Meir S. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Meir S., who was born in Svali?a?va, Czechoslovakia (presently Svali?a?va, Ukraine) in 1929, the sixth of seven children. He recounts his family's relative affluence; attending a Czech school and cheder; antisemitic harassment; the deaths of two siblings; Hungarian occupation; anti-Jewish restrictions; his father liquidating all their assets in summer 1939 to emigrate to Chile; the outbreak of war preventing their emigration; joining a relative in Uz?h?horod for nine months; moving to Mukacheve; attending a Jewish gymnasium; his brother escaping to Budapest; ghettoization in 1944; deportation with his family to Birkenau; claiming to be eighteen; separation with his father from his mother and sisters; obtaining extra bread for cleaning the latrines; sharing it with his father; seeing his mother through a fence; transfer to Auschwitz; his father telling him to work, get any food possible, and memorize his uncle's address in Chile; transfer to Jaworzno (he never saw his father again); slave labor hauling stones; trading his shoes for a better assignment; a prisoner official giving him extra food; sharing it with others; a Polish civilian worker giving him extra food; hospitalization; a Belgian prisoner-doctor saving him from selection; praying with another prisoner; a death march to Blechhammer in January 1945; abandonment by the guards; liberation by Soviet troops; returning to Mukacheve via Cze?stochowa, with assistance from the Joint; reunion with his brother; living with a non-Jewish woman who had saved and returned their belongings; a failed attempt to emigrate to Palestine via Bucharest; reunion with his mother and sisters in Prague; recovering from tuberculosis in a sanatorium; emigrating with his sister to England via Paris in June 1946; hospitalization; living in a Jewish boys home; marriage; his mother and sisters emigrating to Israel; and joining them with his wife and children in 1967.

3 videocassettes