Judith S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-626) interviewed by Edith Bayme and Sasha Milgram

Videotape testimony of Judith S., who was born in Berehovo, Czechoslovakia (today Beregovo, Ukraine), in 1928. Mrs. S. describes her extended family's ancestral home, where she anticipated spending her life; pleasant visits with relatives; Hungarian occupation in 1938; expulsion of undocumented aliens; deportations to Jewish labor battalions; the family not believing rumors of Jews being killed in Poland; and retreating German troops who billeted at her home in early 1944. She details sudden deportation to the Berehovo ghetto; transport to Auschwitz; separation from her father, mother, and brother during selection (she never saw them again); acquaintances who helped her and her sister; transport in June 1944 to Aachen to clear rubble; an Allied air raid which killed 300 of her group; transfer to a Krupp factory in Sömmerda, where her sister died; and liberation during a forced march near Erfurt. She tells of returning home by train with surviving family friends; finding a cousin in Bratislava; retrieving family valuables; hastily departing with other surviving relatives for Budapest and then Prague after her town's incorporation into the Soviet Union; and emigration to England in 1946 and Canada in 1948. She frequently reflects on how the Holocaust changed her life.