Eliška K. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Eliška K., who was born in Přerov, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1912. She describes her father's draft in 1914; attending Jewish, then Czech, school after the republic was established; antisemitic discrimination; studying at the Prague Conservatory; her brother, Gideon Klein, joining her; her mother joining them; German occupation; anti-Jewish restrictions; traveling to Vienna as a resistance courier; hiding people; her father's death in 1940; her sister's and brother-in-law's arrest; her brother's deportation to Theresienstadt in December 1941; deportation there with her mother on July 20, 1942; working in the children's sector; her brother continuing to compose and conduct music; deportation to Auschwitz with her mother in February 1944; separation upon arrival; learning her sister had perished; transfer to Kurzbach; slave labor digging trenches; the death march in January 1945; assistance from friends; their escape; traveling to Prochowice, Legnica, Görlitz, then Prague; obtaining false papers and shelter with assistance from František Halas; liberation by Soviet troops in May; and learning her brother had perished. Mrs. K. discusses feeling she could not go on, during and after the war; the importance of friends to her survival; and her efforts to obtain recognition and publication of her brother's music.

2 videocassettes