- Summary
- Videotape testimony of Piera B., who was born in Ferrara, Italy in 1923, the youngest of three sisters. She recounts attending a Jewish school, then secular high school; her father, a veteran of the First World War, ardently supporting Mussolini; participating in the fascist youth movement; anti-Jewish restrictions beginning in 1938; expulsion from high school; working for her father; visiting friends in Padua and Venice; studying to be a teacher on her own; passing the certification exam in Rome; visiting a refugee orphanage in Nonantola; German invasion; her family entrusting their belongings to their non-Jewish maid before they escaped to Rome (she returned them after the war); living with an uncle; round-up with her mother and aunt; their release as half-Jews; finding her father and sister at the house of a non-Jewish friend; obtaining papers as non-Jews with assistance from non-Jewish friends; her mother's death from cancer in 1944; attending church; liberation by United States troops; contact with the Jewish brigade; preparing for illegal emigration to Palestine in Cinecittà; emigration by ship via Taranto; interdiction by the British; brief incarceration; marriage in 1945; and visiting her family in Naples, Venice, and Ferrara in 1946. Ms. B. discusses the trauma of losing her strong sense of Italian identity.
- Author/Creator
- B., Piera, 1923-
- Published
- Tel Aviv, Israel : Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 1996
- Interview Date
- February 1 and February 8, 1996.
- Locale
- Italy
Ferrara (Italy)
Rome (Italy)
Venice (Italy)
Nonantola (Italy)
Padua (Italy)
Taranto (Italy)
Naples (Italy)
Palestine
- Cite As
- Piera B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3824). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
- Notes
-
This testimony is in Hebrew.
