Rita W. Holocaust testimony (HVT-1110) [videorecording] / interviewed by Howard Berger and Rochelle Karp, June 3, 1988.

Ventnor, N.J. : Federation of Jewish Agencies of Atlantic County/Stockton State College, Holocaust Oral History Project, 1988.

1 videorecording (1 hr., 57 min.) : col.

English

Associated material: Weiss, Rita. Interview 39508. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation. Access at https://vha.usc.edu.

Videotape testimony of Rita W., who was born in Mukachevo, Czechoslovakia in 1924. Mrs. W. recalls living in a Czech colony in the Carpathian mountains with very few Jews; high school membership in a Zionist organization; Hungarian occupation; anti-Jewish measures; her father assisting Polish refugees; his arrest and return six months later; his stories of Hungarian brutality; ghettoization in April 1944 for four weeks; and deportation to Auschwitz. She recounts her arrival to an unknown place, but sensing danger; one sister giving her baby to their mother (that sister survived); another sister choosing to go with her three year old son; staying with four sisters; learning about the chimneys, where their mother had gone, and refusal to believe this; selection for transport in September 1944 (a sister perished then); forced labor digging ditches until December 1944 (she was still with three sisters); a death march; and their escape. She describes posing as eastern workers; she and her sisters working in area farms; becoming ill with typhus; hospitalization; never admitting she was Jewish; liberation on May 1, 1945; learning her sisters had left for Czechoslovakia two weeks before; reunion in Prague with her sisters and her youngest brother; and emigration to the United States in 1947.

June 01, 2002

Rita W. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1110). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Rita W. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1110). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)