Odette A. Holocaust testimony

A follow-up, directed videotape testimony of Odette A., who was born in Paris, France in 1914. She describes childhood in an assimilated family; antisemitic incidents which caused her to define herself as Jewish; completing medical school; volunteering in Perpignan for the international sanitation committee at the end of the Spanish Civil War; working as a government physician in Montargis, where she met her future husband; dismissal due to anti-Jewish laws; returning to Paris; working in Jewish dispensaries; arrest of her mother and sister when they smuggled themselves to the unoccupied zone to join her father (she never saw them again); their transfer to Drancy and Auschwitz; smuggling herself to Nice to join her future husband; obtaining several jobs; and eventually caring for Jewish children for OSE. Dr. A. notes she did not speak of her early life in her previous testimony because "deportation is like being born - there is nothing before it. The woman who lived before is a different person."

1 videocassette