- Summary
- Videotape testimony of Roziana B., who was born in Deštnice, Czechoslovakia in 1927. She recounts being the only Jewish family in town; their assimilated lifestyle; her mother's death in 1936; her father's remarriage in 1937; attending public school; moving to Žatec; German occupation; her father's friend, who was in the Gestapo, warning him to flee (he did); their arrest on Kristallnacht; being ordered to leave; traveling to the Czech border; being denied entry by Czech officials; incarceration by Germans in Kolešovice, then Karlsbad; release; returning to Žatec, then Deštnice; receiving travel papers from her father (he was in Prague); entering Czech territory illegally; living with her father's relatives in a Czech village; attending school; German invasion; anti-Jewish restrictions; deportation to Theresienstadt in February 1942; separation from her brother and father; assignment to a children's barrack; attending classes; her brother's deportation; sham improvements for a Red Cross visit and propaganda film; hospitalization for typhus; forced labor in the gardens; her father's deportation; deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau; separation from her stepmother and sister (she never saw them again); learning her brother had been gassed; brief contact with her father; transfer to Maerzdorf; slave labor in a textile factory; the factory director giving her extra food; liberation by Soviet troops; staying briefly with a German villager; traveling to Prague; and emigration to Israel in 1949 to escape communism. Ms. B. discusses numbness upon learning her brother had been killed; organizing efforts by the Zionists in Theresienstadt, including Fredy Hirsch, which made the children's lives easier; and a Hanukkah celebration there in 1942. She shows photographs.
- Author/Creator
- B., Roziana, 1927-
- Published
- Tel Aviv, Israel : Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 1993
- Interview Date
- November 9, 1993 and November 30, 1993.
- Locale
- Czechoslovakia
Deštnice (Czech Republic)
Žatec (Ústecký kraj, Czech Republic)
Kolešovice (Czech Republic)
Prague (Czech Republic)
- Cite As
- Roziana B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3578). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
- Notes
-
This testimony is in German.
