Selma S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3667) [videorecording] / interviewed by Peter Salner and Martin Bútora, March 19, 1995.

Bratislava, Slovakia : Milan Šimečka Foundation, 1995.

1 videorecording (1 hr., 45 min.) : col.

Slovak

This testimony is in Slovak.

Videotape testimony of Selma S., who was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in 1925, one of four children. She recalls her family's focus on Zionism and culture; their orthodoxy; spending time with her large extended family; her paternal family's bookstore, a cultural center; attending German and Jewish schools; her father having to transfer his bookstore to a non-Jew; arrest and deportation of her parents and brother by Hlinka guards (she never saw them again); incarceration with her younger brother in Žilina; their release through her uncle's intervention; staying with an aunt in Nové Mesto nad Váhom; arranging with a Zionist organization to illegally emigrate to Palestine; arrest en route; incarceration in Bratislava; release; living in Bratislava; forming a group with young men from the Sixth Battalion; she and her aunt being arrested by the Germans; transfer to Sered; an appendectomy; transfer to Theresienstadt in 1944; working in the hospital; living in Prague after liberation; arrest in 1948 for attempting to go to London to join her fiancé; release six months later; and returning to Bratislava. Ms. S. discusses pervasive painful memories of the loss of ninety-one relatives, especially her parents and brothers; postwar hardships and antisemitism; satisfaction from recently re-opening the family bookstore; and visiting relatives in Israel.

June 01, 2002

Selma S. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3667). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Selma S. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3667). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)