Miriam Z. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3802)

Videotape testimony of Miriam Z., who was born in Satu Mare, Romania in 1922, the youngest of six children. She recounts her family's orthodoxy; leaving school after eighth grade to help her mother at home; Hungarian occupation; her brother's draft into a Hungarian slave labor battalion; her father's disbelief when a Polish refugee warned them to flee; German invasion; anti-Jewish restrictions; ghettoization; deportation to Auschwitz; separation from her parents; remaining with her four sisters; seeing their father once when he delivered food; transfer with her sisters to Stutthof, then another camp two weeks later; assignment to work in the kitchen of an underground munitions factory; receiving Red Cross packages; brief hospitalization; her sister stealing food to share with her; a death march; abandonment by the Germans in Gogolin; assistance from Polish villagers; liberation by Soviet troops; traveling to Kraków; assistance from the Joint; returning home via Łódź and Czechoslovakia; reunion with her brother; marriage in 1946; her daughter's birth in 1947; and emigration to Israel in 1950. Ms. Z. notes it was unusual that all of her siblings survived, and never sharing her experiences with anyone, including her daughter.