Ola S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-2035) [videorecording] / interviewed by Frances Proctor Cohen and Lucille B. Ritvo, July 15, 1993.

New Haven, Conn. : Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 1993.

1 videorecording (2 hr., 37 min.) : col.

English

Additional written material is available in the repository.

Videotape testimony of Ola S., who was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1914. She recalls her assimilated family; economic difficulties as antisemitism increased; German invasion; her brother's escape to Soviet territory and her sister's to Vilna, Japan, then Canada; marriage; ghettoization and subsequent poverty, starvation, deportations (including her parents), relocations, forced labor, and smuggling; and her husband's job as a policeman which enabled her to be smuggled as a boy into a forced labor camp in March 1943. She describes a former maid's efforts to hide her; obtaining false papers; working as a housekeeper; hearing Poles express joy at the ghetto's destruction; losing contact with her husband (she never saw him again); relocation to Pruszków following the Warsaw uprising; and liberation. Mrs. S. tells of returning to Warsaw; traveling to Lublin; reunion with her brother in Austria; residing in Germany; joining her sister in Canada; marriage; and emigration to the United States. She discusses the importance of her hope of joining her sister in Canada to her survival and the many Poles who could have betrayed her and did not.

June 01, 2002

Ola S. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-2035). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Ola S. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-2035). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)