- Summary
- 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)
- Cite As
- Aranka S. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-1648). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
- Other Authors/Editors
- Langer, Lawrence L., interviewer.
Kline, Dana L., interviewer.
- Notes
-
Related publication: Upon the head of the goat : a childhood in Hungary, 1939-1944 / Aranka Siegal. -- New York : Puffin Books, c1994.
Related publication: Grace in the wilderness : after the liberation, 1945-1948 / Aranka Siegal. -- New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Puffin Books, c1994.
Related material: Violet S. Holocaust testimony [sister] (HVT-1650), Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
Related material: Aranka S. and Violet S. Holocaust testimony [with sister] (HVT-1649), Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
