Chana S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-1416) interviewed by Edmond A. Kulp and Marsha Grossman

Videotape testimony of Chana S., who was born in Kraków, Poland in 1923. She describes having to leave school when war broke out; her family losing their prosperous business; ghettoization in 1941; deportation with her family to Płaszów; slave labor in salt mines; the deportation of her father to Mauthausen, her mother to another camp, and she and her sister to Auschwitz in 1943; and their agreement to meet in Kraków after the war. Mrs. S. recalls three months in Birkenau; conditions of hunger, deprivation and illness; transfer to a camp in Czechoslovakia with her sister; liberation by Soviet troops; return to Kraków in 1945; finding their home had been confiscated by Poles; reunion with her mother and sister; meeting her future husband, who had been in the Soviet Union during the war; leaving Poland in 1946; a year in a displaced persons camp in Germany; emigration to Israel; and her children's births in 1949 and 1953. She discusses details of prewar life in Kraków; her reluctance to recount her experiences to her children and her sense that that was a mistake; the impact of the Eichmann and Demjanjuk trials in Israel; and the importance of Holocaust remembrance and education.