoization in March; deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau, Mauthausen, then Melk; slave labor digging trenches; assisting a rabbi from his hometown; defusing undetonated bombs; transfer to Ebensee; fellow prisoners hiding him and sharing their food when he was too ill to work; cannibalism; an...

  3. David S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of David S., who was born in Zawiercie, Poland in 1914, the youngest of seven children. He recalls his family's affluence; draft into the Polish military; capture by Germans in Tarnowskie Go?ry; incarceration in Stalag VIII A Go?rlitz for six months; returning home; ghettoization; deportation with his family to Auschwitz/Birkenau with his family (he never saw any of them again); transfer to Lagisza; return to Auschwitz; hospitalization; working in the Union Kommando; the death march to Gross-Rosen; escaping from a train transport in Sudetenland; stealing civilian clothes...

  4. Sam F. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Sam F., who was born in Dokshit?s?y, Belarus. (then Poland) in 1913. He recalls his family; attending yeshiva; work in his uncle's bakery at age fourteen; his sister's emigration to Palestine; attempts to join her; membership in a Vilna zionist organization; conflicts between Lithuania and Poland in Vilna; a pogrom; his escape to Il?i?a?; service in the Polish army; and the German invasion. He recalls a mass killing in March 1942; hiding; ghettoization; another mass killing; escape to the woods; hiding with a farmer, then in the forests for six months; joining the par...

  5. Ben L. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Ben L., who was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1922. He recalls anti-Jewish violence; attending rabbinical school to please his mother; his father's death in 1938; German invasion; ghettoization in 1940; a work assignment outside the ghetto; trading valuables for food to Polish smugglers; his mother and younger brother being smuggled out (he never saw them again); not escaping in order to protect his sister; hiding in a bunker during the uprising; discovery; deportation to Treblinka; selection for transfer to Majdanek after a few days; transfer a few months later to Auschw...

  6. Arieh B. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Arieh B., who was born in Paris, France in 1935. He recalls his father's arrest and return a month later; hiding in a rural area with his parents and younger brother; their discovery in 1942 and return to Paris; his mother's attempt to strangle him in German headquarters, but being stopped by his father; being placed in an orphanage with his brother; constant hunger; running away to a convent with older children; placement in a foster home in Normandy; the trauma of separation from his brother who was in another foster home; his profound loneliness; liberation in July...

  7. Alexander L. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Alexander L., a non-Jew who was born in Kiev in 1936. He describes leaving Russia in 1941 at the onset of the German occupation of Kiev; the fear of being separated from his parents; and imprisonment in labor camps in Germany from 1942 until 1944/1945. He remembers on-going travel, and hearing shots fired but never seeing any bodies. He tells of going to Czechoslovakia after the war and expresses the hope that his children will never have similar experiences.

  8. Hedy B. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Hedy B., who was born in Miskolc, Hungary, in 1930. Mrs. B. recounts childhood in an assimilated family of a civil servant; increasing antisemitism after 1938; her family's unwillingness to separate when her father obtained two tickets to America; her father's conscription into a Hungarian labor battalion in 1942 (from which he never returned); eviction from her home and the ghettoization of Miskolc in 1944; clergymen who offered conversion to ghetto inhabitants; transfer to a nearby quarry which was bombed shortly before her deportation; and arrival at Auschwitz in M...

  9. Jenny R. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Jenny R., who was born in Berlin, Germany in 1919 to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. She recounts her mother's death in 1923; placement in a children's home where she was very unhappy; returning to her father; expulsion from school in 1933 due to anti-Jewish laws, although she did not consider herself Jewish; her father's arrest in summer 1933; visiting him in prison; his transfer to a concentration camp, then his release; difficulty obtaining and keeping jobs due to racial laws; having to prove that her mother was an "Aryan"; rumors of gas chambers and killi...

  10. Edith B. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Edith B., who was born in Kon?us?, Czechoslovakia in 1923. She remembers Hungarian occupation; deportation to Ungvar, then Auschwitz in May 1944; separation from her family (she later learned her brother and father were alive in the male barracks); transfer to Frankfurt; forced labor; taunting of the prisoners because of their Yom Kippur prayers; starvation; a beating for smuggling food; a German guard allowing her to rest during work until she recovered her strength; transfer to Ravensbru?ck in December 1944; working at a Siemens factory; being saved from death by no...

  11. Ruchama P. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Ruchama P., who was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1922, the youngest of three children. She recounts her mother's death when she was two; attending Jewish, then public school; her father's remarriage; a troubled relationship with her stepmother; participating in Hechalutz; attending a boarding school in 1937; visiting her family on holidays; living briefly with her paternal grandparents; German invasion; her brothers' participation in the underground; one wanting to put her in hiding, but refusing to leave her younger half-siblings; deportation to Westerbork; a cl...

  12. Sam G. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Sam G., who was born in Tarno?w, Poland in 1928. He recalls a secure childhood; attending a Jewish school; German occupation; anti-Jewish restrictions; his parents' conflict when his brother fled to L'viv; his bar mitzvah in the ghetto on June 21, 1941; hiding with his parents during a round-up; mass shooting of the Jewish council witnessed by their Christian maid; moving to a furriers' workshop; his parents' deportation to Be?z?ec (he never saw them again); surviving a selection by stealing a work permit; escaping from the ghetto with assistance from their maid (she ...

  13. John F. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of John F., who was born in Vienna, Austria in 1917. He recalls his mother's Sabbath observance; the death of one younger sister; outbreaks of antisemitism; studying medicine; membership in Zionist organizations; the Anschluss in 1938; confiscation of his father's business; illegally traveling to Venice in August; staying with an aunt in Trieste; returning to Venice; traveling to Zurich on a tourist visa; his father's arrest after Kristallnacht; attempting to obtain visas to China for his parents and siblings in Bern; resuming his studies; helping his professor smuggle h...

  14. Avivit K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Avivit K., who was born in Šiauliai, Lithuania in 1932, one of three children. She recounts her family's Zionism; speaking Hebrew at home; a trip to Palestine in 1935 with her mother and sister; her family delaying emigration to care for her developmentally disabled brother; Soviet occupation; her father's arrest and release; German invasion; her father's and uncle's arrest by Lithuanians (they were killed); ghettoization; forced labor with her sister; Lithuanians giving her food; a public hanging; her mother hiding her sister with non-Jews (she returned shortly ther...

  15. Ivan M. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Ivan M. who was born in 1912 in Bratislava, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (presently Slovakia). He recounts his family's assimilated lifestyle; his father's career as a physician; becoming a physician in 1936; working as a physician in Podbrezová, then in the health department in Trnava and Levoča; meeting his future wife, a non-Jew, in 1938; moving to Bratislava; conversion to Catholicism in 1942, hoping to avoid deportation; his wife hiding him, and later his parents; marriage in April 1944; his son's birth a week later; and rejoining the health department after the w...

  16. Joe G. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Joe G., who was born in approximately 1938, the youngest of nine children. He recalls their apartment in Budapest; anti-Jewish restrictions including curfews and wearing the star; a futile attempt to emigrate to Palestine; being sent with four siblings to a Red Cross children's home in Buda in summer 1944; Soviet forces fighting Hungarians and Nazis in front of their building; liberation by Soviets in January; observing Soviets execute captured Nazis; returning home after Pest's liberation; finding their parents; reunion with their other siblings (non-Jews hid them or...

  17. Children of the Holocaust

  18. Hana D. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Hana D., who was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia (presently Czech Republic) in 1931. She recounts living in Olbramovice on her paternal grandmother's farm, which her father managed; her parents' divorce; remaining with her father; not knowing she was Jewish; occasional visits with her mother; German invasion; confiscation of the farm; living with her father's sister in Prague, then with her mother; anti-Jewish laws, including expulsion from school; briefly hiding with her father's non-Jewish friends; secretly studying with other children under private teachers; her mot...

  19. Inge A. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Inge A., who was born in Kippenheim, Germany in 1934. She recalls life in the village; Crystal Night; her father's deportation to Dachau; moving to her grandparents' village; the excitement generated by the Nazis and participating in marching songs with local children; her father's return; his stories about Dachau; attending a Jewish school in Stuttgart; deportations of the local Jews, including her grandparents; and her father's success in their being exempted because he was a disabled World War I veteran. Ms. A. describes her family's eventual deportation to Theresi...

  20. Helga B. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Helga B., who was born in Berlin, Germany in approximately 1928. She recalls her chronic childhood illness; her family's strong German Jewish identity; the impact of the Nuremberg laws on her life, including having to attend a Jewish school; the glass-littered Kurfu?rstendamm following Kristallnacht; her father fleeing to Holland (she never saw him again); and being smuggled into Belgium with her mother in the summer of 1939. Mrs. B. recounts living in Brussels; attending a Catholic school; German occupation; deteriorating conditions; receiving assistance from the Joi...