Harold Alexander fled Nazi controlled Germany to the United States and then joined the United States Army. He returned to Germany towards the end of WWII as an American soldier and met a Jewish woman who was still in hiding. He remembers helping the woman and her family by bringing them a truck full of food and connecting them to family in the United States.

Ann Monka was born in Lida a small town with a prosperous Jewish population in Poland. Ann and her mother were separated from her brother, sister and father after escaping the Lida Ghetto. Ann remembers when she and her mother hid in the Polish forests with the Bielski Partisans, while the rest of her family escaped deportations by jumping from the Nazi transport trains.

March 1, 2022, Russian forces damaged buildings at the Babi Yar Memorial in Kyiv, Ukraine, dedicated to the memory of 100,000 Ukrainians murdered at the site during Nazi occupation. Among them were nearly 34,000 Jewish men, women, and children, killed over the course of two days on the eve of Yom Kippur in 1941. In this clip, Lyudmila Tkach recalls surviving the Babi Yar massacre.

Johtje Vos reflects on her decision to help hide Jews during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Throughout the war Johtje and her husband, Aart, housed 32 Jews, although never more than 14 at the same time. In 1982 both Johtje and Aart were recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for risking their own lives to save the lives of others.

Julia Lentini describes the events on March 8, 1943, when the town mayor told her father that Julia's family would be deported from their home to Frankfurt for a few days. The family was deported to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. This testimony clip is featured in the new IWitness activity: The Nazi Genocide Against the Rome and Sinti (Gypsy) People.

Lili Meier describes how she found a photo album, which has become known as the Auschwitz Album, in a deserted SS barracks on the day she was liberated from the Dora concentration camp. The Auschwitz Album is the only known collection of photographs taken by the Nazi SS at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This testimony clip is featured in the IWitness activity Arrival at Auschwitz – Images and Individual Experiences.

Ursula Bruce was only a child when her family fled Nazi Germany to South Africa in the 1930’s. When Ursula married and had her own family she became very involved in human rights and joined the Institute of Race Relations. Even Ursula’s son refused to join the South African military to protest the government’s racist policies. She reflects on her family’s relationship with Nelson Mandela, former South African president and anti-apartheid leader who died on December 5 2013. He was 95 years old.

In 1941, the Nazi regime, ordered the Jews in Germany to wear a Yellow Star of David inscribed with the word Jude (Jew). The following year, in June 1942, Jews in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and other lands under German control were ordered to begin wearing Yellow Stars.  Betty Gerard shows the Yellow Star with the word Jood (Jew in Dutch) she was forced to wear as a child in the Westerbork Concentration Camp in the Netherlands.

After his arrest in September 1942, Stefan Kosinski was incarcerated while awaiting his trial. In this clip, he recounts the conditions in the jail and his memory of seeing his mother out the window of his jail cell keeping vigil. She is also present during his trial before the Nazi court, which sentences Stefan to five years hard labor. 

Foreign words in this clip:

• pedo (Polish): derogatory term for a gay person
• schwul (German): gay, homosexual
• Zuchthaus (German): penitentiary