A child survivor from Brussels, Belgium, relates her wartime experiences. She tells of her leave taking from her parents, and lovingly recalls the kindness of the priest, nuns, and childless couple who helped her survive in hiding. She also recounts her postwar reunion and experiences with her mother.
A Jew from Poland tells his story with painful deliberation. He describes the liquidation of the Jews of his town, during which he witnesses the murder of this grandmother, and his experiences in the concentration and slave labor camps of Płaszów, Skarżysko-Kamienna, Buchenwald and Theresienstadt. Mr. S. relates that he became religious in the camps and still uses the tefillin and prayer book he removed from the huge piles of religious objects which he found in Theresienstadt after he was liberated.
A child survivor relates his vivid memories of Kraków, the German occupation, and moving to the ghetto and to Płaszów concentration camp. He tells of being smuggled out of the camp and surviving as a street child from age four to seven, with the aid of several Polish women. He reflects upon his postwar reunion with his parents, and the psychological effects of his experiences.
As seen through the eyes of survivors, witnesses, and rescuers who had experiences similar to Anne Frank's, this program takes the viewer beyond the hiding place and the Diary. The testimony excerpts follow the path of the Frank family: their move from Germany to Holland; the German invasion; going into hiding; arrest and deportation to Westerbork (the Dutch transit camp); deportation to Auschwitz; transfer to Bergen-Belsen; and Anne Frank's death in Bergen-Belsen.
Survivors describe specific memories, reflect upon how and why they remember particular incidents, and the impact of these memories on their present lives.
Nineteen first-person accounts of witnesses, including Jews, non-Jews, American POWs, GIs who first entered the camps, a member of the Hitler youth, a Jesuit priest, resistance fighters, and child survivors are woven into a single narrative of World War II and the Holocaust. They tell stories of life under the Nazis, the ghettos, concentration and death camps, liberation, and the challenges they faced after the Holocaust.
A survivor from Mława, Poland tells of his childhood and youth. Recollections of the joyous Passovers of his childhood call to mind his feelings of loneliness at his son's Bar Mitzvah, at which there was no one present from his side of the family, since all had perished in the Holocaust. Rabbi G. chronicles the breakdown and destruction of his closely knit extended family and his own personal deterioration as he experienced the degradations of numerous concentration and slave labor camps.
From the point of view of the child that she was at the time, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen from Bratislava, Slovakia relates her wartime experiences. She tells how, in German- occupied Bratislava, she served as the "ears" of her deaf parents and younger sister, alerting them to impending round-ups of Jews. She speaks of her vain attempts to find shelter for her sister and herself after the deportation of her parents, and her voluntary surrender to the police in the hopes of being reunited with her parents in Auschwitz.
Many aspects of the history of the Holocaust in the former Yugoslavia are told through the voices of those who survived it. The program includes excerpts of Jews rescued by Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians; a Serbian non-Jewish rescuer whose husband was shot for hiding Jews; survivors of concentration camps in Yugoslavia and those deported elsewhere; camp escapees; and partisans.
