Elka F. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3845)

Videotape testimony of Elka F., who was born in Nieśwież, Poland in 1920, the oldest of four children. She recalls meeting her future husband in 1932; participation in Hashomer Hatzair; Soviet occupation in September 1939; German invasion in June 1941; anti-Jewish harassment; forced labor; surviving a selection in October with her future husband and their families (almost all other Jews were killed); ghettoization with approximately 600 survivors; Magalif (head of the Judenrat) giving them permission to wed; marriage in February; Magalif discouraging people from escaping so the elderly and children would not be killed; hiding with her husband and father-in-law during the ghetto's liquidation (her family perished); and their escape to the forest.

Mrs. F. tells of assistance from non-Jews; joining the partisans; building a bunker; destroying factories and bombing railroad tracks; liaison with the Soviets; joining Shalom Zorin's unit and her father-in-law joining Tuvia Bielski's brigade; her husband's increased involvement in operations; German raids; Polish partisans killing Jews; becoming pregnant; liberation by Soviet troops in the Naliboki forest in July 1944; joining her father-in-law in Tuvia Bielski's brigade; their return to Ni︠a︡sviz︠h︡; her husband's participation in Soviet trials of collaborators; her son's birth in November; antisemitic violence; smuggling themselves to Berlin in 1946; living in refugee camps; assistance from UNRRA; her husband beginning to write a memoir; and emigration to Israel via Bari, Italy in 1949. Mrs. F. details ghetto and partisan life. She shows photographs and her husband's book, published shortly before his death in 1995.