Hela V. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4178)

Videotape testimony of Hela V., who was born in Będzin, Poland in 1927, the youngest of three sisters. She recounts her family's affluence; attending public and Jewish schools; German invasion; her father dying from a police beating; buying food posing as a non-Jew (she was blond); selling family belongings to non-Jews; ghettoization; forced factory labor; her mother's deportation; her deportation to Oberaltstadt; slave labor in a weaving factory; better treatment by a German guard after she knit her a sweater; other guards giving them extra food; a prisoner nurse helping them; assistance from English and French POWs; abandonment by the guards; liberation by Soviet troops; publicly humiliating a German overseer; returning to Będzin; finding her home occupied; assistance from a former maid; living with a friend in Bytom, then relatives in Częstochowa; antisemitic harassment; learning her sisters had been killed; joining a Zionist kibbutz; meeting her future husband; illegal emigration by ship to Palestine; incarceration on Cyprus for nine months; and her son's birth in 1951. Ms. B. discusses her husband's death and visiting Oberalstaldt and Poland with her son. She shows photographs.