E. F. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3925) [videorecording] / interviewed by Peter Salner and Monika Vrzgulova, March 24, 1996.

Bratislava, Slovakia : Milan Šimečka Foundation, 1996.

1 videorecording (1 hr., 20 min.) : col.

Slovak

This testimony is in Slovak.

This testimony or excerpts from it cannot be used with the testimony donor's name. She can only be identified by her initials.

Videotape testimony of E. F., who was born in Trenčín, Czechoslovakia (presently Slovakia) in 1927, the younger of two children. She recalls her family observing Jewish holidays; frequent family outings; schoolmates who joined the Hlinka guard shunning her and other Jews beginning in 1938; empathy from teachers and evangelical students; expulsion from school in 1940; participating in Hashomer Hatzair; exclusion from deportation in 1942 due to her broken arm (most of her friends were deported); hiding in a friend's attic during subsequent deportations; evangelical youth movements providing government documents which she brought to Jews in slave labor battalions to enable their escapes; arrest of her father, grandfather, and others in 1944; her mother hiding; her brother joining the partisans; her arrest when using false papers; transfer to Sered after several days; a guard giving them escape tools and money as they boarded a deportation train to Ravensbrück; not escaping because others threatened to expose them; total dehumanization upon arrival when they transitioned from a human with a name to a number; slave labor digging potatoes in January; learning her mother was there; arranging to move her mother to her block; her mother's deportation to Bergen-Belsen while E. F. was working (E. F. feels continuing guilt that she did not survive); orthodox women who refused to eat non-kosher food dying within ten days; losing her belief in God as a result; losing her finger nails from working with chemicals; fainting when starting on a death march; her friends reviving and helping her; escaping, with five others, knowing they could not survive the march; hiding in a forest; learning the war was over; traveling to Prague; assistance from the Red Cross; learning her brother had survived; their reunion in Bratislava; hospitalization; and obtaining their parents' house, although it was empty. E. F. discusses fantasizing about food with other women in Ravensbrück and she and her brother being the sole survivors of a large, extended family.

June 01, 2002

E. F. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3925). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

E. F. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3925). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)