Edith Coliver Testimony

Testimony #2
Sapphire Armstrong Filkins

For my second holocaust testimony I chose to cover Edith Coliver. Edith Coliver was born in Karlsuhe, Germany in July of 1922. Edith was originally born Edith Simon and her parents’ names were Fritz and Hedwig. She had two younger brothers named Ernest and Harold. Coliver’s family were a typical Jewish family, although Coliver’s mother was orthodox Jewish and the rest of the family was reformed. In 1933, when Edith was ten, Hitler officially took over Germany. This caused a lot of changes in daily life for Edith and when Edith was a teenager she was not allowed to go to school anymore because of her Jewish heritage. Her family relocated to the United States to New York where Coliver witnessed a demonstration of American protest against Hitler and the Communist movement. “I was very grateful that they were thinking of Europe and that they weren’t as insolent as we thought they were” Coliver said upon her arrival in New York. After New York her family settled down in San Francisco where Coliver attended high school and eventually college as well. When Coliver talks about her experiences after moving from Nazi Germany she explains that she never related well to others around her in the United States, “I felt these were not my interests having coming out of an area that was going to be in war soon. I felt very much alone.” Despite these challenges Edith developed a great career in translating and diplomacy for the United Nations. She also married and had two children.