Bella L. Holocaust testimony (HVT-378) [videorecording] / interviewed by Sylvia Abrams, November 12, 1984.

Cleveland, Ohio : National Council of Jewish Women, Holocaust Archive Project, 1984.

1 videorecording (1 hr., 48 min.) : col.

English

Videotape testimony of Bella L., who was born in Shyrokyy Luh, Czechoslovakia (presently Ukraine) in 1922, one of twelve children. She recounts her family's orthodoxy; older siblings' marriages; attending public school; visiting a sister in Nové Zámky; Hungarian occupation; forced relocation to Budapest because she was not a resident; not being able to return home for nine months; attempts in Budapest to obtain Hungarian papers for her father to prevent his deportation; arrest and incarceration in a Budapest prison in 1943; transfer to a labor camp; working in a knitting factory; assistance from non-Jewish prisoners; transfer to Auschwitz eight months later, then to Gleiwitz after a week; slave labor in a factory from May 1944 to January 1945; a death march, then train transport; escaping; arrest; transfer to prisons in Brno, Prague, and Theresienstadt; someone throwing bread into her cell; liberation by Soviet troops in May; a non-Jewish women identifying herself as the person who had thrown her bread; assistance from the Red Cross and UNRRA; traveling to Prague, Bratislava, and Budapest searching for relatives; living in Prague with her brother-in-law; reunion with three sisters; marriage to a survivor in March 1946; traveling to Germany; emigration to Israel in August 1948; and joining her sisters in the United States in 1957. Ms. L. notes her parents and others siblings were deported to Auschwitz and did not survive; starvation, dehumanization, and humiliation in the camps; and fasting on Yom Kippur in Gleiwitz. She shows a photograph.

June 01, 2002

Bella L. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-378). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Bella L. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-378). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)