Selma S. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Selma S., who was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in 1925, one of four children. She recalls her family's focus on Zionism and culture; their orthodoxy; spending time with her large extended family; her paternal family's bookstore, a cultural center; attending German and Jewish schools; her father having to transfer his bookstore to a non-Jew; arrest and deportation of her parents and brother by Hlinka guards (she never saw them again); incarceration with her younger brother in Žilina; their release through her uncle's intervention; staying with an aunt in Nové Mesto nad Váhom; arranging with a Zionist organization to illegally emigrate to Palestine; arrest en route; incarceration in Bratislava; release; living in Bratislava; forming a group with young men from the Sixth Battalion; she and her aunt being arrested by the Germans; transfer to Sered; an appendectomy; transfer to Theresienstadt in 1944; working in the hospital; living in Prague after liberation; arrest in 1948 for attempting to go to London to join her fiancé; release six months later; and returning to Bratislava. Ms. S. discusses pervasive painful memories of the loss of ninety-one relatives, especially her parents and brothers; postwar hardships and antisemitism; satisfaction from recently re-opening the family bookstore; and visiting relatives in Israel.

2 videocassettes