Sara S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4183)

Videotape testimony of Sara S., who was born in Vylok, Czechoslovkia (presently Ukraine) in 1925, one of five children. She recounts cordial relations with non-Jews; participating in Hashomer Hatzair; Hungarian occupation; anti-Jewish restrictions; one brother fleeing to Budapest; another escaping to the Soviet Union; apprenticing as a seamstress; German invasion in spring 1944; her parents entrusting possessions to a non-Jewish neighbor; deportation with her parents and sister to the Sevluš ghetto, then a month later to Auschwitz/Birkenau; separation with her sister from her parents (she never saw them again); transfer with her sister three days later to Kretinga; slave labor in a shoe workshop; fasting on Yom Kippur; transfer two months later to Stutthof; her assignment sorting shoes; hiding her sister when she was ill; clandestinely distributing newer shoes to prisoners, some in exchange for extra food, which she shared with her sister and friends; a death march in January 1945; helping her sister walk; liberation by Soviet troops; her sister's death; hospitalization; traveling to Kraków; returning home; reunion with one brother; learning her middle brother had been killed; traveling illegally to Budapest; reunion with another brother in Sokolov; his wedding; joining others intending to emigrate to Palestine; moving to Karlovy Vary, then Vienna; illegal emigration to Palestine with a former partisan via Genoa in 1947; and their child's birth in 1948. Ms. S. notes their neighbor returned some of their property after the war.