Jenny L. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3306)

Videotape testimony of Jenny L., who was born in Aleksinac, Yugoslavia in 1927, the younger of two children. She recounts a kind kindergarten teacher; moving to Belgrade; her father's military conscription in spring 1941; German invasion; anti-Jewish restrictions; a public execution; her brother's escape to Italian-occupied Croatia; reporting to a German round-up; escaping when she saw her friend killed, leaving her mother and grandmother; traveling to an aunt's home in Niš (she worked for the underground); obtaining false papers; living with her former kindergarten teacher; hiding partisans and providing them with supplies; arrest by Bulgarian soldiers fifteen months later; interrogations and beatings; a guard giving her extra food and cigarettes; transfer to German custody; deportation to a labor camp; prisoners helping her escape; capture; deportation to Weiner Neustadt as a non-Jew; forced labor repairing radios; Allied bombings; transfer to Berlin in July 1944; slave labor in a factory; transfer to a Gestapo prison when hidden weapons were found in the factory; interrogation by a Serb collaborator; a German guard saving her from execution; release during an air raid; liberation by Soviet troops; attacks by Soviet soldiers; traveling with other Yugoslavs to Cottbus, Legnica, Katowice, and Lʹviv; returning with a fellow prisoner to Belgrade; efforts to recover family property; her father's return; reunion with her brother; working as a journalist; arrest in 1949 for telling a joke; interrogations and beatings by antisemitic police; transfer to a labor camp; release after thirty months; emigration to Israel; and her father joining her within a year. Ms. L. describes repression under Tito as her “breaking” point; considering suicide after her release; and her career in Israel.