First, read the short biography of the witness, then watch an excerpt from her testimony.
Shirley Herzberg was born in June 1924 in Czechoslovakia in the village of Malý Berezný in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, just a short distance from the eastern Slovak village of Ubĺa. At that time, her name was Suri Lebovičová. The village, like the whole of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, was occupied by Hungary after the declaration of Slovak independence. After the occupation of Nazi Hungary by the German army in 1944, the entire Lebovičová family, with many children, was herded into the ghetto in Uzhhorod, from where they were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
Unlike other members of the family, Suri was not murdered immediately upon arrival; she was selected for slave labor. When the front approached in January 1945, the remaining camp prisoners were driven on death marches westward.
Somewhere near the Saxon town of Heidenau, Shirley managed to escape and, under the name Irene Grantzer, began posing as a German refugee from the front. The labor office assigned her a job in Most.
After the liberation, Suri returned home. But Subcarpathian Ruthenia was soon occupied by the Soviet Union. Suri did not want to live in a country that did not value individual human lives, she wanted to live in Czechoslovakia. And so, like other so-called optants, she moved to the depopulated Czech borderlands and settled in Žatec. But Czechoslovakia was also taken over by a communist dictatorship. Suri preferred to emigrate to the USA and became Shirley. She got married and had children.
The interview was recorded on December 9, 1996 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
What interested you most in this testimony?