Avraham T. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Avraham T., who was born in Lazdijai, Russia (presently Lithuania) in 1909, one of six children. He recalls attending cheder; his family's expulsion during World War I; their return; attending Hebrew high school in Marijampolė; participating in Maccabi; leading the Lithuanian team in the 1932 Tel Aviv Makabiyah; attending the University of Pittsburgh; his father's death; returning home; completing law school in Kaunas; antisemitic harassment by university officials; marriage in 1935; attending the 1939 Zionist Congress in Geneva; Soviet occupation in June 1940; working as the administrator of a military construction project, then for an accountant; fleeing to Vilnius, fearing deportation to Siberia; returning to Kaunas; German invasion; briefly fleeing east; being warned of massacres upon his return; reunion with his wife; paying a Lithuanian to retrieve his family in Lazdijai (they refused); ghettoization; working for the Judenrat, often with the head, Elkhanan Elkes, his assistant Leib Garfunkel, and the German official, Wilhelm Göcke; keeping a clandestine diary; obtaining food from a Lithuanian friend; round-ups and mass killings of thousands; obtaining supplies for a children's Purim play; transformation of the ghetto into a concentration camp; forming a Zionist resistance group with support from Elkes and others; obtaining weapons; organizing military training; Irene Adamowicz, a Polish underground courier, bringing information about other ghettos, uprisings, and partisans; and the capture and killing of Chaim Yellin, a resistance leader.

21 videocassettes