Tatiana B. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4038) interviewed by Yannis Thanassekos and Michel Rosenfeldt

Videotape testimony of Tatiana B., who was born in Fiume, Italy (Rijeka, Croatia) in 1937 to a Jewish mother and Catholic father. She recounts living near her maternal grandmother, aunts, and uncles; being baptized (her younger sister and mother were too, as protection); her father's departure (he was in the Navy); a neighbor turning them (her mother, sister, grandmother, aunt, and cousin) into the Germans in April 1944; brief incarceration in Risiera di San Sabba; deportation to Auschwitz; her grandmother's disappearance; placement in a children's barrack with her sister and cousin; visits from her mother; learning Czech and German; playing in the snow; cessation of her mother's visits (she thought she was dead); the block leader in the next barrack befriending her and telling her not to volunteer to join her mother; her cousin volunteering and disappearing; liberation by Soviets in January; transfer to a Red Cross facility near Prague, then to Lingfield; a wonderful relationship with their caregiver and the other children; learning their parents were alive; a reunion with them in Rome in December 1946; not recognizing them; resolving their initial estrangement; and living in Trieste.
Ms. B. discusses feeling that living in a camp and death were normal when she was in Auschwitz; not discussing their experiences within her family, which she regrets; learning all but four of their maternal family were killed (her aunt also survived); her aunt's continuing hope that her son had survived (he did not); identifying herself as a Jew despite her conversion; painful thoughts of her murdered relatives and occasional flashbacks; marriage to a non-Jew; a reunion in England with the other Lingfield children and her caregiver (she met Sarah Moskovitz who wrote about them); continuing to be in touch with them; visiting Auschwitz; and her children's lack of interest in her experiences until recently.