Adek Stein – a Holocaust survivor from Bialystok, Poland – looked anxiously about the room, struggling with the question he’d just been asked. As his eyes searched his small audience, it was clear he was nervous. That itself wasn’t new. But the interviewer had asked about sexual violence during the Holocaust, and Stein’s face seemed to betray a pain and worry he had lived with for years.
The USC Shoah Foundation, which filmed its interview with Stein at his home in Australia in 1995, tries to interview survivors one-on-one, without distraction. But that day, several young women, presumably members of Stein’s family, stayed in the room as he gave testimony – including his experiences as a forced laborer at the Treblinka extermination camp, where more than 900,000 Jews were murdered. Then it came time to talk about how some Germans had taken Jewish women, in his words, “to make fun.”
