Piera B. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Piera B., who was born in Ferrara, Italy in 1923, the youngest of three sisters. She recounts attending a Jewish school, then secular high school; her father, a veteran of the First World War, ardently supporting Mussolini; participating in the fascist youth movement; anti-Jewish restrictions beginning in 1938; expulsion from high school; working for her father; visiting friends in Padua and Venice; studying to be a teacher on her own; passing the certification exam in Rome; visiting a refugee orphanage in Nonantola; German invasion; her family entrusting their belongings to their non-Jewish maid before they escaped to Rome (she returned them after the war); living with an uncle; round-up with her mother and aunt; their release as half-Jews; finding her father and sister at the house of a non-Jewish friend; obtaining papers as non-Jews with assistance from non-Jewish friends; her mother's death from cancer in 1944; attending church; liberation by United States troops; contact with the Jewish brigade; preparing for illegal emigration to Palestine in Cinecittà; emigration by ship via Taranto; interdiction by the British; brief incarceration; marriage in 1945; and visiting her family in Naples, Venice, and Ferrara in 1946. Ms. B. discusses the trauma of losing her strong sense of Italian identity.

6 videocassettes