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Aranka S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-1648) interviewed by Lawrence L. Langer and Dana L. Kline,

Oral History | Fortunoff Collection ID: HVT-1648

Videotape testimony of Aranka S., who was born in Berehovo, Czechoslovakia in 1930 to a family of six children. She describes prewar family life; her grandmother's unwillingness to leave home; her father's mobilization into a Hungarian labor battalion; learning her sister and grandmother were sent to a ghetto and Auschwitz; her older sister's deportation to Poland with her husband and child; her mother's journey to Poland in an unsuccessful attempt to find them; ghettoization in a brick factory; her mother's efforts to create stability and comfort, and to help others; trying to be a child and lead a normal life in an abnormal place; failed attempts by the underground to prevent deportation; separation from her mother and youngest siblings upon arrival in Auschwitz (she never saw them again); constant fear of separation from her sister Violet; transfer with Violet to Christianstadt; kitchen work; losing a tooth trying to avoid a German guard; and experiencing dehumanization and starvation, and witnessing public hanging of escapees during the two and a half month death march to Bergen-Belsen. Mrs. S. reflects on the "responsibility of surviving"; her nightmares; revealing the past in her books; and her children's difficulties in learning of her experience.

Author/Creator
S., Aranka, 1930-
Published
New Haven, Conn. : Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 1991
Interview Date
September 25, 1991.
Locale
Ukraine
Berehove
Czechoslovakia
Berehove (Ukraine)
Language
English
Copies
3 copies: 3/4 in. master; 3/4 in. dub; and 1/2 in. VHS with time coding.
Cite As
Aranka S. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1648). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
 
View in Yale University Library Catalog: http://hdl.handle.net/10079/bibid/1091644
Record last modified: 2018-05-29 11:46:00
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/hvt1091644