Holocaust Survivor Testimonies and interviews

Here is Remember.org’s collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies and interviews — firsthand accounts collected and preserved over three decades from people who lived through ghettos, deportations, forced labor, and hiding, and who later chose to put their memories into words. Some arrived as full interviews recorded specifically to preserve their story; others were shared by survivors themselves, by their children and grandchildren, or by translators working to bring an account into English for the first time.

We honor and listen to the survivor’s own voice. Below you’ll find long-form interviews, shorter first-person accounts, poems, and artwork — each one a primary source, not a summary. Read together, they resist any single narrative of the Holocaust, offering instead as many different paths through it as there were people who lived them.

My Name is Alice

Holocaust in Czechosolvakia – My Name is Alice Memoir

This work is an inspirational narrative of one little girl who survived against all odds; though 83 percent of the Jewish citizens of Slovakia were murdered, 95 percent of children under fourteen were annihilated.

I’d like to call your attention to Selma van de Perre, nee Velleman, a Jewish Dutch resistance fighter and concentration camp survivor who died in October 2025 at the age of 103.

She wrote her autobiography to describe her experiences: van de Perre, S. (2021). My name is Selma: The remarkable memoir of a Jewish resistance fighter and Ravensbruck survivor.

CARPATI: 50 MILES, 50 YEARS focuses on Zev Godinger, a Jewish ice cream man of the Carpathian Mountains, a self-described “proste” (ordinary) Jew who embarks on a symbolic pilgrimage to his hometown.

In 1931 the Jewish community of mostly poor farmers in the Carpathian region (then Czechoslovakia, today Ukraine) numbered a quarter million. Today, there are fewer than 1,500. Zev lives in Beregovo, where he has special friendship with his Rom (Gypsy) neighbors. Through their exhilarating musical “jam” sessions they demonstrate the subtle interrelationships and influences between Gypsy and Jewish music.

Surviving in Shanghai

Walter Frank Interview

Gabor Hirsch, a survivor, asks for your help in finding other survivors

Holocaust survivor Testimonies and interviews — Birkenau Survivor Gabor Hirsch

The Story of Elsie V .

Survivor Alexander Kimel’s poem, In Memory – A Holocaust Prayer

Alexander Kimel’s, I Cannot Forget

Alfredo Vorshirm

Harold Gordon from Grodno, Poland

Jacque Lipetz shares his story: “Looking back, this occupation was benign compared to the horrors of the Nazis, but what loss of freedom is benign? What security lies in not knowing if there will be a tomorrow.”
Vera Laska on researching the Holocaust
Survivor Judy Cohen shares a poem, Fifty Years Later: Reflections on Teaching The Holocaust to Young People.
Henry Cohen was the Director of Camp Foehrenwald, the second largest Jewish displaced persons center in the American Zone of Germany in 1946.

Camp Föhrenwald map — Map of DP Camp Föhrenwald, as illustrated by the United States Army after it was taken into use.

Judith Jagermann shares her childhood memories of survival

Judith Jagermann was a Holocaust survivor from Karlsbad. When 11, her entire family was deported. she and her sister were sent to an orphanage while her parents were sent to concentration camps. Judith and her mother were tortured for years at Auschwitz before being liberated by the British.

Filip Muller’s testimony: Auschwitz