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 into the Soviet zone; her parents' arrests; she and her brother being evicted from their home; living with an uncle; her parents' return; ghettoization; building a bunker with other families; hiding with her family and others during round-ups; discovery by Germans; escaping with her mother; joining her father and brother in a local work camp; hiding during the days (children were not permitted); her brother's murder in a mass killing; her parents' deportation; Fred O., an influential prisoner, helping her obtain a kitchen job; deportation with her aunt and cousin to Budzyń; public executions; her cousin sharing extra food; composing songs about camp life; their transfer to Majdanek; slave labor in the laundry, then agricultural work; and Soviet POWS giving her and the other children extra food.

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 as 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 Bad Reichenhall, then Jordanbad displaced persons camps; assistance from UNRRA; traveling to Bergen-Belsen displaced persons 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.