Mlaka Baran Testimony

In this video Malka Baran is giving her testimony of her experience of the Holocaust. Malka was born in Warsaw Poland, but grew up in a town nearby called Transtataulva with her mother, father, and younger brother. She describes her life before the occupation, and conveys that after the occupation life was not that much different at first, but then her freedoms were slowly taken away, and people started disappearing. She recalls the morning that everything changed. SS officers forced all the Jewish families out of their homes and lined them up on the street. The officers then ordered the people to start marching, and as they did there were officers selecting people and separating them into two groups. Her mother was separated from her, her father, and brother and she never saw her again. Malka later learned that the group her mother was in was sent to Treblanka, and her mother was killed. The group Malka and the remainder of her family were in were sent to a small ghetto. Malka tells that she has amnesia of the period of time that she lived in the small ghetto, until she was sent to a labor camp. Malka, her father, and brother all worked while living in the ghetto, but at some point they never returned. She was told later they had been shot. The Germans started to liquidate the ghetto some time after the death of her brother and father, and she was then sent to a labor camp to work in a metal factory. She was placed in an all female barrack in which hundreds of Jewish women lived. She remained at the camp until liberation. Malka illustrates her memory of the liberation and said “one morning the German supervisors left and didn’t come back… We were so conditioned that we did not try to budge or move even though we were alone, not supervised. Until a young Jewish man ran into the hall and shouted ‘you are free, go out the Germans are running away’”.After the liberation Malka lived with her friends for a time. She was orphaned, and had no family. She had become extremely passive and empty, and was unable to make her own decisions. She moved place to place with a friend working, and trying to survive. When Malka describes her traveling and being displaced she says “Every year on my birthday I was somewhere different”.