Leona K. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4448) interviewed by Joanne Weiner Rudof and Barbara Hadley Katz

Videotape testimony of Leona K., who was born in Nowe Miasto, Poland in 1926, one of five children. She recalls her large and close extended family; antisemitic policies at school; German invasion; she and her family visiting her married sister in Warsaw; ghettoization; their return to Nowe Miasto; ghettoization; working outside the ghetto as a maid for a German family; deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau in November 1942; remaining with two sisters and cousins when separated from her family; slave labor digging ditches in bitter cold; carrying the dead back to camp; learning of the gas chambers and crematoria; public hangings; transfer with her sisters to the Canada Kommando; eating food they found when sorting the clothing of those gassed; fasting on Yom Kippur; her sisters forcing her to work when she was ill so she would not be killed; seeing her brother and cousin from a distance; separation from her sisters in a selection; a German helping them reunite; transport in open train cars in January 1945; escaping with her sisters from a forced march; encountering United States troops who fed and cared for them in Schwerin; placement in Lübeck displaced persons camp; meeting her future husband; marriage; her older sister's emigration to Palestine; emigration to the United States with her sister, husband, and his relatives; and the births of her children. Ms. K. notes the great joy she receives from her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She shows photographs and a diamond that her husband's father had given to him before the war.