Michael I. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Michael I., who was born in 1917, one of seven children. He recalls his family's business in Warsaw and Falencia; attending yeshiva until age fourteen; participating in Akiba; becoming head of the Otwock branch; antisemitic violence; living on training farms (hachsharah) in Be?chato?w and Siemiatycze; German invasion; fleeing to Ostro?e?ka, then ?omz?a; returning to his family in Otwock; fleeing to Soviet-occupied territory; traveling to Vilnius via Bia?ystok and Hrodna; working at a hachsharah in Garliava; living in Kaunas; German invasion; fleeing to Ukmerge?; posing as a non-Jew; returning to Kaunas, then Garliava; ghettoization in Kaunas; forced labor; assisting in organizing the resistance with Chaim Yellin; Itka Grinberg, head of the Jewish police, assisting him avoid deportation; arrest when traveling to Garliava; incarceration in the Ninth Fort; escaping with a group back to the ghetto; the Jewish police hiding the escapees in a bunker; Yellin, Grinberg, and Elkhanan Elkes, head of the Judenrat, meeting with them; joining an organized escape in trucks; joining a partisan group in a forest; killing collaborators for revenge; enlisting in the Soviet army; a Jewish general befriending him; returning to Kaunas; attending Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur services; volunteering for the police in Vilnius as a non-Jew; escaping en route to an assignment in Warsaw; joining groups planning illegal emigration to Palestine; Hashomer Hatzair assigning him to take children from Lublin to Bratislava to Vienna; assistance from the Joint; marriage in the Wels displaced persons camp; a circuitous route to Marseille; illegal emigration to Palestine; interdiction by the British; incarceration in Cyprus; transfer to a hospital in Israel when he was ill; and eventually living in a kibbutz. Mr. I. names many people when discussing details of specific events.

8 videocassettes