Advanced Search

Learn About The Holocaust

Special Collections

My Saved Research

Login

Register

Help

Skip to main content

Reva S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-1375) interviewed by Laure Gutman and Amy Tanich Shulkin,

Oral History | Fortunoff Collection ID: HVT-1375

Videotape testimony of Reva S., who was born in Šiauliai, Lithuania in 1927. She recalls ghettoization in 1941; mining peat and digging ditches as a forced laborer; extreme hunger; moving to the Trakai ghetto; deportation of her grandparents and youngest sister; her father's escape from the ghetto (she never saw him again); and deportation to Stutthof with her mother and sister. Mrs. S. describes futile efforts to help her sister avoid selection; transfer with her mother to Elbing, then five months later to Neumarkt; assistance from Italian prisoners of war; transfer to jail; a death march in January 1945; mass shootings of the prisoners and being left for dead; receiving help from Soviet troops; and reunion with her mother. She recounts their attempted return home; learning that her father and sister had been killed but her brother had survived; remaining in Kraków; traveling to Feldafing to join her brother in November 1945; marriage in 1946; and emigration to the United States in 1949. She shows a comb her father had made for her in the ghetto.

Author/Creator
S., Reva, 1927-
Published
Baltimore, Md. : Baltimore Jewish Council, 1990
Interview Date
January 21, 1990.
Locale
Lithuania
Trakai
Šiauliai
Kraków (Poland)
Šiauliai (Lithuania)
Language
English
Copies
2 copies: 3/4 in. dub; and 1/2 in. VHS with time coding.
Cite As
Reva S. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1375). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.