Tzipora H. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3831)

Videotape testimony of Tzipora H., who was born in Hrubieszów, Poland in 1933, the youngest of three children. She recounts starting school two weeks prior to the German invasion; brief Soviet occupation, then German return; a mass round-up, including her older brother; her father bribing a German to secure his release; having him smuggled to the Soviet zone; her parents' arrests; eviction from their home with her brother; living with an uncle; her parents' returns; ghettoization; her father's position on the Judenrat; building a bunker with other families; hiding with her family and others during round-ups; discover by Germans; escaping with her mother; joining her father and brother in a local work camp; hiding during the day (children were not permitted); her brother's murder in a mass killing; her parents' deportation; Fred O. helping her obtain a kitchen job; deportation to Budzyn with her aunt and cousin; public executions; her cousin sharing extra food; composing songs about camp life; their transfer to Majdanek; and slave labor in the laundry, then agricultural work.
Ms. H. tells of a death march; two escaped prisoners hiding her with a Polish farmer; liberation by Soviet troops; traveling to Lublin; placement in a Polish orphanage; visiting Hrubieszów with her father's friend; reporting the Polish family that had denounced her mother, an act of revenge; placement in a Red Cross orphanage in Lublin; transfer with the orphanage to Pieszyce; her aunt retrieving her; joining a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz in Łódź; reunion with her uncle and brother; traveling illegally to Bratislava; living in Bad Reichenhall, then Jordanbad displaced persons camps; assistance from UNRRA; traveling to Bergen-Belsen DP camp; emigration to Palestine from Marseille; reunion with her aunt; and living on a kibbutz. Ms. H. discusses losing her belief in God due to her experiences; becoming an adult in camps despite her young age; nightmares resulting from her experiences; several visits to Poland with youth groups; and her daughter's death from cancer reinforcing her sense of abandonment by those she loves. She shows photographs.