Lilli S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3717) interviewed by Andrés José Nader and Siegland Schröder

Videotape testimony of Lilli S., who was born in Zehlendorf, Germany in 1913, the youngest of three children. She recounts being raised as a Christian (her parents were Jewish); her father's service in World War I; his status as a doctor; living briefly with grandparents in Dresden; her mother's death when she was six; her father's remarriage to a non-Jew; studying agriculture; antisemitic harassment; surveillance of her father's clinic by Nazi troops in 1933; his suicide; emigrating to France; attending the University of Toulouse; marriage to a Lithuanian Jew in 1935; moving to Paris; frequent trips to Germany using her Lithuanian passport; her siblings' emigration to the United States; German invasion; obtaining French papers; involvement with the Resistance; her son's birth in 1941; placing him with a French family; arrest and imprisonment for Resistance activities in 1944; assistance from the prisoner pastor; deportation to Drancy, then Auschwitz; camaraderie among the political prisoners providing hope for survival; relations between national groups; singing resistance songs; transfer to Kratzau; slave labor in a munitions factory; assistance from Czech civilian workers; hospitalization; a Jewish doctor saving her from selection; escaping with a friend; being hidden by French forced laborers, then by nuns in a Dresden children's home (she had stayed there as a child); she and her friend smuggling themselves to Switzerland; brief imprisonment; reunion with her husband and son in Paris after the war; the birth of a second son; emigrating to East Berlin in 1953; working for Walter Ulbricht's wife; maintaining contact with the nuns from the children's home; her son's death in France; attending a reunion of Auschwitz survivors; and obtaining German citizenship in 1992. Ms. S. sings a song she wrote in camp and mentions her three books. She shows photographs.