Katalin L. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4195) interviewed by Michel Rosenfeldt and Massimo Ianetta

Videotape testimony of Katalin L., who was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1922, the second of two children. She recounts her parents' divorce; attending public school; anti-Jewish legislation; attending communist meetings with her brother; marriage; her husband's draft into a Hungarian slave labor battalion (he did not survive); German invasion; her brother obtaining false papers for her and her mother; their arrest and imprisonment; beatings during interrogations; seeing her brother once (he escaped); their transfer to Sárvár; deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau; separation from her mother (she was killed); exchanging numbers with a prisoner in order to be with a friend; their transfer to Ravensbrück, then to Berlin; slave labor in an Argus aircraft factory, a subcamp of Sachsenhausen; her trance-like state while operating machinery; a German overseer providing extra food that she shared with her friends; digging anti-tank trenches; a march to Oranienberg; liberation by Soviet troops; traveling to join relatives in Debrecen who informed her that her brother was alive; finding her apartment occupied; reunion with her brother (he had survived in hiding); working for the Hungarian government; pervasive antisemitism; illegal emigration to Belgium in 1946; marriage to a Hungarian survivor; and the births of three children. Ms. L. discusses relations among prisoner groups in camps; not sharing her experiences; visiting Hungary with her family in the 1960s; sharing her experiences with her daughters then; and writing a fictionalized screenplay about her experiences. She explains the camps as she sketches them.