Helen S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4136) interviewed by Raymond Kaplan

Videotape testimony of Helen S., who was born in Vilna, Russia (presently Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1917, one of three children. She recounts a happy childhood; attending public school; marriage in 1939; her husband's draft into the Polish military; his return in 1940; her son's birth in 1941; German invasion; ghettoization; hiding with her son, husband, and aunt in a bunker with a hundred others; their discovery; the Germans taking her son (she never saw him again); her aunt committing suicide; deportation to Stutthof; separation from her husband; beatings from guards from which she still bears scars; slave labor digging anti-tank ditches; a death march; liberation by Soviet troops; hiding in a house in Szczecin; Soviet soldiers raping survivors; assistance from two of her father's friends; traveling with a friend to Łódź, then Feldafing displaced persons camp; learning her husband had died shortly after liberation; working for UNRRA: remarriage to a survivor whose wife and child had been killed; emigration to the United States, with assistance from HIAS; the births of two daughters; and her second husband's death in 1997. Ms. S. notes not knowing the fate of her parents. She shows photographs.