Judith K. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4161)

Videotape testimony of Judith K., who was born in Nitra, Czechoslovakia in 1929, the first of two sisters. She recounts her childhood in Nové Zámky; attending a Jewish school; participating in Hashomer Hatzair; Hungarian occupation in 1938; attending a Catholic high school due to the Jewish quota in public schools; learning their relatives in Nitra were being deported; her father bringing his mother and cousins from Nitra to their home; his draft for one month of forced labor in 1943; German invasion in March 1944; anti-Jewish restrictions; abuse from Arrow Cross members; hiding their valuables with a non-Jewish worker and her teacher (both returned them after the war); her father's draft into a Hungarian slave labor battalion; an uncle having her, her mother, sister, grandmother, and cousins smuggled to Nitra; her father's return; hiding during round-ups by Hlinka guard, then in a village with a non-Jewish woman; discovery by Germans; deportation to Sered, then Bergen-Belsen; cruel Polish kapos; her mother glimpsing her father once; her mother and sister having typhus; becoming sick; liberation by British troops; hospitalization; transfer to the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp; repatriation to Nitra via Prague and Bratislava; reunion with surviving relatives; learning her father had not survived; moving by herself in September 1945 to a Makabi ha-tsaʻir training farm in Bratislava, preparing to emigrate to Palestine; being taken with her group in April 1946 to Vienna, Enns, then Ainring displaced persons camp; being sent back to Nitra when she became very ill; rejoining her group in Belgium; boarding an illegal ship to Palestine in Sète in April 1947; interdiction by the British; incarceration on Cyprus; marriage; her son's birth; arrival in Israel in January 1949; and her mother and sister emigrating to Israel. Ms. K. shows childhood photographs.