- Summary
- Videotape testimony of Rachel G., who was born in Vilna, Poland (presently Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1924, one of four children. She recounts attending Montessori, then a Tarbut school; her older brother's death; anti-Jewish harassment; participating in a Zionist youth group; assisting Jews expelled from Germany in Zbąszyń in 1938; Soviet occupation in 1939; German invasion in 1941; ghettoization; slave labor in a forest; transfer back to the ghetto; producing homemade bombs for the underground; her father volunteering for transfer to a labor camp (they never saw him again); an unsuccessful escape attempt; the partisans refusing her membership because she would not take an oath to abandon her family; deportation with her mother, sister, and aunt to Kaiserwald; slave labor in an AEG factory; helping a fellow prisoner escape; sabotaging production; transfer by ship to Stutthof, then Toruń one month later; a woman from Vilnius giving her extra food in Stutthof; a death march; liberation by Soviet troops; traveling with her mother to Warsaw; encountering antisemitism among Poles; traveling to Łódź, then Lublin; obtaining false papers as Greeks in order to leave Poland; and briefly staying in Cluj, then Aiud.
Ms. G. recalls working with Hashomer Hatzair organizing illegal emigration to Palestine; her mother's and sister's legal emigration to Palestine; assignments in Milan, Paris, and Poland; brief arrest in Moravska Ostrava; traveling to Bratislava and Prague; participating in a group which sent her to Nuremberg to observe the results of their plan to poison German POWs; illegal emigration to Palestine via Milan and Tradate; incarceration in ʻAtlit; release; and her unsuccessful attempt to return to Europe to continue revenge operations. Ms. G. discusses shutting off her emotions in camps; not blaming kapos and others who were trying to save themselves; and contacts with Jewish partisan leaders and Zionists in postwar Europe, such as Abba Kovner. She shows photographs.
- Author/Creator
- G., Rachel, 1924-
- Published
- Tel Aviv, Israel : Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 1994
- Interview Date
- March 28, 1994, April 22, 1994, May 6, 1994, and June 2, 1994.
- Locale
- Lithuania
Vilnius
Poland
Vilnius (Lithuania)
Zbąszyń (Poland)
Warsaw (Poland)
Łódź (Poland)
Lublin (Poland)
Cluj-Napoca (Romania)
Aiud (Romania)
Bucharest (Romania)
Budapest (Hungary)
Prague (Czech Republic)
Paris (France)
Ostrava (Czech Republic)
Nuremberg (Germany)
Bratislava (Slovakia)
Milan (Italy)
Tradate (Italy)
ʻAtlit (Israel)
Palestine
- Cite As
- Rachel G. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3641). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
- Notes
-
This testimony is in Hebrew.
