Aliza B. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Aliza B., who was born in Thessalonikē, Greece in approximately 1928. She recalls a happy childhood among her large, extended family; German invasion in April 1941; anti-Jewish measures; her brother's escape; ghettoization; her brother's return; their deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau; separation from her parents (she never saw them again) and brother; the smell of "burning meat"; learning of the gas chambers and crematoria; selection for specious medical experiments and surgery performed by Josef Mengele, Horst Schumann, Wladyslaw Dering, and Carl Clauberg; recovering from post-surgical infections with assistance from Jewish prisoner doctors; recognizing a neighbor from Thessalonikē (her future husband); learning from him her brother was in Monowitz; a non-Jewish Kapo assisting her and others; transfer to the Union Kommando; contact with other Greek prisoners; clandestine communication with her brother via notes; a beating for fasting on Yom Kippur, that resulted in losing her belief in God; a public hanging of four women who supplied explosives to blow up a crematorium; a death march and train transport to Ravensbrück, then Malchow in January 1945; slave labor in an underground factory; losing hope; hospitalization; recovery after receiving medication from a German guard; evacuation on May 1, 1945; observing cannibalism; liberation by United States troops; briefly living in a refugee camp; returning to Thessalonikē; learning her brother was in Palestine; marriage; illegal emigration to Palestine by ship via Athens; reunion with her brother; her son's birth despite thinking she had been sterilized by the "experiments"; four subsequent losses of children in childbirth; and the birth of a second child when her son was thirteen.

6 videocassettes