Yaakov F. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Yaakov F., who was born in Suwałki, Poland in 1924, the sixth of eight children. He recounts his family's affluence; attending Jewish school; antisemitic harassment and violence; one brother enlisting in the Polish military; brief Soviet invasion, then German invasion in 1939; a local German warning his father of imminent deportations; his parents arranging for him to hide with a non-Jewish family; attending church and wearing a cross; moving to the barn when the family feared discovery; escaping to the forest when the Pole hiding him tried to kill him; assistance from Polish villagers; arrest as a Pole by German soldiers; transfer to Kaliningrad; beatings and interrogations; deportation to a stalag in Olsztyn; assistance from a Polish officer from Suwałki; his grief when a Jewish prisoner was beaten to death; assisting the camp underground; burying Soviet POWs; transfer elsewhere in July 1942, then later to a prison in Wojciechowice; his assignment digging a mass grave and burying those executed, then cleaning mobile gas vans; transfer to Sieradz; deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau; exposure as a Jew; and interrogation and torture.

25 videocassettes