Rosalyn O. Holocaust testimony (HVT-945) [videorecording] / interviewed by Susan Millen and Dana L. Kline, December 2, 1987.

New Haven, Conn. : Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, 1987.

1 videorecording (1 hr., 2 min.) : col.

English

Associated material: Orenstein, Rosalyn. Interview 11738. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation. Access at https://vha.usc.edu.

Videotape testimony of Rosalyn O., who was born in Kraków, Poland, in 1925. She recalls her comfortable childhood; being taunted by non-Jewish students; her father reporting for army duty after the outbreak of war; his capture and imprisonment in a camp near Ostende, Belgium; and her mother's belief that as a POW's wife she was protected by the Geneva Convention. She describes the requisitioning of part of their apartment for a "decent" German couple; moving to the Kraków ghetto; her mother's and two aunts' deportation in 1942; her transport to Płaszów in January 1943; witnessing executions and beatings; suffering from typhus and scarlet fever; and forced labor repairing the uniforms of dead German soldiers. Mrs. O. recounts deportation to Auschwitz in October 1944; a German soldier who gave bread to inmates; evacuation to Bergen-Belsen in January 1945; marching through the town center; then transport to Gelenau, a sub-camp of Flossenbürg, where she worked in the kitchen. She details transport to Mauthausen; being given food enroute by sympathetic Czech bystanders; liberation by American forces; reunion with her father in Poland; postwar Polish antisemitism; departure with her father for western Germany; and arrival in the United States in 1949.

June 01, 2002

Rosalyn O. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-945). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Rosalyn O. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-945). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)