Hans F. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Hans F., who was born in 1922, the youngest of three children, into an assimilated family in Breslau, and moved to Berlin at the age of seven. He is now a professor of Religious Studies and much of his testimony is suffused with a psycho-historical critique of the topics he discusses. From his personal experience, Professor F. tells of his early politicization; his parents' fear for the family; his education in England, where he became a religious Christian (while his father, still in Germany, renounced his own conversion and returned to Judaism as a political protest;) and of the secularized Jews he encountered in the Washington Heights section of New York, where he and his parents lived after emigrating from Germany. He speaks of his discovery of his Jewish heritage through his Christian experiences, and the difficulty of harmonizing in oneself the secular/Christian with the cultural/religious traditions of Judaism. Professor F. pays particular attention to the insidious appeal and powerful organization of the Nazi program and asserts his belief in the necessity to bear witness.

2 videocassettes (3/4" u-matic)