Dorotka Goldstein Roth (b. 1932) was just seven years old when the Germans invaded her native Poland. Her family fled to Vilna, Lithuania, a place that proved just as perilous as Poland. When the Germans arrived in Lithuania in 1941 and began rounding up Lithuania’s Jews, the Germans received considerable cooperation from the country’s non-Jewish population. This cooperation helps explain the fact that between 95 and 97 percent of Lithuania’s Jews died in the Holocaust. Roth’s family was captured, her father was shot, and Roth, her sister, and her mother were deported to Latvia and then to the Stutthof concentration camp in Germany. In this 1989 interview, Roth described the collective punishment of the camp’s women after a successful escape.

Click here to view the interview.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION