Hanna U. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Hanna U., a non-Jew, who was born in Poland in 1933, one of two children. She recounts living in Warsaw; her father's death when she was three; German invasion in 1939; observing starving people and bodies on the streets when traversing the ghetto by street car; her uncle's deportation for resistance activities; sending packages to him through the Red Cross; a public execution; observing the ghetto burning during the 1943 uprising; the Warsaw uprising in 1944; when most of Warsaw's population was forcibly evacuated, deportation with her mother and brother to Dzielna, Pruszko?w, then Auschwitz/Birkenau; assistance from her uncle who had preceded them there; her mother's, then her hospitalization; placement in a bed with a Jewish boy who died; believing she would never leave there; becoming numb to death, corpses, and the horror; her uncle and the camp underground arranging to have her brother smuggled into the women's camp before the evacuation; their escape; a Polish family hiding them; liberation by Soviet troops; her mother bringing them to Cze?stochowa to give thanks to the Black Madonna for their survival; returning to Warsaw; finding their home destroyed; living with an aunt in Kutno; her uncle's return; completing her studies in Warsaw; and leaving Poland after her mother's death in 1957. Ms. U. discusses acting as a translator for tourists at Auschwitz prior to her emigration; not revealing she had been a prisoner there; and a 1983 visit to the family that had hidden hers. She shows photographs, documents, and objects made in Auschwitz/Birkenau.

2 videocassettes