Ruth F. Holocaust testimony (HVT-1448) [videorecording] / interviewed by Jodie Frank and Bernard Weinstein, June 28, 1988.

Union, N.J. : Kean College Oral Testimonies Project, 1988.

1 videorecording (1 hr., 38 min.) : col.

English

Associated material: Friedman, Ruth. Interview 2166. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation. Access at https://vha.usc.edu.

Videotape testimony of Ruth F., who was born in Altona (Hamburg), Germany in 1926, the youngest of three children. She recounts attending a Jewish school; antisemitic harassment; her sisters' emigration to Palestine; the milkman warning them of a round-up of Polish Jews (her mother was from Galicia); Kristallnacht; being shunned by former non-Jewish friends; her father leaving for Budapest in June 1939 (he was a Hungarian citizen); joining him in Budapest via Vienna; assistance from the Jewish community which supplied her with tutors; working in a factory; German invasion in March 1944; ghettoization; escaping from a round-up; hiding with a friend, then in a vacant apartment; paying a non-Jewish policeman to smuggle her back to the ghetto; severe hunger; obtaining soup from the Red Cross; her father's death in a Soviet bombardment; liberation by Soviet troops in January 1945; moving to Enns, then Salzberg; working at displaced persons camps; moving to Antwerp; illegal emigration to Palestine from France in April 1947; interception by the British; incarceration on Cyprus; marriage; her daughter's birth; arriving in Israel in January 1949; she and her mother visiting relatives in Frankfurt in 1958; encountering former neighbors in Hamburg; assisting her mother obtain restitution; her death in 1959; divorce and remarriage; emigration to the United States; and hatred of Germans resulting from her losses and experiences. She shows photographs and a dreidel her father carved.

June 01, 2002

Ruth F. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1448). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Ruth F. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1448). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)