Irit R. Holocaust testimony (HVT-1805)

Videotape testimony of Irit R., who was born in Mińsk Mazowiecki, Poland. She recalls her family's poverty; German invasion; ghettoization; her father's beating by Germans; public humiliation of a rabbi which ended her belief in God; her father's death from starvation in 1941; supporting her family doing farm work; her mother placing her with a farmer in 1942; learning of the ghetto's liquidation; being denounced as a Jew while working under an assumed name; a Polish woman from Kałuszyn adopting her as a Christian; denouncement by her previous employer; obtaining Christian identity papers from a local priest; helping a Jewish family while posing as a Christian; working in a convent; having to prove her identity several times; revealing she was Jewish to the convent's Mother Superior to avoid conversion; liberation by Soviet troops; learning none of her family had survived; returning to the convent; reclaiming her Jewish identity six months later; and emigrating to Palestine from an orphanage in Łódź. Mrs. R. discusses the importance to her survival of dreaming and hoping her mother and siblings would survive; learning of the Holocaust after the war; continuing nightmares; and identifying herself as a secular Jew.