Charlotte R. Holocaust testimony (HVT-567) interviewed by Gabriele Schiff and Bonnie Dwork,

Videotape testimony of Charlotte R., who was born near Košice, Czechoslovakia in 1926. She recalls her father's emigration to the United States; moving to Košice with her mother; annexation by Hungary in 1938, which resulted in a language change at school; hearing about atrocities towards Jews elsewhere and her inability to believe them; the German invasion in 1943; and anti-Jewish legislation, including wearing the yellow star and confiscation of Jewish property. She describes food shortages; the forced round-up of Jews in a brick factory; transport and horrendous conditions in the cattle cars; arrival at Auschwitz; separation from her mother whom she never saw again; transport four weeks later to Hundsfeld; working as a slave laborer for eight months; a death march in January 1945 to Gross Rosen, then Buchenwald; transfer in cattle cars to Mauthausen; becoming very ill and being hidden by her friends; and transfer to Bergen-Belsen where conditions were worse than any she had experienced. She relates liberation by British troops; prisoner deaths from overeating; her partial recovery from tuberculosis and typhus; a feeling of apathy regarding her own fate; transfer to Sweden for treatment; friendship with a nurse whose family brought her home and offered to adopt her; efforts to locate her father in the United States; emigration to join him; and adjustment difficulties. Mrs. R. discusses her continuing friendships, the scars she thinks all survivors bear, and reads one of her poems about survival.