Esther K. Holocaust testimony (HVT-73) [videorecording] / interviewed by Laurel Vlock, July 23, 1980.

Boston, Mass. : Holocaust Survivors Film Project, 1980.

1 videorecording (1 hr.) : col.

English

Associated material: Kerner, Esther. Interview 32345. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation. Access at https://vha.usc.edu.

Videotape testimony of Esther K., who was born in Galicia, Poland in 1910. She speaks of her medical education in Czechoslovakia; her return to Poland in 1939 after the outbreak of the war; and her work in a Russian hospital during the Russian occupation of her town (1939-1941). She describes the ghettoization of her home town; life in the ghetto, where she lived with her family and worked as a physician; the liquidation of the ghetto hospital and her transfer to another town where she served as physician and dentist for the gentile population for nine months, until it became unsafe for her to remain. She recounts her precarious and uncomfortable existence hiding in a barn for fourteen months, helped by a Polish farmer, one of several gentiles who assisted her and her family during the war. She tells of her journey to Czernowitz, accompanying the Czech army as an assistant to the surgeon, and to Prague, where she was liberated. Other topics discussed include her postwar life in Prague, where she remained with her husband until the Communist takeover in 1948; their emigration to the United States; the lasting psychological effects of her wartime experiences; and her present cynicism.

June 01, 2002

Esther K. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-73). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Esther K. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-73). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)

Physicians.