Helen B. Holocaust testimony (HVT-734) [videorecording] / interviewed by James W. Pennebaker and Alan Griffin, November 10, 1985.

Dallas, Tex. : Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies, 1985.

1 videorecording (1 hr., 26 min.) : col.

English

This testimony cannot be used for commercial advertising.

Videotape testimony of Helen B., who was born in Łuków, Poland in 1928, one of five children. She recounts her family's affluence; attending public school; summering in the country in 1939; German invasion; fleeing to Wólka Domaszewska; returning home; brief Soviet occupation; Germans returning and plundering their store; her father's arrest and release; housing refugees in their home; anti-Jewish restrictions, including wearing the star; Germans searching for her father and beating her mother in 1942; round-ups and random killings; ghettoization; hiding with a Pole, who turned them over to the Germans; a German wounding her brother when he tried to escape; hiding in a bunker; her grandfather's and uncle's arrest and murder; hiding in many places with assistance from non-Jews; liberation by Soviet troops in July 1944; returning to Łuków; threats of violence by Poles; moving to Katowice in April 1945; joining her paternal grandmother in Munich; marriage to a friend from Łuków; and emigration to the United States in September 1949. Ms. B. discusses her children's "bitterness" toward Germans; accompanying her husband to testify in Germany; and attributing her survival to luck, her father, and help from non-Jews.

June 01, 2002

Helen B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-734). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Helen B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-734). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)