Gilberte W. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4404) interviewed by Barbara Hadley Katz and Joanne Weiner Rudof

Videotape testimony of Gilberte W., who was born in Paris, France in 1913. She recounts that her mother was a French Catholic and her father a German Jew; visiting her paternal grandparents in Germany when World War I started; her father's draft into the German military; living in several places including Rastatt, Mannheim, then Magdeburg; attending a convent school; living with her paternal grandfather after her grandmother died; attending Friday night services with him and church on Sunday with her mother; moving to Leipzig, then Vienna; marriage to a Jew in 1935; the Anschluss; obtaining documents to emigrate to the United States (her husband could not go); returning to her parents in Leipzig; hiding her husband during Kristallnacht; her father's arrest and incarceration in Buchenwald; his release; obtaining travel documents in Berlin; sailing to the United States from France in 1939; learning her husband was hiding in France and had a girlfriend; divorcing him in 1941; remarriage to his best friend; her mother hiding her father in France during the war; and arranging their emigration to the United States as soon as the war was over. Ms. W. discusses raising her daughter as a Jew and believing in God, but not organized religion. She shows photographs and documents.