Adele R. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4032) [videorecording] / interviewed by Yannis Thanassekos and Michel Rosenfeldt, September 11, 1995.

Brussels, Belgium : Fondation Auschwitz, 1995.

1 videorecording (5 hr., 7 min.) : col.

French

This testimony is in French.

Videotape testimony of Adele R., who was born in Mezőkovácsháza, Hungary in 1922, the sixth of sixteen children from her father's third marriage and her mother's first. She recalls their relative affluence; believing she was protected by God from age eight; attending public school; being tutored in Hebrew; living with an uncle in the next village when she was sixteen; her brothers' drafts into Hungarian slave labor battalions; deportation with her parents and some siblings to Auschwitz in August 1945; separation from her parents, brother, sister and her children; encountering another sister two weeks later; two women providing her with extra water; her sister and friends saving food to make a “birthday cake” when she turned twenty-two; slave labor in the latrines, then as a nurse; observing Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur with others; train transfer in November; digging anti-tank ditches; her sister sharing extra potatoes with her and others; a German guard providing extra food and advising them to escape; a death march in January; a severe beating; escaping with her sister; joining a group of Hungarian refugees; being sent to work on a farm in Schlieben; liberation by Soviet troops; escaping a rape attempt by a Soviet officer; traveling to Leipzig; a Belgian soldier proposing marriage to her sister; traveling to Arlon, then Namur; many hospitalizations during the next three years; marriage in 1948; visiting her brothers in Israel in 1954; and eventually settling there. Ms. R. discusses she and her siblings not sharing their experiences; learning only after his death that her younger brother had been in a concentration camp; and nightmares, pervasive painful memories, and continuing health problems resulting from her experiences.

June 01, 2002

Adele R. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-4032). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Adele R. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-4032). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)