Roziana B. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3578)

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.