Paulina B. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4203)

Videotape testimony of Paulina B., a Catholic Romani, who was born in Banská Bystrica, Czechoslovakia (presently Slovakia) in 1919, one of twelve children. She recalls her family's poverty; living on a farm; caring for the animals; her father's death; not attending school; working as a mason from age fourteen; marriage at seventeen; the births of two children; her husband's death three years later; persecution by Germans and Hlinka guard; Romanies helping each other; her children's deaths due to lack of medical care; hiding with her mother and sisters in the basement of a neighbor's home, then in an underground shelter in the forest; a nearby villager providing food for them; one brother's death in the partisans; liberation by Soviet troops; traveling to another village; returning home; finding their houses destroyed; adopting a girl from an orphanage; and present-day discrimination against Romanies.