Leon B. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Leon B., who was born in Katowice, Poland in 1919, one of three children. He recounts his family's affluence; attending cheder and a German school; participating in Zionist groups, including Betar; a lecture by Vladimir Jabotinsky; his father purchasing land in Israel; managing a Zionist youth camp in Sękowa in summer 1939; German invasion; fleeing with his father and sister to Będzin; his mother and brother joining them; moving to Sosnowiec; organizing a Zionist group with Yiśraʼel Ḳoz'ukh and others; warning fellow Jews not to report for deportation; forced labor building roads; deportation to Gross Masselwitz; escaping back to Sosnowiec; forming an underground group; meetings with Jewish resistance leaders Eliezer Geller and Mordecai Anielewicz; his mother's arrest; obtaining her release by threatening Moshe Merin, head of the Judenrat; meeting with Polish partisans from Armia Krajowa; traveling with a Pole to Częstochowa and its ghetto using false papers, then to another city where he obtained weapons; ghettoization; hiding with non-Jewish friends; sending their group members and their parents to Austria and Hungary as non-Jews; escaping to Vienna; arrest; escaping to Sosnowiec; hiding with Polish friends; being smuggled to Budapest in November 1943; and reunion with his parents and friends, whose escapes he had arranged.

10 videocassettes