- Summary
- Videotape testimony of Sara M., who was born in Kaunas, Russia (presently Lithuania) in 1915, the oldest of three children. She recounts her family's move to Jurbarkas, then Ukmergė; attending a Russian school, then a Jewish school where Jacob Gens, the future head of the Vilna ghetto, was her teacher; moving to Kaunas in 1934 for a job; her brother joining her; her sister's emigration to Palestine in 1939; Soviet occupation; living with her aunt and grandmother; German invasion; local Lithuanians rounding up and killing Jewish men, including her brother; ghettoization; slave labor at an airfield; non-Jewish friends outside the ghetto giving her food for her family; arrest for smuggling; release after a friend bribed a German; her grandmother's death; hiding during round-ups; assignment to a farm from which smuggled food into the ghetto; transfer with her aunts to Kovno concentration camp, then six months later to the Šiauliai ghetto, Panevėžys, then Stutthof; separation from her aunts (they did not survive); assignment to a group of Hungarian women who lit Sabbath candles; a three-day beating as a scapegoat for the candle lighters; the Hungarian women not giving her food; transfer to a group digging ditches, then to a small group for farm work; eating the raw vegetable they harvested in summer 1944; death marches for months; liberation by Soviet troops near Berlin; traveling to Kaunas via Łódź, Hrodna, and Vilnius; being smuggled to Białystok in 1947; contact with Hashomer Hatzair; being sent by them to Warsaw, then to their kibbutz in Łódź; meeting her future husband; emigration to Palestine via Marseille in spring 1948; reunion with her sister; her death in 1958; and raising her sister's children. Ms. M. shows photographs.
- Author/Creator
- M., Sara, 1915-
- Published
- Tel Aviv, Israel : Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 1998
- Interview Date
- January 22, 1998.
- Locale
- Lithuania
Kaunas
Šiauliai
Russia
Kaunas (Lithuania)
Jurbarkas (Lithuania)
Ukmergė (Lithuania)
Panevėžys (Lithuania)
Białystok (Poland)
Warsaw (Poland)
Łódź (Poland)
Vilnius (Lithuania)
Hrodna (Belarus)
Marseille (France)
Palestine
- Cite As
- Sara M. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3914). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
- Notes
-
This testimony is in Hebrew.
