Piera B. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3824) [videorecording], February 1 and February 8, 1996.

Tel Aviv, Israel : Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 1996.

2 videorecordings (6 hr.) : col.

Hebrew

This testimony is in Hebrew.

Videotape testimony of Piera B., who was born in Ferrara, Italy in 1923, the youngest of three sisters. She recounts attending a Jewish school, then secular high school; her father, a veteran of the First World War, ardently supporting Mussolini; participating in the fascist youth movement; anti-Jewish restrictions beginning in 1938; expulsion from high school; working for her father; visiting friends in Padua and Venice; studying to be a teacher on her own; passing the certification exam in Rome; visiting a refugee orphanage in Nonantola; German invasion; her family entrusting their belongings to their non-Jewish maid before they escaped to Rome (she returned them after the war); living with an uncle; round-up with her mother and aunt; their release as half-Jews; finding her father and sister at the house of a non-Jewish friend; obtaining papers as non-Jews with assistance from non-Jewish friends; her mother's death from cancer in 1944; attending church; liberation by United States troops; contact with the Jewish brigade; preparing for illegal emigration to Palestine in Cinecittà; emigration by ship via Taranto; interdiction by the British; brief incarceration; marriage in 1945; and visiting her family in Naples, Venice, and Ferrara in 1946. Ms. B. discusses the trauma of losing her strong sense of Italian identity.

June 01, 2002

Piera B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3824). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Piera B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3824). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)